fevered.earth

  • Emersonian (Megalopolis)

    Contains detailed discussions of things that happen in Megalopolis. Go see it first.

    Filmed on an LED volume; put that in your pipe and smoke it.

    It’s easy to take a film like this at its own myth, and much of the marketing in the run up to the release has encouraged you to do so. The now-infamous trailer consisting of machine-apocryphal negative quotes about Coppola’s earlier films, the much-vaunted selling of Coppola’s vineyard to fund the budget, the tactically-leaked tales of late improvisational nights smoking weed in the production trailer with the cast. It all contributes to an image of this film as something special, something which has taken an above-and-beyond effort to see realised — something which has loftier goals than the average flick. It’s always going to be hard to sit in the cinema and see that collapsed into an actual film.

    Does Megalopolis crumble under the weight of expectation? Not quite. True, it’s not that weird and the giddy fervour with which critics have spent the last month damning it to hell as an incoherent mess (46% on Rotten Tomatoes, for anyone whose soul is withered enough to care) seems really a bit of a put-on; no-one is risking their cushy access to Oscar screeners or whatever by dunking on this ‘independent’ film. It’s a well-made film with some judacious if budget-bound visual effects. It has a mercurial cast of talented and famous actors who are well-suited to their roles. It’s not particularly radical in structure — there’s a nod to formalism with the occasional act-breaking title card but mostly it follows a classic Hollywood plot structure with a few break-outs into something weirder (Protagonist Cesar’s drug-fuelled breakdown; the final Megalopolis montage) and a few things that are ostentatiously typical — the scene where Cesar sees old flame Wow Platinum at the park and offers her his coat is sublimely executed, but could have come from Love, Actually.

    We’re never given any real explanation for why Cesar is playing with this prism. Perhaps he just thinks it’s neat.

    What’s actually weird in Megalopolis? There’s two main aspects, and both bear comparison to some other controversial directors. The acting in Megalopolis is not at all naturalistic — it has an element of the Shakespearean. In fact many scenes feel like they have come from an adaptation of some unknown discovered Shakespeare: the way in which we follow around the members of one or two families as they explain the popular politics to us through their encounters recalls Romeo and Juliet; the plot itself of course is filled with references to antiquity and to Julius Caesar. The good nephew who hides his virtue in controversy and the bad son who wages war on his own King is a twist on personal favourite Henry IV Part 1. And so the acting is grandiose, prone to monologue, and allows the actors reign to interpret the dialogue as they will. Adam Driver’s delivery of “You think one year of medical school entitles you to plow through the riches of my Emersonian mind?” is not something you will see emulated in any other movie this year. George Lucas, of course, filled his Star Wars prequels with similarly stylised performances and dialogue and was pilloried for it — Coppola perhaps had some of the Tom Stoppard-inflected monologues from Revenge of the Sith in mind when scripting Megalopolis, with its odes to a dying republic and portraits of the people who let it become so.

    The other aspect is the earnestness, with Megalopolis being a distinctly funny film — again aping Shakespeare, every indulgent moment of drama is defused with a little following slapstick — that is nonetheless bereft of the cynical humour that has become the mode for big Hollywood presentations. What does this mean? Well there’s several dick jokes and no “well that happened” moments. Alongside this cheeky humour, the actual meat of the film is similarly direct: Driver’s Cesar wants to build his dream project, the titular Megalopolis. The film wants you to want him to build it. There’s no interrogation of the merits of doing so — indeed other reviews have noted the lack of any class perspective whatsoever. It’s about the pure power of creating, the inherent worth in having the will to see something done. Naturally this recalls the cod-Nietzschean energy of Ayn Rand’s infamous The Fountainhead, another epic about a man who wants to build a thing. But Megalopolis is not Randian except in the most broad of strokes. Cesar’s high goals set him above the other characters but not in terms of rational self-interest, or in a way that is permissive of him to be cruel. Rather, the other characters are simply fallen, craven, too beholden to this existing world to open their eyes and see the next one approaching fast.

    This next world admittedly seems to involve a lot of petal-like buildings that flap around a bit. In the film’s driving metaphor, Cesar is able — by some virtue of his artistry or his engineering or his connection to the wonder-material Megalon — to stop time. But we never see him use it for any deliberate purpose. It’s only used for the artistic ends it’s already a metaphor for. Similarly, the shorthand for the Megalopolis project and it’s world of boons ends up being a sort of space-travelator; it’s a city that’s literally going to help you get to where you want to go. America like Rome is a dying Empire, so in this America Madison Square Gardens is literally a circus. Cesar at one point misses his dead wife while suffering from a hole in the head. It’s an exceptionally literal film in many ways.

    What could it mean?

    Where Megalopolis disappoints is in its handling of gender, the classical trappings being something of a lure to encourage you away from noticing that Cesar lives in a world where there are only three women: grasping climbers, frigid mothers and beautiful perennial muses. The climbers appear in the twin figures of Wow Platinum, the TV gossip host whose role is elevated significantly by Aubrey Plaza’s performance, and Taylor Swift-alike Vesta, the virginial singer who makes a brief but significant appearance at the halfway point of the film. Platinum is a perfect foil for Jon Voight’s slightly hateful, slightly loveable wealthy banker Crassus. Unlike the feckless Clodio (who has the classic Disney villain cross-dressing trait) and his two sisters, Platinum has the drive and the ability to outmaneuver old Crassus, who she marries after dumping a disinterested Cesar — so it’s a shame that of all the characters in the story, a violent death is reserved for her.

    Similarly, there’s an odd edge to the reveal that Vesta — the subject of a ludicrous and deeply satirical auction for her virtue — is in fact not a virgin, or a teenager, or American. Do those things count against her? Should we be good Kantians and hold the subject of this horrid circus to account for lying, even in these circumstances?

    Cesar’s mother is perfectly unloveable and a non-entity beyond that, perhaps to drive home his need for unconditional love from Natalie Emmannuel’s Julia. Much of the film is spent in discussion of Cesar’s previous muse Sunny Hope, who was driven to despair by his mercurial nature — and his cheating. Modern replacement Emmannuel’s Julia has the most difficult job in the cast, keeping any kind of edge on a character written as permanently doe-eyed and bowled over by the great creative virtues of the man she is muse to. Her big moment is getting to say “stop time… for me!” Furiosa this is not. It’s a huge missed opportunity for this ostensible vision of the future to be so hide-bound in its women characters.

    Much like the film’s politics, it looks neat but it’s unclear what it’s actually meant to do.

    As mentioned above, the film plays with being political, with having something specific about politics to say. Where it settles is not exactly deep however, and it’s more than a little reactionary. Rich dilettantes playing with the emotions of the mob are dangerous. Indulging fascism will bring some truly stupid people to power. Rioting is bad. It’s not much to sink your teeth into and even the ostensibly political framing of the corrupt old-world mayor who serves corporate interests is quickly rinsed out and replaced with an interpersonal conflict about Cesar marrying his daughter. The climax of the film has Cesar address the audience directly (okay, it’s somehow the second-most-direct address to the audience in this film) to beg them to dream big and shoot for the stars and so on. I couldn’t decide whether the slightly bathetic nature of this was intentional or not; I think it wasn’t. It’s a Mishima speech, one given by a character too detached from the world of regular people to have any purchase or impact. He’s hollering from that balcony but the noise from the planes is just too loud to hear what’s being said. It’s enough to wrap up the plot, but I didn’t feel inspired much at all.

    Which I think is the ultimate problem for Megalopolis — Coppola wants to inspire us to debate, to think, to create society anew — but he doesn’t actually have any idea how. Taking a single rich family as a microcosm of society as a whole is useful for telling a story, but it’s a difficult way to offer something tangible. How To Blow Up a Pipeline could at least suggest blowing up a pipeline. Becoming Barron Trump is simply inaccessible for most people. There are plenty in the world who remember that the world was made by people, made by their choices. Rediscovering that is important, but it’s not even a first step. For me, Megalopolis can’t even claim to be reigniting that flame — the Graeber and Wengrow book The Dawn of Everything made a much more compelling case for the inadequency of our politics to our ever-changing nature.

    Is it perhaps unfair to expect a film to reinvent politics. But it’s only even a notion because this is Francis Ford Coppola’s Film That Reinvents Politics (and Art, and Love, and Everything) which is maybe a silly thing to aspire for a film to be. I wouldn’t change it though. And as a mere film, it has unique moments, spectacular visuals and a beating heart. That’s enough, I think.

    If you like my writing, please watch my video essay The Fanatic, available now with a short companion essay kindly published by Blood Knife. If you’re after more text, please follow me on Medium or subscribe to my Letterboxd reviews.

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  • The Acolyte (episodes 1–8)

    Almost ten months ago now I was basically getting punked by Ahsoka. Spoilers here for all of The Acolyte.

    Me and the gang getting ready to log onto Disney+ and watch some more Star Wars.

    Once again, we return. It felt like a shame to not watch the new Star Wars TV show, especially in the anticipatory air that has swept in with the cessation of weird shareholder antics over at the Disney corporation: a fully armed and operational Bob Iger 2 will be anihilating entire cinemas in the near future, and all this TV nonsense will likely be swept under the rug, with only critical darlings Andor and The Mandolorian passing into memory. And for me, the era of misery-watching bleak tie-in slop that started back with Obi-wan and ran through Ahsoka may be tied off by — let me see — “The Mandolorian and Grogu”, coming to cinemas May 2026. I can hardly express my anticipation.

    Into the muted gulf of my attention is pitched The Acolyte, a startlingly late attempt by Disney to take the straightforward option: just do some regular TV shows, but stuff them full of cloaks, wipe transitions and laser swords. The Acolyte is theoretically free-floating, liberated from the need to tie in to any existing material. Set in what the greasy branding materials define as ‘The High Republic’ (a name presumably picked ex post facto by whoever described the original films as happening ‘a long time ago in a galaxy far far away’), the show can depict a unique setting which blends elements of Star Wars in among novel sci-fi concepts. By which I mean that it’s a cop show set five minutes before The Phantom Menace. They tried! But despite being on the face of it a poor testament to the infinite flexibility of the Star Wars setting, Acolyte does have one real trump card to play: it’s quite good.

    Sol has an almost Harry DuBois-esque incompetance to him. It’s charming, at first.

    The sequel trilogy was, of course, a sequel to Revenge of the Sith even if it struggled to live up to that mantle. Obi-wan was a sequel to the prequel trilogy. Andor was a prequel to Rogue One which was itself a belated prequel to Return of the Jedi. Ahsoka was something of an interlude — when that Thrawn film surfaces perhaps it will seem more like prologue. Into this tapestry we must weave The Acolyte, a show that more than anything seems imbued with the spirit of Attack of the Clones, set in and around the institution of the Jedi at it’s peak, as it slowly and inexorably heads towards its destruction. That movie laid the blame with institutional incapacity, incompetence, and arrogance. “Count Dooku was once a Jedi. [murder] is not in his character.” and all that.

    Acolyte opts instead to examine endemic failures: what sort of thing are individual Jedi doing, screwing up and covering up? After all, what is the failing Jedi order if not an organisation made up of failing Jedi? Very straightforwardly inspired by real-world stories of overreaching authority, most obviously the Waco siege, we learn the story of four Jedi who catastrophically screw up a basic assignment in a way that destroys the lives of two young girls. The Jedi aren’t grandly deceived, they don’t have true and pure intentions, they just do the wrong thing for selfish, poorly thought-out reasons, and people die because of it. Then the institution, as institutions are wont to do, merely acts to insulate itself from blowback. It’s simple but effective (six seasons of Line of Duty stand as testament to the story-telling power of ‘this goes all the way to the top’) and crucially well-executed. It’s well-made Star Wars.

    Does every Star Wars have to have a green bureaucrat in it now?

    Acolyte’s first strength is the cast, with Amandla Stenberg giving a competent dual showing as the sisters Osha and Mae against Manny Jacinto’s smoldering antagonist Qimir and Lee Jung-Jae’s bumbling Jedi Master Sol. There are various strong secondary players many of who, uh, take a sabbatical after the midway point, and Carrie-Anne Moss brings gravity to the crucial but brief appearances of Master Indara, whose inability to rally her underlings to her demands gives the flashback episodes something of a LinkedIn vibe to them at times. Beloved character of tie-in novels and comics ‘Vernestra’ has the unplesant job of doing the various ‘back at the ranch’ cutaways here. She’s played by Green Rebecca Henderson (the makeup still doesn’t look good), who isn’t quite as terminal a presence as Green Mary Elizabeth Winstead, but there’s not as much clear air between them as I’d like. In fact it’s quite odd how similar their scenes are structurally, with both characters having to cover for their wildcard colleagues — which is odd given that one of them is supposed to be a swashbuckling hero of the New Republic and the other is a corrupt, doomed administrator of the Old Republic. But I digress.

    Here’s our guy.

    Any true Attack of the Clones must have its Dexter Jettster, and here that’s definitely the elusive and mercurial Bazil, the rodent-like tracker the Jedi hire in episode 4 who quietly becomes the series’ answer to the droid mascot — but where the purpose of the droids has always been to sneak servitude and feudal mores in under the audiences’ noses, Bazil’s animal form actually makes it impossible to ignore his curious mezzanine set of rights. He has a name, he has a job, he speaks a language which can be learned. While ostensibly paying for his services though, the Jedi casually lose him in the evil forest. When he’s one of the three survivors of the clash with antagonist Qimir, Sol fails to acknowledge him at all when they’re back onboard his ship. In the finale, as Sol risks both their lives dangerously thrusting his ship into the asteroid ring, Bazil’s action to intervene receives the kind of blank expression you’d give a malfunctioning machine. Or Droid, even. This guy is obviously a person! But Sol, by this point in every way our perfectly fallen Jedi, can’t see him as human even as his actions contribute to Sol having to head down to the planet and to his eventual doom. When Qimir challenges Mae to kill a Jedi without using a weapon, perhaps this is what he means.

    Droids otherwise receive little attention here, beyond the pilot droids who are incapable of abandonning ship in the second episode and Osha’s ever-present personal assistant, whose Damascene conversion late in the series is only really a reflection of the exchange of places between Osha and Mae. Perhaps, like we’re supposed to think of the lightsaber crystal, the sheer hatred rolling about in the air turned the tiny droid evil. Or maybe it’s best to not be quite that literal.

    Qimir’s helmet is, noticably, much cooler than Kylo Ren’s.

    While I described it as a ‘cop show’ before, Acolyte is not structured like a procedural. Rather, it’s firmly in the prestige TV mold — not as structurally radical as the film/serial structure of Andor, but akin to something like True Detective: a single story explored over the season, with the decision sometimes made to weaken the structure of the overall story in order to deliver eight semi-contained episodes. This is worst for the two Rashomon-aping flashback episodes, already beleaguered as they are with child actor leads, which end up separating crucial revelations from the characters they are revelatory to; when Osha removes the sensory deprivation helmet in episode 8 we’re left to figure out for ourselves that she was probably watching episode 7 in there.

    Aside from this however the show — perhaps aware of the belligerence of the average Star Wars superfan — takes a confident if hand-holding tour through the ostensibly self-contained main plot. Centering on events on Mae and Osha’s home planet when they were children, we’re drip-fed details about how the Jedi fatally mishandled a situation such that they performed a home invasion, in the process killing their entire extended family of dubious witch-people. The hand-holding peaks with Mae and Osha’s mother, standing at the wrong end of a laser sword hilt, explaining to the audience that she’s good actually and was going to do the right thing had she not been murdered by the space police. But the twists and turns are coherent and logical, for the most part, and contain some genuinely exceptional moves for a Star Wars entry — the build of Sol into a sinister and deranged figure is slow but inexorable. Qimir’s easy company is allowed to lull the audience (and Osha) into forgetting that he’s wizard Rorschach. Even the stuff that’s really rough, like the mind wipe tree ending, is executed with such panache that you go along with it.

    Almost.

    Whether by chance or careful planning, some of the stumbling blocks that previous Star Wars TV shows hit are avoided entirely. The costumes never look bad (with the exception of Green Rebecca Henderson’s senate gown, which may well be deliberate), and the team are having great fun playing out Osha and Mae’s internal drama in fabric. The twin characters swap clothes, roles and pairings repeatedly through the story (think Luke in episodes 4 through 6) in a manner that artfully demonstrates the weakness of Sol’s late insistence on their magical nature making them more one person than two. “You’re not even sisters!” he exclaims, even as they straightforwardly behave in the most recognisable sisterly fashion. The sets and locations are solid as well, with the Coruscant scenes just about seeming like they might be taking place in some unpleasant cloisters just off-screen from Attack of the Clones and the inevitable Mos Eisley analogue not feeling like twenty extras milling about on a sound stage, as was the case for the entirety of Obi-wan.

    The hooks for additional seasons of story are appropriately integrated as well. Not here will you find Ahsoka’s ludicrous buck-passing cliff-hanger finale; everything promised in the first episode is paid off in the last one, with Sol and the gang all worm food, Osha getting into religion and Mae… well, Mae’s on the backburner for now. Qimir’s scar, the most obvious unopened box, is thematically coherent as-is — there is nothing strictly to be gained by exploring it except in so far as that could form part of a new narrative in the future, which is all you can hope for.

    Osha is so ruthlessly commited to Dialectics that she is constantly at war with the person she was two days ago, who is a clown and a coward.

    Needless to say, I did not want or need to like The Acolyte, but here I am. Somehow, the dead franchise — which I declared sick beyond all rescue at the end of Ahsoka — has returned. Will they be able to pull this off again? I certainly hope so, though Lee Jung-Jae’s absence would be keenly felt in a sequel season. Part of what made this first season so enjoyable though was the ability of the show to spin characters up in a handful of scenes such that their subsequent loss was felt more keenly; who knows which character actor they’ll have in to be the protagonist in a sequel.

    Previously:

    1. Obi-wan: Episode 1
    2. Obi-wan: Episode 2
    3. Obi-wan: Episode 3
    4. Obi-wan: Episode 4
    5. Obi-wan: Episode 5
    6. Obi-wan: Episode 6
    7. The Phantom Menace (video essay)
    8. Andor: Episodes 1, 2, 3
    9. “Can Andor save Star Wars from itself?” Andor: Episodes 4, 5, 6 (plus supplemental)
    10. Andor: Episode 7
    11. Andor: Episodes 8, 9, 10
    12. Andor: Episodes 11, 12
    13. Ahsoka: Episodes 1, 2
    14. Ahsoka: Episodes 3, 4, 5, 6
    15. Ahsoka: Episodes 7, 8
    16. The Acolyte

    If you like my writing, watch my video essay The Fanatic, available now with a short companion essay kindly published by Blood Knife. If you’re after more text, please follow me on Medium or subscribe to my Letterboxd reviews.

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  • The Wasteland (Furiosa)

    Spoilers (thematic and otherwise) for Furiosa.

    That’s Furiosa.

    At the climax of the film that bears her name, Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) hunts down the man who killed her mother and set her life on the violent path through the wasteland that she has never managed to escape. Disarmed and defeated, Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) is alternately nihilistic, manic, murderous. But he refuses to be despondent, to beg or sob or apologise. He won’t legitimise Furiosa’s revenge on her behalf. Defiant, he demands that she either kill him — or join him. Dementus straddles the line between off-putting, unpleasant, charismatic and ridiculous in a manner that harkens back to Heath Ledger’s Joker, but without that character’s hyper-competence. Indeed, the empire of the Great Dementus rises and falls over the course of the movie largely without direct intervention from Furiosa, his incapacity as an administrator and inability to share power with his internal allies leaving him stripped down to a core handful of followers by the conclusion.

    In their shared anger — Dementus proposes — Furiosa and he have much in common. Veteran director George Miller does well to make these hoary old cliches seem fresh and novel, aided most by the abstract style of these final scenes of Furiosa and Dementus alone in the sprawling desert. Miller eschews the grand showdown in favour of a pared-back, stylised meditation on revenge, on free will, on evil. It’s the rare “we’re not so different, you and I” that works, not for a trite nihilism about there being no difference between good things and bad things, but because it’s the truth of the setting — Furiosa takes place in a world where everyone has had something taken from them. Is the brutal Dementus not right to be angry? Is there not some aspect of his wilting invocations of elite privilege that rings true?

    That’s Dementus.

    It is not hard to imagine the crisis-ruined world of Mad Max as the immediate future of our own. Climate change, war, political instability, any and all could be plausible steps on the way to turning our planet towards a desertified wasteland where there is little to do but scavenge in the ruins of our parents. Robbed blind by an ancestral class who are all too willing to mortgage the future of those who follow them, who privately mull over whether humanity has had such a good run that it might actually be better to keep not fixing the problems. After all, by the time the bomb drops, won’t everyone who matters be dead already? Hopefully in the real world we can keep this from coming to pass; but if we fail, like Dementus and his roving clan, who will there be left for us to rage at in the dust and the dirt? What catharsis will there be to have?

    This is what allows Dementus to laugh in Furiosa’s face. There’s no revenge to be had in the wasteland, only to be lusted after. I saw someone online being mocked for making the point that Furiosa’s mother and her compatriots are technically hoarding the green place, but it’s an argument worth taking seriously. Who does the green place belong to? Women, mothers, pacifists? Who can say which of humanity deserve salvation? When Dementus comes to the Citadel for the first time, making his ineffective pitch to the assembled War Boys that they should rise up, he brings to mind Tubal-Cain in Aronofsky’s Noah: the great masses of humanity coming to stake their claim to another Ark and being turned away (Furiosa . The violence was already at the gates of the green place; the green place already had a border. The green place had already become the Citadel, jealously hoarded with indiscriminate violence. What is the difference between Furiosa as a child tearing a man’s throat out with the chain of a bike, and a War Boy trained to hurl himself from the citadel as a falling bomb? Is not the inevitable end of possessing the green place, becoming the Citadel, barbarians at the gate and no end to the violence justified?

    Furiosa’s mother is no stranger to the violence of the wasteland.

    We see Dementus torture Furiosa’s mother. We see Dementus tear a man limb from limb between five motorcycles. But — we see other tortures. We see other deaths. Dementus did not bring death to the wasteland. The wasteland is death, only pending. They’re all dead already. There’s nothing to build, nothing worth having. The green place, Furiosa’s river delta, is gone by the time of Fury Road. She knows this really — otherwise she would have gone back. Furiosa never mourns the loss of the star map she tattoos herself with; that part of her was already replaced with the wasteland even before the metaphor became literal. Given the chance, when Praetorian Jack arranges for her to travel alone in a car stocked with supplies, she stays with the War Rig. The only virtue the green place had was that Furiosa was from there. Once she found somewhere else to be from, she had no need of it any more. The defining trait of Gardens of Eden is that they become lost.

    Furiosa (Miller, 2024)
    Noah (Aronofsky, 2014)

    Furiosa expresses the wasteland to us slowly, going from the brief glimpses of the green place into bleak desert dunes devoid of any feature whatsoever. From there we pick up land features, then tents, then small structures and car trailers. We’re some way in by the time we first reach any kind of permanent structure, the great rock towers of the Citadel. This helps circumscribe what we’re also told in text titles: this is all there is. Aside from the three great fortresses (the Citadel, Gastown, the Bullet Farm) there is nothing else beside. As miserable as these locations are, anywhere else you might be is only habitable to those passing by on a vehicle. And if you’re passing by on a vehicle, you’re vulnerable to being raided by a bigger gang, and that gang by a bigger gang, until all meaningful life outside of the fortresses has rolled up into the bike gang of the great Dementus. Given this power to command and nothing left to expend it on, Dementus promptly uses it to seize Gastown. At which point everything is back to square one. The only free choices in this system are to die, or else to destroy one of the fortresses and implicitly doom everyone else to die with you in a sad parody of mutually assured destruction.

    Furiosa comes alive behind the wheel of Immortan Joe’s War Rig.

    It’s a world with no room for creation, only possession. We see Immortan Joe’s brother, the unfortunate previous administrator of Gastown, duplicating an artwork onto a mural from an illustration in a book. But even this facsimile is destroyed and degraded. It’s a world without culture, without community or family. There is no ‘living well’ to form the best revenge. The only expression is direct, personal and immediate — turning to look God in the face and scream ‘witness me’. Throwing your enemy to the ground and having him beg you for life. It’s a world staffed with people who have regressed into their own fantasies and are limited only by their ability to achieve them, as with the People Eater who is constantly stimulating himself, or the Octoboss who just wants to wear a cool mask and fly about. This is where Furiosa ends up at the climax of the film, demanding of a baffled Immortan Joe that her personal vendetta against Dementus is of paramount importance. But it doesn’t matter that Joe is baffled. Furiosa is capable of realising this fantasy, and does. And if on returning she finds that being a cool badass with a robot arm is no longer fulfilling, then Furiosa will just have to find another fantasy to realise.

    While Furiosa is the undisputed protagonist this time round, the film does not shy away from indulging the viewer in Dementus’s freewheeling joy.

    The dead wasteland sustains only the industries of death — Gastown, which turns death in the form of dead things into power. The Bullet Farm, which manufactures the instruments which cause death. And the Citadel, which produces the people destined to die. Beyond this triumvirate? Only sand and carrion birds.

    If you enjoyed this article try my reviews of Rebel Moon Part 1 and Rebel Moon Part 2. If you appreciate my writing, watch my video essay Sixteen Attempts to Talk to You About Suicide Squad. Then watch my video essay The Fanatic. Then back to Suicide Squad. Then The Fanatic again. If you’re after more text, subscribe to my Letterboxd reviews.

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  • Rebel Moon Part 1: A Child of Fire

    The retro styling on the title card is very nice — I almost want the rest of the film to be this nostalgic.

    “Zack Snyder is making his own Star Wars.” It’s a bold premise. For better or worse, the film immediately begins to take shape in your mind — and from a filmmaker whose divisive reputation precedes him, there’s a strong temptation to assume what kind of film this will be before seeing a single frame of it. Zack Snyder’s Netflix production Rebel Moon: A Child of Fire wasn’t made on a shoestring budget, and by definition it can’t capture the blissfully ignorant innovation of making an off-brand Star Wars — a Starcrash or a The Man Who Saves The World with the ambition to do it all from scratch, in a period where the image of Baby Yoda wasn’t plastered on every lunch box. But there’s still some of that cheeky thrill in hearing “Zack Snyder’s doing an R-rated Star Wars,” as if you might have heard it on the playground at school and immediately started calculating how you would trick your parents into renting it for you.

    There’s already so very much Star Wars nowadays — mostly vented from the great Disney+ orifice, but it’s still only been four years since The Rise of Skywalker arrived on the big screen. People once had to wait sixteen long years for a new cinematic Star Wars experience. Unimaginable now in a world with Ahsoka and Andor and The Acolyte and so on. So the challenge for this new two-part space opera is to shake itself free of diminutive comparisons and distinguish itself as an original science fiction movie and setting.

    The first question is: which Zack Snyder is at the wheel? The contemplative, existentialist director of Man of Steel? The director wedged into the mythic/pulp aesthetic of Zack Snyder’s Justice League? Or the artisanal lens enthusiast of Army of the Dead? Naturally there’s a bit of each (especially that last one, with some truly beautiful lenses put together for this one ), but more than any other self-reference Rebel Moon sees Snyder return to the blushing, hyper-stylized action of 300, albeit with the benefit of hindsight and many years more experience.

    The soft focus is paired with rich, deep shadows for a unique, ghostly look.

    Much like the under-appreciated Jupiter Ascending, which had the Wachowskis exhibiting a similar competency, Rebel Moon treats its classic pulp sci-fi locales as a given, trusting the viewer to immediately clock the idyllic space-farm, the hive of scum and villainy, the Blade Runner city, the old West and so on. These varied settings are bound by a rich saturation and contrast in the colors that forms a coherent visual throughline; a comforting intensity that’s established in the lurid opening shots on protagonist Kora’s home moon of Veldt. As well, the infamous slo-mo — which has often been restrained or absent in Snyder’s work post-Watchmen — is back here in force, ratcheting the tension up in a way that will make you sad this initial release isn’t actually R-rated and can’t yet feature the heavily implied explosions of blood.

    The visual coherence helps the viewer keep up to speed, as the film moves at a breakneck pace through the second half of the story. The plot of Rebel Moon is explicitly that of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai — or more directly John Sturges’ adaptation of that story, The Magnificent Seven. The traditional peasant village comes under threat from an evil empire and sends out representatives to recruit itinerant heroes, any they can find, to defend it. The opening act is given the most time and attention, laying out the lives of the villagers in such a way that their plight is apparent and human, as well as showing the evil empire engaged in some classic evil empire behavior: more Caesar than Palpatine, the fight is over grain tribute rather than lofty ideals (at least at first).

    The dreadnought in low orbit evokes similar imagery from last year’s The Creator.

    Similar to Magnificent Seven, the gathered recruits only get the space of a single vignette to distinguish themselves in. Even these, though, have evidently been cut to the bone to hit that two-hour runtime. It’s still intelligible — all we need to see is the indentured blacksmith strutting confidently towards the beast-too-wild-to-be-tamed to understand what’s going on, for example. Unlike this year’s other novel sci-fi epic, Gareth Edwards’ The Creator, there’s never a sense that the film has engaged the plot compression unit to such an extent that things have become dreamlike and abstract. The worst thing you’ll suffer is disappointment that we don’t get to spend more time with the various rogues who end up getting recruited.

    The final act is the least complete, given the difficult task of not resolving the plot before part two arrives in a few months’ time. It’s a hard sell, as hard here as it was for Across the Spider-verse or Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning earlier in the year. A movie should have an ending. There’s an action showdown as you might expect, all flashing lights and dramatic violent flourishes. But without the catharsis of final victory or the establishment in that tight runtime of something like a Death Star to blow up, it feels like what it is: a midpoint. But even if this finale is more “wait and see” than it is overwhelming, the stinger right at the very end promises a sequel which might upend all sorts of expectations for how this story plays out.

    It casts the hexagonal grid motif the Marvel movies have settled on in a certain light.

    Being a knock-off is permission to break all the rules, and Rebel Moon knows this full well. Is there a C3P0? Yes, and he gets shot. Is there a cantina? Yes, and it’s flirting with being a brothel. Is there a Han Solo? Well, no spoilers. And will it be trashy as all hell? In a clear statement of intent, the film opens with a girthy, tumescent space cruiser crossing the threshold of a great yonic portal.

    Despite the headlines, Star Wars (and Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven) aren’t the only inspirations Rebel Moon is playing off. Excalibur is another obvious one, with the king dead or dying and his errant knights sickly and dispersed across the land. The Perceval here is Anthony Hopkins’ entrancing ‘Jimmy’, the C3P0-like pacifist robot who immediately breaks from that mold by shooting someone dead and fleeing into the forest to discover himself, only reappearing at the close now decorated with deer antlers. Comic relief, Jimmy is not.

    The taming-the-beast sequence owes much to Avatar, though I somehow doubt featuring in a Zack Snyder film will quiet the “no cultural impact” crowd. Of course, George Lucas never shied away from having a character mount a great computer-generated beast — there’s one in all three prequel films. The Bennu, a griffin-like winged beast, is a fine addition to this canon.

    Star Wars is when there’s a weird little guy in it.

    The most notable element of classic Star Wars that is missing is, sadly, the space politics. A much-mocked Lucas fixation, the scenes of machinations in the galactic senate or boardroom tables full of Imperial officers griping are lacking here. The tone is more in line with Dune, with us meeting or hearing about individual power brokers within an Imperial hierarchy but without even the token bureaucracy represented by Dune’s Mentats. And (delightfully for this PG-13 cut) we get to see just a little Baron Harkonnen moral decay on the part of the Imperial forces, and a touch of eXistenZ-aping body horror in the process.

    There’s more than a little of The Witcher creeping in around the edges too, especially in Kora’s flashback retellings of the story of the young princess. The backstory of Snyder’s universe here is more fantastical, more Lord of the Rings than Lucas’s tragedy of the republic — it’s good Kings and bad Regents, and prophesied children who will bring peace to the realm. And with a gothic God-King, a great empire across the stars that’s just maybe a little bit fascist, and a concerning undercurrent of implied necromancy , it’s hard to escape the touch of Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000 setting.

    A caped figure looms over a youngling.

    It’s unclear if Rebel Moon will be the Zack Snyder film to win over his detractors. Having made himself deeply unpopular in some circles with his mythopoetic take on DC’s superheroes, applying the same techniques to another sacred cow risks solidifying his reputation as an iconoclast — or worse, a contrarian. Netflix, who you can assume would very much like to have ‘Netflix’s Star Wars’, have engaged in an all-out marketing blitz, plastering the film across their media outlets and building small interactive moons in various cities. The film itself risks being swallowed up in all this external drama, but it’s enjoyable and distinctive enough to stand by itself. There are few big-budget films with a comparable ambition of style and motion and a director visually talented enough to realize that ambition. Rebel Moon is worth seeing on that justification alone.

    Is it Star Wars? Perhaps predictably, what makes Rebel Moon most interesting is all the ways in which it’s not Star Wars. Able to vary in characters, mood, setting and tone, Rebel Moon is fresher than any attempt to do this sort of thing since Jupiter Ascending. That film was compromised by running out of the hard cash required to see the full vision on screen. The fate of this film has been gambled on what has so far been a losing proposition, the two-part film epic. Like young Anakin Skywalker on Tatooine, we can only hope the old master has rigged the dice, and Rebel Moon realizes all this potential when part two lands next year.

    If you enjoyed this article I have conveniently already reviewed Rebel Moon Part 2. I’ll probably end up reviewing the extended cuts when they arrive in the summer also; subscribe to get them by email when I do. If you appreciate my writing, watch my video essay Sixteen Attempts to Talk to You About Suicide Squad. Then watch my video essay The Fanatic. Then back to Suicide Squad. Then The Fanatic again. If you’re after more text, subscribe to my Letterboxd reviews.

    This article was originally written for Blood Knife which is currently on hiatus.

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