For all its blockbuster gaudiness, “Rebel Moon” still displays a shocking amount of restraint in the early going. The film opens on a ponderous exposition dump by a narrating Anthony Hopkins, who voices an ancient robot named Jimmy (performed by Dustin Ceithamer on-set), but settles into a nice rhythm once we meet our main, if reluctant, hero. An outsider who settled on the desolate moon of Veldt two years prior to the events of the film, Kora (a steely and compelling Sofia Boutella) is content living in anonymity among a village of hedonistic, Viking-like settlers. All the typical hero’s journey tropes are present and accounted for here, from the man harboring an innocent crush on her (Michiel Huisman’s Gunnar, channeling an “Aw shucks” appeal to mostly convincing effect) to her mysterious backstory soon doled out in extensive flashbacks to the impending threat of the Imperium (known colloquially as the authoritarian “Motherworld”) arriving on her doorstep.
As action-oriented as he may be, Snyder takes his time and allows these early moments to breathe. Perhaps a little too much, as it turns out.
The fly in the ointment comes from how talky and dialogue-heavy this table setting proves to be, which has never been a strength of most of his movies. Although this society’s emphasis on a simple life and worldly pleasures helps ground this space opera in something tangible, no characters ever talk in anything resembling actual conversations. By the time Kora begins reciting her motivations and backstory out loud for the dozenth time (“I’m only telling you this so you know who I am,” Kora literally says to Gunnar at one point after a prolonged flashback spelling out her origins), it’s easy to imagine clunky, video-gamey dialogue wheels popping up on-screen to help dole out the bare minimum of pertinent information to us gamers viewers.
The issue only worsens when the plot kicks off in earnest, incited by Ed Skrein’s vicious Admiral Noble and his Imperium warship appearing over Veldt alongside a small army of invaders and demanding a cut of the inhabitants’ precious stores of grain. Kora’s speed-ramped fight with some unruly soldiers (disappointingly, Snyder resorts to the threat of sexual assault as a motivation here) dashes any hopes of a peaceful resolution, leading her on a planet-hopping quest to put together a team of criminals, insurgents, and revolutionaries to help her small town repel their oppressors. The problem is, hardly any of these oddballs are given a good reason to join up in the first place. Kora and Gunnar repeatedly arrive in some gorgeously imagined new locale (including a blatant “Star Wars” cantina riff), encounter a new character just in time for them to undertake a random side-mission to prove their worth, and simply move on to the next recruit. This bizarrely episodic structure might as well be ripped straight out of countless video games, with NPCs milling around with no actual interiority … right up until the moment the main character interacts with them and triggers the next level.
It’s a shame, too, because the ensemble team consisting of Charlie Hunnam’s roguish bounty hunter Kai, Bae Doona’s honorable warrior Nemesis, Staz Nair’s perpetually shirtless former slave Tarak, Djimon Hounsou’s disgraced military general Titus, and Ray Fisher as rebel leader Bloodaxe, none of whom ever really develop or bond with one another in any meaningful way, deserved much better than this.