Let’s see what all the fuss wasn’t about.

With news filtering out from Netflix that yet another of Zack Snyder’s proto-franchises has withered on the vine, what better time than now for me to check out Rebel Moon and see what all the fuss wasn’t about. Let’s start, then, with the theatrical cut of Rebel Moon Part One: A Child Of Fire, a film that seems to ask “what if Star Wars wasn’t already derivative enough?”

Rebel Moon Part One: A Child Of Fire introduces us to Kora (Sofia Boutella), a mysterious outsider hiding out on the agrarian moon of Veldt. When the oppressive forces of the Motherworld arrive demanding tribute for their war machine, Kora takes up arms against the garrison left to ensure their compliance. With the clock ticking until Admiral Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein) and his warship The King’s Gaze, Kora sets out to rally warriors from across the galaxy to defend the village and take a stand against the might of the Imperium, hoping to spark a rebellion. Or at least survive long enough to warrant a sequel.

The first few minutes of Rebel Moon Part One: A Child Of Fire confirm that Snyder has lost it, if indeed he ever had it to begin with. His sci-fi magnum opus intended to span a hundred spin-offs may have started (and to be fair has hardly changed) as a speculative Star Wars pitch which was wisely rejected, but to dismiss it as a mere Lucasfilm knock-off would be to do it a great disservice. It’s so much more derivative than that.

Zack Snyder’s latest monument to himself crash-lands with all the subtlety of an orbital bombardment, wrapped in the comforting familiarity of a narrative you’ve seen a dozen times – in Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, or The Magnificent Seven (1960), or Battle Beyond The Stars (especially Battle Beyond The Stars) or The Magnificent Seven (2016) or A Bug’s Life – only now stretched out like a classic Zack Snyder slow-motion shot: brooding, homoerotically muscular and weirdly empty. It’s not so much a story as it is a parade of trailer moments, stitched together with expository paste and an unwavering belief that quoting Joseph Campbell is the same as understanding myth.

Kora, our allegedly complex lead (played by Sofia Boutella with the energy of someone trying to remember if they left the stove on), spends the film either silently seething or silently walking. Occasionally she does both at once, which counts as a dramatic beat here. Her arc – such as it is – is less about growth and more about posing like a vinyl figurine between plot coupons. It’s an origin story that seems embarrassed by origins and unclear on the concept of story.

Snyder’s preoccupations are not new. Nor are they evolving. His world-building has always leaned toward the Warhammer 40K end of the aesthetic pool, but here it gets all the nuance of a fan-forum lore post with a $150 million budget. The Empire – sorry, the Imperium – functions entirely on a diet of grim pronouncements and monotone violence, operating with the kind of brutal efficiency and galaxy-spanning reach that makes you wonder why they’re worried about this one potato-farming village in the first place.

Every character enters like they’ve just finished reading their own character bio and hope the audience have too. There’s a roguish mercenary, a sage pacifist robot, a noble ex-general, a laser-sword wielding warrior with a tragic past and a pair of siblings heading up a nascent rebellion – each doled out like role cards in a tabletop game no one’s actually planning to finish. Dialogue oscillates between strained solemnity and smirking banter, never finding an emotional gear beyond “earnest incel cosplay.”

And yet, for all its endless dressing up in borrowed robes – cross Dune, Firefly and Thor: The Dark World off your cover version bingo card – there’s no real joy in the pastiche. It’s neither homage, reinterpretation nor reimagining; it’s an industrial blender of genre shorthand, designed to feel mythic but delivered like a cheap content strategy. Scenes swell with portent, but there’s no actual tension – just mood boards with motion blur.

Action sequences arrive dutifully, framed like splash pages in a graphic novel that got tired of text. The camera lingers like it’s in love, but with the idea of mythic iconography, not its execution. Every narrative blow lands like it was choreographed by someone who thinks emotion is what you feel while reading a gym brochure.

It’s tempting to imagine this is all a setup, that the second part will bring resolution, clarity, maybe even meaning. But Snyder doesn’t build arcs, he builds cathedrals to his obsessions – architecture without occupancy. Rebel Moon Part One: A Child Of Fire isn’t half a story; it’s a whole mood, and that mood is “high school philosophy student discovers Ayn Rand.”

The director’s cut of Rebel Moon Part One (because of course there’s a Director’s Cut), released some four months after Part Two was dropped on Netflix with all the enthusiasm of a firmware update, arrives with the leaden retitle of Chalice Of Blood and about an hour of “Snyder’s true vision”, which apparently he was incapable of delivering the first time round on a project where he had full creative control. As you’d expect, it adds more blood, more brooding, a little more flesh and a lot more performatively cruel violence but absolutely nothing in terms of worldbuilding, character or plot. It’s a tedious and vain eyeball-grab using the already tainted “Snyder Cut” brand, wallowing in Snyder’s favoured tropes: grim violence, hollow alpha-male theatre, and an understanding of female trauma that amounts to little more than slow-motion suffering that can be fixed through foreplay-free fucking.

So no, this isn’t – and was never going to be – a bold new franchise. It’s just more Zack Snyder, by Zack Snyder, for people who think “The Snyder Cut” is aesthetic dogma. If you’re into pew-pew existentialism and slow-motion resistance fighters lensed like Renaissance martyrs, Rebel Moon might be your jam. For the rest of us, it’s a tediously rendered shrug – an expensive prologue to a story that doesn’t realise it has nothing to say.