Is ‘Rebel Moon’ A ‘Star Wars’ Movie?

With the first installment of Rebel Moon now streaming on Netflix, critics and viewers can’t help but notice that the film feels an awful lot like a Star Wars movie. There’s a good reason for that.

Granted, Rebel Moon is not an official Star Wars movie, but it did start out as one. Zack Snyder has not been shy about revealing that the project started out as a pitch to Lucasfilm shortly before George Lucas sold the company to Disney. According to Snyder, the pitch was rejected, but over time, he mulled over making the story a standalone sci-fi series with its own cinematic universe.

Via IndieWire:

Detaching the [Akira] Kurosawa-inspired movie from “Star Wars” didn’t prove difficult, as Snyder said there was no overlap in terms of characters between what he was developing at Lucasfilm and the other movies in the franchise. The director added about his isolated “Star Wars” movie, “It was me saying, ‘Give me the keys and let me take it for a spin.’”

However, the milage may vary on Snyder’s attempt to distance Rebel Moon from Star Wars. The film arrived with a brutally low Rotten Tomatoes score as critics eviscerated the film for repeating way too many of the same beats as the original Star Wars. (The characters wielding laser swords didn’t help.)

“In film school, some professors use the familiar example of Star Wars to teach Campbellian mythmaking, the theories that identify and codify the narrative units re-contextualized since Grecian times,” Charles Bramesco of The Guardian wrote. “Snyder demonstrates a clear fluency in these concepts with his classically minded scripting, except he forgot the part where the archetypes are meant to be refreshed through novel contexts.”

Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire is streaming on Netflix.