And That’s No Moon Either

Charlie Hunnam (left), Michiel Huisman, and Sofia Boutella in Rebel Moon

The Netflix movie Rebel Moon Part One isn’t as terrible as online buzz might suggest. Let’s start with that controversial thesis. Please don’t mistake me, it isn’t timeless art: a cadre of reviewers, professional and amateur, have skewered the movie’s numerous weaknesses. Its blatant ripoff of Star Wars, for one, and its reliance on director Zack Snyder’s trademark fight choreography, intercut with abrupt breaks into silly slo-mo cartoonishness.

However, I’d like to avoid the obvious and manifold shortcomings, and spotlight one overlooked strength. Pre-release press coverage emphasized how Snyder initially pitched the screen treatment to Lucasfilm as a “more mature” take on Star Wars. He reworked his treatment as a standalone feature only after Lucasfilm’s parent company, Disney, passed. This made me cringe, because filmmakers frequently think “mature” is a synonym for “violent, hypersexual, and visually murky.”

American culture often treats children as twee and precious, incapable of handling life’s harder edges. Disney, of course, notoriously sanded all the sex, and most of the violence, off Grimms’ Fairy Tales in their feature-length animation. Children’s books, movies, and TV shows model chaste heterosexual romance, and only stylized violence, reducing war to ballet. European media does something similar, but not to the same degree.

This includes the original Star Wars. According to historian Garry Jenkins, Lucas modeled the original movie on 1930s Flash Gordon serials he watched on his parents’ black-and-white TV. His parents considered Flash Gordon acceptable viewing, because of its strong moral backbone, its clear division between heroes and villains, and no sex. (The episodes also broadcast out of sequence, which is why Lucas dubbed the first movie “Episode IV.”)

We’ve watched former child stars polish their adult bona fides by embracing sex, violence, and moral flimsiness. Countless former child stars, like Anne Hathaway or Lindsay Lohan, attempted to cleanly divide themselves from their childhood roles by appearing topless onscreen. Miley Cyrus’ live national meltdown continues to haunt her career even after she’s tried to atone. Achieving adulthood in mass-media culture means rejecting the preciousness of childhood.

Director Zack Snyder (promo photo)

Snyder attempts something similar in Rebel Moon. The movie’s protagonist, Kora (Sofia Boutella), is a battle-scarred veteran fleeing her past. She aspires to live in rural, agrarian simplicity, hiding from her former commanders, but she also rejects overtures of romance. She describes herself as too hurt to love; her words form a lament, but her tone is boastful. Her story dribbles out gradually, but basically, she enjoys being damaged.

Despite Kora’s best efforts, the war finds her. When the Imperium murders her village’s headman and leaves a garrison in the barn, Kora decides to run. But before completing her escape, she interrupts the hard-bitten local garrison attempting to sexually assault a young village maiden. (Rape, here mercifully averted, has become the go-to form of low-friction motivation for movie protagonists. It’s sloppy and low-hanging fruit, but audiences react strongly.)

Having tied her fortunes to the village, Kora accepts the responsibility for organizing the resistance. Here’s where the movie’s one redeeming quality emerges: Kora accepts help from villager Gunnar (Michiel Huisman). Gunnar teases out the backstory Kora has concealed during her self-imposed exile, and in doing so, recognizes the injured orphan girl beneath her warrior-woman façade. The script treads lightly in admitting this, but Gunnar falls in love with Kora.

Gunnar is everything Kora wants to avoid being: generous, nurturing, and committed to his people and community. The more he uncovers Kora’s deep internal scars, the more he wants to relieve them. He’s impressed by her fighting skills, but they don’t define her. Instead, he sees her with levels of nuance and complexity which she has tried to reject, and in stray quiet moments, tries to steer her toward healing.

There we find this movie’s moral heart: one character accepts the most cynical possible interpretation of events, and even revels in them, while the other wants to nurture the whole heart, scars and all. Only fleetingly does Snyder admit this openly, but it lingers tacitly beneath the entire narrative. Though the surface-level story addresses the villagers’ resistance to Empire, the deeper story describes the tension between nurturance and violence.

Please understand, this movie isn’t good. Snyder borrows liberally from fifty years of blockbusters and B-movies to create a smorgasbord of reheated tropes. Even that wouldn’t be so bad, but the movie doesn’t appear to be having much fun. If we pause these glaring objections, however, and look at the less-obvious moral themes, this movie has something going on. Hopefully Part Two will give it flesh.