Rebel Moon: What The Worst Critic Reviews Said About Zack Snyder's Netflix Movie
Controversial filmmaker Zack Snyder established a working relationship with Netflix as the director of zombie action film "Army of the Dead." His follow-up feature for the streaming service is "Rebel Moon," an original project based on what was once a script for a Star Wars movie. Reviews for Snyder's latest dropped on December 15, when the film kicked off a limited theatrical run ahead of its December 22 wide release to Netflix. As it turns out, overwhelmingly negative first reactions may spell disaster for "Rebel Moon." Comments by some of its harshest critics suggest that Netflix could have a certified flop on its hands.
IndieWire's David Ehrlich, for example, characterized the film as both derivative and uninteresting. "[It] feels like a million isolated storyboards without a single thing welding them together," he wrote.
In his assessment for Variety, Owen Gleiberman was marginally kinder to Snyder's sci-fi epic but similarly accused it of amounting to an uninteresting pastiche. "'Rebel Moon,' while eminently watchable, is a movie built so entirely out of spare parts that it may, in the end, be for Snyder cultists only," he wrote.
For The Independent, Clarisse Loughrey awarded "Rebel Moon" one out of a possible five stars. "It's a film populated by some of the 'Zack Snyder's Justice League' filmmaker's worst impulses: a mess of imagery, some of it attempting to shock, congregated largely around the idea of what might look good in a trailer," she wrote in another negative review.
Reviewers found Rebel Moon to be little more than cheap thrills
Heading into "Rebel Moon," Polygon reviewer Kyle Wilson hoped for a landmark in sci-fi blockbuster filmmaking. Instead, he found it to be entirely forgettable. "Everyone but the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut fanboys would be better off immediately ejecting this turgid whimper of a movie into the farthest reaches of the galaxy," he wrote.
"That even after a reported 20 years in the making the film still feels fundamentally pointless isn't just disappointing, it's entirely bewildering," wrote Robbie Collin in a review for The Telegraph.
Meanwhile, in a review for The Messenger, Jordan Hoffman praised some of the film's sci-fi elements but found that they did little more than look good. "Cool capes, shirtless hunks and a squid alien can only get you so far," reads the review's subheading.
Zack Snyder already has plans for "Rebel Moon" to be the start of an expansive franchise. Since "Rebel Moon" — technically subtitled "Part One: A Child of Fire" — is the first half of a longer story, a sequel is already in post-production. Beyond that, even, Snyder is planning on turning the series into a trilogy. Netflix has yet to greenlight a third "Rebel Moon" film, however, and these reviews suggest that its prospects are currently pretty bleak.