Recencies van critici

[A Child of Fire] is more of a loosely doodled mood board than a functioning film – a series of pulpy tableaux that mostly sound fun in isolation, but become numbingly dull when run side by side. That even after a reported 20 years in the making the film still feels fundamentally pointless isn’t just disappointing, it’s entirely bewildering.

In attempting to paint a fresh gloss on some very old ideas, Snyder... has turned Netflix money into an ambitious, erratic, relentless slide show of stand-alone images that strain to cohere into a single, engaging narrative. The result is a space opera that’s bloated but rarely buoyant, with paper-thin characters and action—when not rendered in Snyder’s signature slow motion—so chaotic it can be challenging to track.

While Snyder may do his best to invent a dark, gripping universe to engross viewers, Rebel Moon is a limp, soulless regurgitation of tropes stolen from much more formidable films.

Despite Snyder’s stylistic gifts... there’s not enough reason to invest in the larger story or indeed even smaller aspects of it... “Rebel Moon” might look big and splashy, even on a TV screen, but in terms of working as drama, it’s less a rebel yell than a low-key rebel grunt.

The relative grace of A Child of Fire’s action direction only underscores how disjointed and generic the rest of the film is. A longer cut may correct the frequent lapses of narrative logic, but that leaves the issue that these characters and their conflicts aren’t compelling enough to generate much interest in spending more time with them.

Perhaps the two combined parts (in their full, bloody, uncut forms) will miraculously cohere into a watchable film. But as it stands, Rebel Moon has suffered a complete failure to launch.

What you’re witnessing here is an amalgamation of recognizable bits and pieces, all mashed together and supersized to the max. It’s essentially the Snyder Cut of every science fiction and fantasy touchstone of the past 100 years — a jam-packed, ransacked greatest-hits reel posing as a saga.

At the risk of being more uncharitable, honestly, who approved this thing? “Rebel Moon” is nearly unwatchable and one of the most stunning misfires of this scale in quite some time.

[A Child of Fire] is a film populated by some of the Zack Snyder’s Justice League filmmaker’s worst impulses: a mess of imagery, some of it attempting to shock, congregated largely around the idea of what might look good in a trailer.

[Child of Fire] is too invested in table-setting to be fully enjoyed on its own, at times feeling more like a studio presentation deck than a piece of organic storytelling... Whether it will all come together in the second part remains to be seen, but “Child of Fire” already feels like too much narrative throat-clearing.

[A Child of Fire] is so clumsily Frankensteined together from a pair of the most recognizable touchstones in film history that it doesn’t feel like a true original so much as a two-headed chimera without a single thought shared between them.

[Snyder and his co-writers] never really try to be original. Instead, they joyless trudge through formulaic territory, only now with a bigger budget and a Snyder-y compulsion to replicate the looks and styles of other movies and comic books, among other media. “Rebel Moon” often looks more like an animated pitch for a movie than an actual movie with human characters, urgent drama, emotional stakes, and so forth.