Rebel Moon: 30 seconds, streaming quotas, and doubts

Rebel Moon: Thirty seconds that summarize a shift in eras

Thirty seconds were enough. A viewer peine Rebel Moon, saw a woman pulling a plow alone while a man watched, and closed the tab. His reading of that first scene was blunt: female empowerment, male submission, and a collectivist veneer. The film was discarded before the plot even began. The anecdote is minor; the conversation it sparks is not. Because what is being debated there is not a Zack Snyder movie, but who decides which stories get financed, who pays for them, and why viewers feel they are watching a catalog they didn't choose.

Is Rebel Moon an ideological film or just a bad rehash?

There is no consensus. For some, the first scene already reveals the message: the woman single-handedly sustaining agricultural production against the man observing her. For others, that interpretation collapses with the first minute of rigor: the society portrayed in the film is a patriarchal agrarian community, with a local boss and very traditional hierarchies, not a collectivist experiment. The label doesn't withstand scrutiny, they argue, but the discomfort is real.

And here appears the second front, the one that disorients those expecting a simple ideological complaint. Several viewers maintain that the film would be equally bad without its symbolic weight. A rehash, they say, of The Magnificent Seven, which in turn was a rehash of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. A western, in the words of those who have seen it. Others see a mishmash of Dune, Star Wars, Riddick, and the Warhammer universe, with the worst of each and the best of none. There is also industrial criticism, from those who argue that a director who needs five hours to tell something that should fit in two is a bad director.

What is science fiction and what is fantasy?

The conversation drifted, as usual, toward taxonomy. Some argue that science fiction is exactly what its name indicates: fictional science, advances that don't exist yet, spaceships, hibernation, interstellar travel. Under that prism, protagonists capable of delivering disproportionate beatings to much heavier rivals would not be science fiction, but fantasy, or outright propaganda. The rebuttal comes with two uncomfortable titles: 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 were also science fiction. The genre, they remind us, is not limited to an engineering catalog. Where metaphor ends and pamphlet begins is, as of this discussion, a matter of opinion.

Subscription prices and the economics of streaming

Here the issue enters fully into economics, led by a forum user. His reasoning is simple: you cannot finance an infinite catalog of releases with a subscription fee of about ten euros per month. If the price doesn't cover the cost, he argues, someone pays the difference, and that someone is usually the advertiser. From there springs his suspicion that much of the content responds more to advertising interests and market trends than to creative decisions. The secondary consequence he himself points out is the drop in quality: producing in industrial quantities with haste and tight budgets takes its toll. More available content than ever and fewer things worth finishing.

The viewer who discards the entire catalog

There is a scene that summarizes the phenomenon better than any analysis: the viewer who opens his download manager every fifteen days and starts crossing things off. He discards national cinema, discards whatever has a female protagonist on the cover, discards certain casts, discards Asian product, discards almost all comedy. When he finishes filtering, he has no page left. The paradox is that even so, he occasionally finds an exception, almost always in science fiction or pavor. That screening explains why a release like this generates so much noise: it's not just that people don't like it, it's that it confirms a prior suspicion.

Refuge in the classics

In the face of the new catalog, the conversation turns to the old. Titles that stand the test of time are rescued: Seven Samurai, The Magnificent Seven, recent thrillers with decent scores on aggregators, and a 2009 film confused with another release of the same name. Also the trendy dystopian series, with its dose of correctness but an approach that, even critics admit, fits within its own world. And a recurring conclusion: the classic told what it had to tell better, simply put.

If anything makes clear this crossroads of reproaches is that the ideological label is now the first line of any review, fair or not. It is likely that the next controversial release will split the audience in two again before the first shot is seen. With reservations: perhaps next time the problem won't be the message, but that no one remains willing to endure those first thirty seconds.