By Eric Ortiz (@EricOrtizG)
Zack Snyder made his name known two decades ago, with his Dawn of the Dead (2004) remake and, especially, with his adaptations of the comic books 300 (2006) and Watchmen (2009). But since his foray into the DC Extended Universe, and what subsequently happened with his cut of Justice League (2021), Snyder has generated a true cult following. This has allowed him to have plenty of freedom and big budgets in his most recent partnership with Netflix. Moving away from superheroes, Snyder returned to zombies two years ago with Army of the Dead (2021). Now his new work for said streaming platform, Rebel Moon (2023-2024), is a two-part film anchored in the space opera subgenre, in which Star Wars (1977) marked a before and after.
I attended the recent press conference in Mexico City, where Snyder recalled that this film has been “boiling for a long time,” and added that he “famously talked about it maybe being a Star Wars movie, so it’s been around. What happened with it recently is that we finished Army of the Dead and my partners in Netflix were like ‘what do you want to do now?,’ I was like ‘I don’t know, maybe we do a sequel to Army of the Dead or maybe, I have this other crazy idea, it’s a pretty straightforward concept.’ And they said it sounded great.”
In the first part of the diptych, Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire (2023), Snyder presents the mythology of the so-called Mother World, a long-lived empire that has subjugated several other worlds.
For Snyder, the main challenge in building a story of these characteristics was “to start to pick the mythology in all the corners, because you don’t want to catch yourself out like we don’t have an answer to a problem. That was for me the real work of this world. There’s a whole universe where there could possibly be more than two movies. I’m no stranger to exotic realms. I was prepared by the world building we’ve done in the past for 300, Watchmen and Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole (2010). The process of creating these worlds has always been a thing that we’ve been super into. It was always one of the reasons to make the movie for me. Everything we’ve done before this prepared us.”
Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire starts to develop a plot that deals with a classic conflict within the space opera subgenre: the oppressed against the oppressors. In a period of time after the assassination of the Mother World royalty, a different leadership has emerged, but also rebel groups that are confronting the empire.
Our protagonist Kora (Sofia Boutella) is living in a village, where the commune is dedicated to harvesting. The peace of the fertile area is shattered with the arrival of a military group from the Mother World, led by Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein), who serves as the main villain of this installment. The antagonists’ mission is to find the insurgents and they need the commune to supply them with food. With echoes of the Nazis, and even of the tension at the beginning of Inglourious Basterds (2009), the situation ends in the brutal occupation of the village.
Thus, Snyder begins to reveal who Kora really is, a warrior now destined to defend the villagers. Star Boutella was also present at the conference, where she recalled that she was “trying to meticulously curate my choices when it comes to action. I wanted them to be special and require my physicality for something that was going to be really good. Zack, whom I was already a big fan of after watching 300 and Watchmen, gave me the best platform to exercise that. He’s simply the best to shoot action scenes. Kora is a warrior, she was trained at such a high level.”
About Kora, Snyder said that “emotionally, in every way possible, she is also linked to her physicality. She’s a warrior, so how she fights, the way she uses her body like a weapon, those things are part of her. Sofia has this incredible mysterious quality, but at the same time she can be vulnerable but fierce. In the movie, she’s very in charge but she also comes from a world where she’s had to be a subservient soldier. Then also to show progression of time, where she began, what she went through, things happened to her, she was betrayed. And then who she is now on the other side of that. The ability to be able to capture all of those things in a single form is really difficult.”
The film opts for the classic structure of assembling a team. To form a solid resistance, Kora is assisted by one of the farmers (Michiel Huisman), and then also by a seemingly harmless mercenary (Charlie Hunnam). They go after combatants who despise the empire (Staz Nair, Bae Doona and Djimon Hounsou) and the wanted insurgents (Ray Fisher, Cleopatra Coleman and E. Duffy).
Boutella noted that “we have this gathering of soldiers to go and defend something, and then there is an entity that is negative and daunting to us. But individually every single character has a very complex human story that I think is quite relatable. Every character has depth, a story, you know where they come from.”
When asked how he would define a rebel, Snyder responded the following: “A rebel is someone who questions the established system: Is there another way of doing it? Is there a better way? These guys (the villagers) aren’t hurting anybody, so there’s no reason why they can’t exist. What it talks about is just their version of freedom, they want to maintain it. Our story is pretty simple in that the bad guys want to take that away and they want to maintain it, so it’s pretty easy to understand. In our movie a rebel is just someone who is standing up for themselves and for their beliefs.”
Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire takes us to diverse planets of this universe, showing a good number of alien races and creatures – before this, a conscious robot also appears and it’ll surely become more relevant in the second movie –. One of Snyder’s favorite creatures is played by an almost unrecognizable Jena Malone.
Snyder confirmed that Malone “plays the big spider Harmada. She’s just a great actor. It was really difficult, wearing the makeup and being in this weird cart that rolled her around, she had to fight from it because the stunt guys were moving. It was fun to watch her perform but also it’s so cool to see it be completed by the other artists that we worked with in post-production, because it’s half and half, she’s all prosthetic but then her legs are CG.”
Additionally, Snyder highlighted the enormity of his sets: “We ended up building this village for real. It’s a very giant village. It was all practical so we shot the interiors and the exteriors all there. So it was really quite nice to have that, not have to go over the studio and shoot the pickups.”
Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire also shows its grand scale when exploring Kora’s aforementioned background, and in its sequences with the director’s trademark style – including the use of slow-motion – . While there’s an action-packed climax, which also involves some bounty hunters, this is just the beginning of the rebels’ journey to free themselves from imperial rule.
“Rebel Moon is not hard sci-fi, it’s fantasy sci-fi. It’s like Frank Frazetta meets Moebius (Jean Giraud). There’s an illustrative slightly retro quality that I was really trying to capture. Boris Vallejo, Frazetta and the whole group, those were the things that made me want to make this visual journey. Of course I want audiences to be immersed in this drama of what these characters are going through, but it’s another thing to inhabit this world. I really am excited for audiences to inhabit the world,” Snyder said.
Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire will be available on Netflix starting December 22. The second part will arrive in April 2024.