How Not To Steal Star Wars — Rebel Moon

If you'd like to join my Discord server where we chat about our writing projects, workshop ideas, and the movies/shows we love, here's a link you can use to join. My Discord: discord.com/invite/aJpYPQX Keep writing! - Henry

I can't wait for Zack's 14 hour director cut to reveal that the water girl that almost got wrapped by the soldiers was secretly Martian Manhunter all along, tying this poetic story together somehow

They really told ChatGPT to put Star Wars and Seven Samurai together

This movie is just "and then and then and then." It felt like random clips just firing off.

17:01 After that scene with the giant bird creature was over, I remember saying out loud "That was just the scene from How To Train Your Dragon but bad."

The plot felt like an RPG where you pick up side characters along the way, but with just the cutscenes and none of the gameplay

rebel moon is like trying to build a brick wall without cement you’re stacking all of the bricks on top of each other but not reinforcing them, or binding them together with cement so eventually no matter what it will all collapse

the beauty of SW is that it lifts so many references and remixes them altogether, it becomes something entirely new and entirely familiar.

There’s a piece of advice that applies here that goes “Don’t follow in their foot steps, Seek what they sought” from Marty O’Donnell. Instead of stitching together disparate elements because you like them, it asks you to figure out what the point, what the goal of the story you like is, then ask yourself how you yourself would solve that problem. It’s an almost effortless way of creating something with your own spin because now you have a compass to decide whether or not something should be in your story

"Good artists copy, great artists steal." As a student of classical music, I was taught that Stravinsky said this! 😅

Paul Schrader said that inspiration should be like shoplifting. You always wanna shoplift from a different store so you never get caught.

Snyder's visual style was fun and interesting one time in 300, just like M Night's twist writing worked once in sixth sense. You need more than one trick.

I'll always remember this quote from George Lucas. When ILM was making the Hoth Battle scene for The Empire Strikes Back, Joe Johnston (the storyboarder for the scene) was having a discussion with Lucas on what the scene should be (this was before the script was even finished). Lucas suggested that Johnston and company take influence from ice battle scene in the Sergie Eisenstein film Alexander Nevsky (1938). But Lucas speciffically instructed Johnston saying "I don't want it to look like this, I want it FEEL like this".

Zack Snyder makes badass visuals and action scenes, but dear god if he's freaking awful at writing. Bro seriously needs actual competent writers to help him write good stories.

10:15 best way I’ve seen those two covers described. Reznor’s version is a suicide note. Cash’s is a eulogy.

My spite for this movie was elevated by the fact I watched Seven Samurai a literal week prior. It literally felt like they were trying to make Star Wars if the plot was based off that instead of The Hidden Fortress.

I laughed so hard when you talked about a Bug’s Life, because every time I sit down to watch a Bug’s Life I think, “Hey, why don’t I watch Galaxy Quest instead, it’s basically the same movie and it’s funnier.” So then I sit down to watch Galaxy Quest and immediately think, “Wait, let’s watch the Three Amigos instead, it’s basically the same movie and it’s funnier.” And then I’m happy I did because the “My Little Buttercup” scene makes me laugh every. single. time.

Maybe Synder heard about Checkovs Gun, and made a movie determined to disprove that concept.

Related: it's easier to get away with lifting ideas in the 1970s with an audience that only has books and three channels of network TV than it is in 2023 when just about any piece of media made in the last fifty years is instantly available online. But as you say, some do it far better than others. :)

there's probably a crossover fanfic out there that does what rebel moon wants to do, better than snyder ever could