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rhjimlad
Reviews
Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire (2023)
We've seen all this before....
...and it was done better.
Rebel Moon is a mess. It's shamelessly derivative and full of cartoon characters that just don't work.
It is a blatant takeoff of Star Wars mixed in with the Seven Samurai having poor, innocent farmers being threatened with death if they don't hand over all their grain to the evil empire which turns up unannounced in the sky above their idyllic village. Why a galaxy-spanning empire that has the technology to build sentient robots and starships the size of aircraft carriers needs grain is not explained. The two dimentional villain is a Darth Vader ripoff without the cool cape and helmet who is run by an emperor who is even more evil. It even turns out he's a cybernetically enhanced Darth Vader ripoff. This guy just delights in violence and cruelty for its own sake and as a result the character is simply vapid as are his comic-book lines and facial expressions. The real Darth Vader was a far, far better villain who had depth and Ian McDiarmid's Emperor Palpatine was a stellar performance rendering Rebel Moon's attempts at these types mere cardboard cutouts by comparison.
The hero is just as vapid. The often-seen-in-action-films-these-days sylph-like girl out for revenge who can break bones and the laws of motion physics with equal ease is simply boring and unbelievable.
The scenes and locations are blatant Star Wars ripoffs too. The trek across a barren planet to a thug-infested spaceport where there is a fight in a seedy bar full of strange looking aliens. The joining forces of the hero with a mercenary so the hero can hitch a lift on his starship. The villain's mortal injury and cybernetic resurrection at the end...I could go on and I'm surprised Lucasfilm/Disney haven't sued for copyright infringement and plagiarism.
To reiterate: we've seen all this before and it was done better.
Last Will (2011)
Amateurish
The worst aspect of this dreadful movie for me was the sound. As a former sound engineer, the displayed incompetence made my skin crawl.
In the wedding scene at the start of the movie, the wedding singer, despite standing right in front of a microphone, is all but inaudible. Same goes for her instrumentalists. I thought I was listening to a badly folded down 5.1 mix before I realised the sound recordist just didn't seem to know what he was doing: in the courtroom scene when the protagonists are walking through the halls of the courthouse, the sound is reverberant, indirect and muddy: the conversation outside the court between James Brolin and Tatum O'Neal is notable because the picture cuts between the two characters are audible; you can hear the traffic noise in the background changing suddenly with each one.
There has been very little if any post production audio dubbing done on this movie. The entire soundtrack would serve as a guide track in a dubbing suite but it's a disgrace as the finished product.
In the middle of the movie, without warning and apropo nothing at all, the director decides to regale us with a reprise of a large number of scenes taken from the first half of the film, cut together and shown mute with a pointless overdub of some syrupy vocal ballad. It was at that point that I gave up watching this amateurish tripe. One or two reviewers of have applauded Brent Huff for his direction in this film. Personally, I wouldn't let him direct traffic if Last Will is an example of his skillset.
Oh, and Tatum O'Neal can't act to save herself.