For all its blockbuster gaudiness, “Insurgent Moon” nonetheless shows a stunning quantity of restraint within the early going. The movie opens on a ponderous exposition dump by a narrating Anthony Hopkins, who voices an historic robotic named Jimmy (carried out by Dustin Ceithamer on-set), however settles into a pleasant rhythm as soon as we meet our primary, if reluctant, hero. An outsider who settled on the desolate moon of Veldt two years previous to the occasions of the movie, Kora (a steely and compelling Sofia Boutella) is content material residing in anonymity amongst a village of hedonistic, Viking-like settlers. All the standard hero’s journey tropes are current and accounted for right here, from the person harboring an harmless crush on her (Michiel Huisman’s Gunnar, channeling an “Aw shucks” attraction to principally convincing impact) to her mysterious backstory quickly doled out in intensive flashbacks to the approaching menace of the Imperium (identified colloquially because the authoritarian “Motherworld”) arriving on her doorstep.
As action-oriented as he could also be, Snyder takes his time and permits these early moments to breathe. Maybe somewhat too a lot, because it seems.
The fly within the ointment comes from how talky and dialogue-heavy this desk setting proves to be, which has by no means been a power of most of his films. Though this society’s emphasis on a easy life and worldly pleasures helps floor this area opera in one thing tangible, no characters ever speak in something resembling precise conversations. By the point Kora begins reciting her motivations and backstory out loud for the dozenth time (“I am solely telling you this so you already know who I’m,” Kora actually says to Gunnar at one level after a chronic flashback spelling out her origins), it is easy to think about clunky, video-gamey dialogue wheels popping up on-screen to assist dole out the naked minimal of pertinent data to us players viewers.
The difficulty solely worsens when the plot kicks off in earnest, incited by Ed Skrein’s vicious Admiral Noble and his Imperium warship showing over Veldt alongside a small military of invaders and demanding a minimize of the inhabitants’ valuable shops of grain. Kora’s speed-ramped combat with some unruly troopers (disappointingly, Snyder resorts to the specter of sexual assault as a motivation right here) dashes any hopes of a peaceable decision, main her on a planet-hopping quest to place collectively a workforce of criminals, insurgents, and revolutionaries to assist her small city repel their oppressors. The issue is, hardly any of those oddballs are given a great purpose to affix up within the first place. Kora and Gunnar repeatedly arrive in some gorgeously imagined new locale (together with a blatant “Star Wars” cantina riff), encounter a brand new character simply in time for them to undertake a random side-mission to show their value, and easily transfer on to the subsequent recruit. This bizarrely episodic construction would possibly as properly be ripped straight out of numerous video video games, with NPCs milling round with no precise interiority … proper up till the second the primary character interacts with them and triggers the subsequent degree.
It is a disgrace, too, as a result of the ensemble workforce consisting of Charlie Hunnam’s roguish bounty hunter Kai, Bae Doona’s honorable warrior Nemesis, Staz Nair’s perpetually shirtless former slave Tarak, Djimon Hounsou’s disgraced navy normal Titus, and Ray Fisher as insurgent chief Bloodaxe, none of whom ever actually develop or bond with each other in any significant manner, deserved a lot better than this.