Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire (2023) dir. Zack Snyder
Snyder’s inviolable picture bids for a better Hollywood. If we’re lucky, it might even be a taste of what’s to come.
With his second Netflix film, Zack Snyder has found a production company willing to meet the liberty his vision commands. The first go around with Netflix and the second and more ambitious of his zombie-busters, Army of the Dead (2021), was his first time serving as his own cinematographer and, while his visual prowess and distinct style impress, the picture felt rushed (a character disappears without mention) and more like an exercise in preparation for something bigger. And that something bigger is Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire, the first of a two part film.
Rebel Moon was originally conceived of as a Star Wars film but, freed from the burdens of canon and Disney’s top-down production management, the end result feels less like a derivation and more like a successor. I wouldn’t dare suggest it will have the same sort of cultural influence as Star Wars — that’s a fundamentally irreplicable phenomenon in the streaming age. Yet, when compared to the recent garbage from Disney (Marvel and Star Wars both), Snyder proves the most capable and artful custodian of the extravagant, quasi-religious space-opera. His longstanding technical mastery that evolved into mainstream formal iconoclasm with the extreme shallow focus with the 15mm Canon dream lens of Army of the Dead and the 4:3 aspect ratio for Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021) is taken to new extremes with the creative freedom provided by Netflix. Snyder’s inviolable picture bids for a better Hollywood. If we’re lucky, it might even be a taste of what’s to come.
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