‘A pound shop C-3P0!’

That was Mark Kermode’s verdict on Jimmy the robot from Rebel Moon. This sums up what Kermode and many others have said about director Zack Snyder’s new space adventure movie: that it’s a rip-off of Star Wars, that it’s staggeringly derivative.

I usually like Kermode but actually Jimmy isn’t much like 3-CP0. He’s a humanoid robot with an English accent – OK. But there have been a lot of human-shaped robots since Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. It’s pretty much the default shape for robots. And English accents are not rare; Mark Kermode has one.

Jimmy is a military robot, designed to kill, not a protocol droid who can speak 6 million languages. C-3P0 is pedantic and cowardly and pessimistic. Jimmy, on the other hand, has an interesting and messy internal life. Unlike C-3P0 he is dignified, and he is played for sympathy, not for laughs. He was programmed to defend a certain princess, and now that she’s dead he can’t fight – until something unexpected suddenly restores his capacity for violence.

This incident has placed him on an interesting trajectory. When we see him in one of the final shots of the movie, having not seen him at all for over an hour, he has undergone a strange transformation – a kind of robotic midlife crisis, resulting in new feral headgear. It’s a striking image.

I didn’t particularly want to like Rebel Moon and I didn’t see myself writing about it here, slightly pedantically defending it from a critical pile-on. Of Snyder’s precious films, 300 impressed me at 16 but in retrospect it was a crazy and fascist movie, drawn from an equally crazy and fascist comic. I haven’t seen a Snyder film since Watchmen. I know that Rebel Moon started out as a rejected pitch for a Star Wars movie. In the trailer, the action looked weightless, the characters dour. I thought it would be Star Wars without any humour or character, and with a reactionary political edge.

But honestly, contrary to what most of the critics are saying, Rebel Moon carves out its own space and is its own thing. I watch everything in 20 or 30 minute stretches these days, between changing nappies, sleeping and going to work, so the length of the movie didn’t bother me as I didn’t watch it in one sitting. But if I didn’t really like it, I wouldn’t have kept coming back.

From the start, Rebel Moon struck me as more like Warhammer 40K or Dune than Star Wars: there’s the solemn choral music and the baroque Gothic style of the bad guys. This tone promise was borne out: the whole movie is edgier than anything Lucas made. It’s not exactly Come and See but it’s more for teenage boys (of all ages and genders) than for the whole family.

The early scenes with the good guys are also very un-Star Wars. They talk about sex, joke about it, and have it barely off-screen, which is something most action-adventure films of our era are terrified to do because they want to pack all age groups into the cinema. That’s refreshing. Also, these pagan farmers appear to be having a really good time even when they aren’t riding each other. For me, all this was unexpected and endearing.

The arrival of the bad guys is really tense. This sequence follows Hitchcock’s ‘bomb under the table’ principle. Yes, thanks critics, it’s obvious they’re bad space fascists and they’re going to do bad things. But we don’t know exactly what they are going to do, or when. Hence the tension.

The imperial soldiers are not faceless stormtroopers. They’re macho bullies and rapists, apart from one decent guy; they have horrible personalities, but the point is that they have personalities. In another 40k nod, their armour spans the gap gracefully between futuristic and baroque.

Contrary to what I expected, the fight scenes actually kick arse. They have real weight and are gritty. The energy weapons have a kick to them.

There are plenty of genre tropes in the first 40 minutes. But there are few specifically Star Wars tropes until Kora and Gunnar (look! I remembered their names 3 weeks later) take in a vista of a town from a clifftop before proceeding into a cantina full of exotic and dangerous-looking figures. From there it turns away from Star Wars again and becomes a ’round up a posse’ story, drawing from Kurosawa himself, not Kurosawa filtered through George Lucas.

There are plenty of moments where the movie is a visual feast. But sometimes the environments look like stage backdrops, and even when they don’t look like it they behave like it. When our heroes meet the Bloodaxes, it might as well be happening on a theatre stage because there is no interaction with the floaty columns that loom in the background. Towards the end, which is not really an end but a lull before the next movie, the characters keep saying wooden portentous things clearly designed to get the ending to feel more ending-y. That’s clumsy. I found most of the slow motion stuff unnecessary and distracting. A slo-mo shot of seeds being sown – what is that for?

The Bloodaxes keep saying the word ‘Revolution,’ without every giving us the slightest notion of what their revolution is about. In this sense too the movie is distinct from Star Wars: it finds a way to be even more apolitical. Unfortunately Rebel Moon also goes so far as to hint that the evil empire might be redeemed by a slightly more compassionate absolute monarch, one who can heal little birdies with her bare hands.

Once again, like in Dune and Star Wars, we have space feudalism. The assumption that a lot of dukes and emperors would be able to manage interstellar travel, when our modern capitalists have such trouble even getting off the ground, is a strange one, but again it’s a genre trope and hardly unique to this movie.

The whole thing is basically limited and on the shallow end, but it’s gripping, pacy and well-executed. Take the masked priest characters who lurk in the background ominously for the whole movie, until the final scenes when we at last learn what their function is and see them at work. That’s cool. The script is pretty likeable. When a bunch of nameless good characters are killed in battle toward the end of the movie, we afterwards get a moment of tribute and mourning – something we rarely get in Star Wars, where there’s an unwritten rule that nameless characters are disposable.

It’s a shame this kind of budget isn’t going to a movie adaptation of some piece of space sci-fi by, say, Ian M Banks or Ann Leckie, or some original adventure drawing on their ideas. That’s my main problem here: there are lots of little sci-fi tropes and elements in Rebel Moon, but no big Science Fiction ideas animating the story, no consistent through-line in the worldbuilding.

I thought the Avatar sequel, Dune: Part One and Andor were all brilliant in very diferent ways. Rebel Moon is not on that level – it’s not so original or intelligent. But the critics are wrong. It hits the targets it sets out to hit. And it’s only ‘like Star Wars‘ in the sense that they both belong to the same genre. In the same way Notting Hill is like Meet the Parents in that they are both rom coms. In the way that 300 is like Gladiator. In the way that Watchmen is like an Avengers movie.

Saying that Jimmy is C-3P0 is just pointing out that they both have human shapes and English accents. It’s not demonstrating anything, except ignorance or maybe disregard for the genre. Likewise, pointing out that Rebel Moon is like Star Wars is actually saying nothing more than ‘These two films are action-adventure movies set in space.’

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