Zack Snyder’s much-anticipated space opera Rebel Moon: Part One – A Child of Fire, is set to release on Netflix on 22 December. It promises to be a visual spectacle with amazing fight scenes, fantastical creatures, and space battle cruisers trading broadsides. What’s not to like?
From the IMDB summary: “When a peaceful settlement on the edge of a distant moon finds itself threatened by the armies of a tyrannical ruling force, Kora (Sofia Boutella), a mysterious stranger living among the villagers, becomes their best hope for survival.” But of course, a female savior is the only hope for our heroes because current year and woke culture demand it.
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Regardless, it looks like the movie will be a fun ride. Snyder told Entertainment Weekly that he got the idea for Rebel Moon as a student in the late ‘80s. Creating a one-line pitch, he settled on “a ragtag team of warriors from different backgrounds assembled to fight for a common cause — but piloting spaceships and wielding laser guns instead of World War II bombers.”
His wife Deborah Snyder further reinforces the notion that Rebel Moon is totally original when she told EW that “Mostly everything right now is based on a book or based on a game. It’s a remake, or it’s a sequel,” and added, “There are very few times you get the opportunity to do something that’s wholly original.”
But how original is Snyder’s Rebel Moon? A short EW synopsis tells us, “The central conflict of Rebel Moon revolves around wheat, specifically the crop grown by hardy human settlers on the rocky planetoid Veldt….. When an imperial spaceship from the authoritarian Motherworld…. lands on Veldt demanding that hard-earned harvest to feed their merciless army, the settlers set out searching for any Davids who might be able to help them topple Goliath.”
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The irony in Deborah Snyder implying that Rebel Moon is not based on a book or a game is that it may be both. In 1995, Bruce Bethke and Vox Day published a science fiction paperback called, yes, you guessed it – Rebel Moon, which in turn was a novelization of a PC game called Rebel Moon produced by Vox Day.
The name is not where the similarities end. From the introductory chapter called “A Prelude to War” explaining the Lunar rebel uprising against the United Nations: “When seeking the root causes of the Lunar Revolution of 2069, one needn’t dig far. The United Nations’ position of power on Earth depended on control of the food supply; control of the food supply, in turn, depended on control of the lunar hydroponic food factories; and the hydroponic food factories themselves were heavily dependent on the ingenuity, the sweat, the determination, and far too often the blood of the lunar colonists.”
Is it any wonder this reviewer on Goodreads assumed that Netflix acquired the rights to develop Vox Day’s book Rebel Moon into a film?
There may not be definite proof that Snyder took the idea from or was inspired by Vox Day’s Rebel Moon, but the striking similarities raises some questions.
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Maybe
Very little of anything is truly original these days. Then again, there are so many sciece fiction comics and novels basd around
moon colonies fighting with the local Empire.
Very little ever was. The old stories are rehashes of christian and pagan myths, which are rehashes of classical stories, which are rehashes of older works still. Everything is derivative, which is to say that everything is a thread embedded in the one great tapestry of lies that humanity tells to itself to keep the dark at bay.
Maybe
Very little of anything is truly original these days. Then again, there are so many science fiction comics and novels based around
moon colonies fighting with the local Empire.
Reply
Kong King you are correct.
Vox Day pointed it out himself:
https://voxday.net/2023/12/08/the-pulse-of-fandom/
But speaking of moon colonies, this gave me a good chuckle: “The lady would appear to be protesting both unnecessarily and just a little too much. After all, if it’s a farming colony planet that is rebelling, why is the film named Rebel Moon?”
I thought the movie was ripping off The Seven Samurai. Whoops!
No it’s ripping off Battle Beyond the Stars which was a ripoff of the Magnificent Seven which was a ripoff of Seven Samurai.
Wasn’t there a wheat subplot in the original scripts for Star Wars, hence the preproduction script title “Blue Harvest”?