For a genre that pretty much inspired the entire blockbuster era, space opera has become weirdly hard to get hold of beyond Star Wars. After the original trilogy’s barnstorming success in the late 70s for Lucasfilm, there were umpteen abortive attempts by other studios to grab themselves some of that good space fantasy dollar, but nobody really got anywhere useful. Disney’s appalling The Black Hole is barely remembered these days, while Roger Corman’s Battle Beyond the Stars is perhaps memorable only for giving a certain James Cameron an early break on special effects. There was even a James-Bond-in-space movie, Roger Moore’s Moonraker, although it hardly registers as one of 007’s most scintillating adventures.
Flash forward to the present day, and space opera seems to have become the preserve of the small screen, thanks to Disney+’s endlessly satisfying conveyor belt of Star Wars spin-offs and retreads. We are promised more movies set in a galaxy far, far away, but there are no definitive start dates for production and certainly no mooted release dates. Ever since 2019’s incredibly disappointing, trilogy-killing The Rise of Skywalker, the only way to watch space opera at the multiplex has been to catch the latest Guardians of the Galaxy episode or sign up for retro screenings of the old classics.
It is perhaps fitting, then, that Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon is due to debut on Netflix, despite all its blockbuster stylings. First pitched to Disney back in the 00s as a potential all-grown-up Star Wars film, it has been reimagined as an extracurricular activity, though you might not know it at first glance. The first trailer dropped earlier this week, and boy does it look like a movie that was conceived against a backdrop of Jedi knights, star destroyers and giant death stars. There are even lightsabers and exotically monikered space princesses, for flip’s sake, along with an evil military organisation known as the Imperium that is apparently fighting an interplanetary insurgency.
Remind you of anything? If the first few frames feature a pair of Kurosawa-inspired robots trying to escape with a vital hologram message while space chaos erupts all around them, then Snyder may have some explaining to do.
At the same time, there are oversized death griffins, insectoid alien-human hybrids and statuesque, six-limbed colossi, so Snyder has clearly been doing his best to add something fresh into the space opera mix. And the sheer glory of the eye-popping cosmic glory on offer here means there will always be a temptation to find out what happens next, not least because the American film-maker is capable of some of the most splendid moments of stylised fantasy spectacle that have ever been edited together.
The opening segue of 2009’s Watchmen, set to a chorus of Bob Dylan, blood and fire. The moment in 2016’s Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice when Ben Affleck’s Bruce Wayne recalls his parents’ brutal death on the streets of Gotham, pearls spiralling down in slow-mo torment. The bravura scenes on dying Krypton in 2013’s Man of Steel. Watch any of these segments in isolation and you would assume Snyder is a film-maker of unsurpassable renown.
Perhaps he is. The Snyder cut of Justice League was rightly praised a couple of years back, the director somehow freed from studio pressure to make an intelligent, stylishly open-plan and noirish, four-hour TV epic. Watchmen beautifully captured the comic book majesty of Alan Moore’s self-reflexive superhero history book, even if purists (and the author himself) will never forgive its story-shifting liberties. At least two-thirds of Man of Steel is a fabulous Superman flick, before the whole thing descends into a final act of knuckle-headed, pixel-mashing exploso-farce. Should we give him another chance?
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Netflix clearly has, as Rebel Moon is being pitched as the first part of a two-movie setup. Part one is titled A Child of Fire and hits screens just before Christmas, while part two (The Scargiver) is due to arrive in April 2024.
This is still the guy that once made Batfleck utter the immortally clunky line: “They told me the world only makes sense if you force it to” in Dawn in Justice. Then again, George Lucas himself was a self-confessed terrible writer of dialogue, with Harrison Ford once telling him: “George, you can type this shit, but you can’t say it” in reference to a particularly shonky Star Wars script. Maybe, just maybe, Snyder can get it right this time.