"Rebel Moons": An abridged screenplay
Voiceover: In space, there is SPACE WAR. Once there was a king or something, but he died. Honestly, it doesn't really matter. The Space War continues.
[We open to shots of bucolic farmland -- in SPACE.]
Village Chief: Everyone! We have to make love so the harvest gods make our crops grow! (This is a real line from the film.)
Village Chief: I am going to talk for a bit about religion. It will never come up again in any way for the rest of the movie, and our folksy ways will seem a lot weirder when the main characters walk to a spaceport that's, like, 20 miles away. But that doesn't happen for like another 30 minutes of screentime, so I'm going to go for it.
[Suddenly - Nazis in SPACE. They were presumably mentioned in the opening narration.]
Admiral Noble: Everything about me screams evil. Give me your grain.
Village Chief: Oh, uh, we don't have any.
Gunnar: Even though it's been shown that the whole village loves and trusts the village chief, and he explicitly told me not to do this, I will publicly contradict him in front of Admiral Noble and suggest that we sell the Nazis some of our massive amounts of grain.
[Admiral Noble kills the village chief. He demands all of the grain!!! He leaves some Space Nazis behind for the purposes of terrorizing the village and then leaves while they.. grow the grain? I guess?]
Gunnar: Noooo the consequences of my actions!
[The Space Nazis are evil to the villagers and also each other. They have a robot. He is conflicted about things.]
Robot: Have you heard about the king?
Village Girl: No.
Robot: There was a king. All we combat robots had a prophecy about how he would have a daughter. Then he did. Then they both died. We decided to stop fighting because all the light had gone out of the world.
Village Girl: Well I think you're carrying the light inside you, Nazi Robot That I Just Met.
Robot: That's kind of a weird thing to say, but thanks.
[The concept of combat robots who prophesy, worship a human god-king, and can choose not to fight - by far the most interesting idea in the movie - is never touched again. The Nazis try to rape the village girl, in case the audience needs a reminder that they are evil.]
Old Villager: Kora, when I found you on that crashed ship being all badass and stuff, I thought you were a badass. Please help us!
Kora: No, I don't feel like it. I'm going to leave. If the Space Nazis learn I'm here, they'll kill all of you. Wait, are those guys going to rape that village girl? Well, if I don't help, it'll introduce some moral ambiguity to my character, and we can't have that, so....
[Kora beats the shit out of the Space Nazis, mostly in slow motion. The robot helps, then runs away. He is never seen again, which is very confusing for the watchers since he has had a significant amount of the dialogue thus far.]
Kora: Well, shit.
Gunnar: We have to go find some more fighters to protect the village!
[Gunnar and Kora walk to the spaceport.]
Kora: The Space Nazi Emperor found me as a child and raised me as his daughter. I had to become an assassin or something. Now you know my darkest secret.
Gunnar: Honestly, I'm not surprised at all.
[They go to a bar. A weird alien disses Kora. She shoots him and a bunch of his friends in slow motion, but not before giving them lots of chances to surrender because she's a good guy.]
Kora: Anyway, now that those guys are all dead, we're looking for the super secret rebel leader. You know, the one whose very name means death to mention. Does anybody know how to find him?
[Kai stands up. Kai is sketchy and rougish.]
Kai: Yeah, I do. Plus I have a spaceship, which is convenient. We just need to run some errands first.
Kora and Gunnar: Tight.
[They visit a variety of locales. At each one they find a new member for their crew. Each new character gets a five-minute fight scene in slow motion. None of this is relevant to the plot. None of them get any more lines in the entire movie, because we have a lot of exposition to dump.]
Kora: At one point I was the bodyguard for the princess. She had space magic. It was wild. Anyway, just wanted you to know.
Gunnar: Wait, didn't that robot imply that the king and his family got killed, like, a hundred years ago?
Kora: Nah. Well, maybe. Don't worry about it.
[The crew finds the rebel leader.]
Rebel leader: Fuck off, we don't want to help you and your shitty village.
Gunnar: ...please?
Rebel leader: Good point. Okay, I am going to go help these guys. Team, this is exactly what we have been working towards. Who wants to come with me?
[Basically none of the rebels go with him.]
Rebel leader: Fair enough.
[They go to somewhere. Suddenly, Kai betrays the crew! And the Space Nazis are there!]
Gunnar: What the hell, man? You've acted sketchy this whole time, and now you're just going to go ahead and do an obvious betrayal?
Kai: The space nazis didn't just destroy my planet. They tortured every man, woman, and child living on it first. (This is an actual line from the film.)
Kora: Okay...? You'd think that would make you hate those guys instead of work for them, but whatever I guess.
Kai: Anyway, the whole point of all of this is that I want to collect the bounties on all of these rebel fighters I took you to visit, and I figured they'd come with you when you asked. Because I know your secret identity as the adopted daughter of the space emperor!
Kora: Wait, so you knew where they all were the whole time? And instead of just selling that information you cooked up this insane plan to bring me to them so that they'd join my crew? Why?
Kai: Don't think about it too hard.
[For inexplicable reasons, Kai and the Space Nazis force Gunnar to execute Kora instead of just doing it themselves. Or not doing it, since the whole point of the plan was to take her alive. But wait! Gunnar sets her free instead!]
Kai and Noble: Oh, bother.
[There is a fight. The good guys win - in slow motion. The rebel leader dies, but since he is one of a dozen minor characters, the audience doesn't really care.]
Djimon Hounsou: Guys, this is awesome. It could start a whole... rebellion! I know it doesn't seem like a big deal, but actually it really IS. (This is an actual line from the movie.)
Djimon Hounsou: I am wasted in this film. Also, Snyder paid how much for me and gave me literally 35 words of dialogue?
[The Space Nazis get the body of Admiral Noble. They pump him full of juice and he has a vision of the Space Nazi Emperor. At one point the closed captions read "astral ice crepitates," which is just incredible.]
Space Nazi Emperor: I am going to briefly recap the backstories of all of the crew, since you probably forgot as they haven't spoken since they were introduced.
Space Nazi Emperor: Ok, now that that's over - find them!!!
[Admiral Noble comes back to life. The heroes ride horses through a sea of grain, despite this ostensibly being a movie about space. The last shot in the film is of a Nazi Robot in the grain holding a stick and wearing antlers on his head. It is unclear why.]
THE END
Thank you for this. I heard about the film, was vaguely interested, then watched the trailer and lost interest. I'm glad Zack spent $166 million on this movie so I could read this post.
Spent 166M on two films, both of which have a final runtime north of 6 hours in total. For 80m a film, they did really well on visuals.
I thought the visuals pretty good. But the story was quite lacking.
Having watched this last night I'm so glad to see this detailed breakdown, but I do have some additional notes for people hungry for more details:
Great additions!
This is really emblematic of the biggest problem in the whole thing. There are too. many. characters.
Take the nice space Nazi soldier you mentioned. We spend, like, 7 minutes of screentime characterizing this guy.
There's a scene where the most dickish bad guy is threatening to kill him and he's like "do it, bitch", so we know he's brave. Or maybe suicidal? Ooh, interesting. Can't wait to find out more about that.
He defends the mournful robot from the other bad guys, so we know he's a protector. Though it's a little weird that he had just been like "holy shit what is that, is that a robot?", but maybe he's just quick to adapt to new things.
Then he tries to fight the rapist dudes and takes out a bunch of them, so we know he's a badass. Nothing more needs to be said there, every character in this movie is a badass ninja.
...And after he helps the protagonist, as you pointed out, the camera never shows him again.
It's jarring as heck for the viewer; everything we've been shown up to this point is that this guy is going to be like Finn from Star Wars, but cooler - and then he just vanishes. Maybe he and the robot run off together? Who knows.
It's a baffling choice for the story. So kora is building a crew to fight the Nazis, and you have a badass Nazi defector guy who just saved her life. She's not going to use that guy??? He's standing, like, right there when she announces her plan.
I recognize that "asian samurai lady with a crazy hat and robot hands" also sounds like a great addition to this D&D party, so maybe we had to save screentime for her.
Not enough for the characters to ask her to join the group, you understand. Or talk to her. Or talk about her. Just enough for them to watch her kill a space lady-spider in slow-mo for 5 minutes and then smash cut to the next scene where she's on their spaceship.
He had things to do today, like change the space laundry
You're the second person to confused a gryphon for a hippogriff. And it's very upsetting. Yeah he bowed to it. But COME ON ITS SO DIFFERENT.
/hj
There's one glaring flaw with your summary, I'm afraid. Nobody in the movie rides a horse, they always ride ALIEN SPACE HORSES!
Bonus scenes:
[The crew arrives at a planet. There is a shirtless blacksmith here. He is a slave!]
Gunnar: Hey dude, want to come free the universe with us?
Tarak: Sorry, I can't come until I work off my debt to this guy. I have a very specific code of ethics.
Kora: Dang. How much do you owe?
Slaver: One billion trillion spacebucks!
All: [gasp]
Slaver: Okay, how about this. If Tarak can ride buckbeak the hippogriff over there, I'll let him go. Otherwise you all have to be my slaves... forever!
Kora: What? That's a terrible idea. Plus, we're all space ninjas and you're not even armed. There is literally nothing stopping us from just taking this guy away from you. Not that you seem to care, since you have him making weapons. Anyway, screw it, we'll do it.
[Tarak rides buckbeak. It is perhaps the longest scene in the entire movie.]
Slaver: your debt is paid in my books, pardner. (This is an actual line from the film.)
[The slaver's redemption arc is cut short when buckbeak eats him.]
Tarak: Attagirl. (Actual line.)
[We are less than halfway through the movie. Tarak will never speak again.]
============
[The crew arrives at yet another planet. There is a cool lady here. She is a samurai with robot hands and a wild hat.]
Samurai lady: hey, you, hold this random civilian back for me.
Kora: we don't even know each other, but you're right, I am trustworthy. I'm the protagonist, after all.
[The samurai lady kills a lady-spider. We watch this fight scene for five minutes. It is in slow motion. At one point, when it looks like she might lose, her samurai swords turn into laser samurai swords!!!!!!!!! The rest of the good guys stand around and do nothing.]
Kai: whoa, that was badass.
Samurai lady: don't celebrate this violence. It is a tragedy.
Kai: are you sure? Because that was a literal space monster. And the monster just told you that she was going to eat all of the children on this planet for the specific purpose of, and I quote, "making their parents suffer." I feel like if anybody needed to be killed, she did. If you're trying to make a point about spider-colonialism or something, it fell kind of flat.
[There is no conversation about the samurai lady joining the group. We just cut to a shot of the spaceship flying away. It doesn't matter because the samurai lady will never speak in this film again.]
Crepitate
crep·i·tate
/ˈkrepəˌtāt/
verb
make a crackling sound.
I guess there just wasn't another word they could have used there.
If there is anything that I loved most about this movie, it was learning this word.
Thank you for your "screenplay" - I enjoyed it far more than I expect I would have liked watching the movie itself. Ordinarily, I'll give a half-decent space opera (Killjoys, Firefly, etc.) the benefit of the doubt if it has any originality at all, because truly well-executed original science fiction movies and series are so rare.
Rebel Moons sounds less like an homage to its source material than a badly assembled mix-and-match of space opera clichés, with all the seams showing. That was the impression I got from the trailer, and you've confirmed it. I suppose it could be as through-the-other-side unintentionally funny as Starcrash?
Unfortunately, the whole thing takes itself very seriously, which dampens some of the "unintentional comedy" aspect.
Djimon Hounsou telling the camera "I know this seems like a small battle, but it's actually a big deal" is very much hilarious, but I found other stuff like innocent village girl #4 telling the robot "well I think you're carrying the light inside you" to be just too much. It was painful to watch.
I didn't hate the movie, though. I love Snyder's visuals, and unlike, say, Sucker Punch or Justice League there's a real color palette here, it's not just grays + bluornge. It's more frustration that it could've been decent if someone else had written the screenplay.
Very much so. The scenes are basically just glued together with no connective tissue. I've never seen anything like it.
I loved the movie, sure it has some problems (too short, for all the characters intros, looking forward to the additional hour cut), but it's a love letter to every scifi genre possible. There is a heavy Firefly and Killjoys influence mashed together with Clash of the Titans (1981?) for good measure, everyone was expecting Star Wars, but it's far less Star Wars than anything else except for its 'epic scale'. It's a space opera, written like a novel space opera.
The movie is based on Seven Samaurai by Kurosawa (1957) which is one of my favorite films.
I think my problem with this film is that unlike Seven Samurai, Firefly, or even Star Wars, the characters and world just aren't that interesting. They feel extremely derivative without offering anything new. It feels like Zack Snyder is playing paint by numbers, borrowing worldbuilding and ideas from all these other movies to make something that looks like them. But in usual Zack Snyder fashion, he failed to tell an actually interesting story with all of it.
This is why I think his best works are direct adaptations of someone else's writing. With 300 and Watchmen, the characters and their stories were already compelling, it was up to Snyder to sell those stories with slick visuals.
I was honestly about 90% certain the entire film was generated by various forms of Chinese AI by the end. I don't think I have seen a worse movie in a verrry long time.
Sounds fantastic, like a Monty Python skit about sci-fi movies. Just need someone to turn it into a video.
I'll have to watch Rebel Moons tonight, when I'm not supposed to be working. 😋
Oh gods, the graphics and the universe it's set in are awesome, but the story telling is bad. 😭 The wasted potential is horrifying.
This is both hilarious and accurate! I've shared it with a few people already.
I had a conversation about the movie with a coworker earlier today. We speculate that this whole shorter cut of the movie is all a business decision. The whole "Snyder Cut" is the new thing. So the whole point was to release this inferior version first and let it get a bunch of bad press. Then when the "Snyder Cut" of part one gets released, it will be seen as a (relatively) superior movie.
This is Netflix, so there's no reason why this couldn't have been a 6 hours (or more) series. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Snyder isn't being held back by anyone or any studio this time. There's no real need to cut this down to fit some shorter runtime. It's inorganic, but it will probably work. How do I know this? Because I'm hyped as hell for the "Snyder Cut" of part one LOL
It made no sense but it was visual I guess. I'd read a novel set in the world - there is the potential for so much world building here - but the movie was meh.
One correction, I think, is that the general is who adopts her, not the king
Okay, Rebel Moon is a terrible movie that's clearly a ripoff of Star Wars, 40K, and Dune (which the latter two also ripped off), but this bit is uncharitable. Noble clearly wasn't buying the village chief's story, pointedly remarking on how well fed everyone looked, and Kora had explicitly told him to hand over some grain to get them to go away, without telling them anything that would make them come back. Gunnar speaking up was an attempt to spin the chief's story in a way that didn't paint him as a liar but also bridge the gap by saying there was a reserve for emergencies they could give them.
Very fair points and thank you for disagreeing!