Sofia Boutella leads a band of insurgents taking a stand to protect a farming community from the evil empire in the grunge action auteur’s Netflix sci-fi movie.

In 2021’s zombie heist thriller Army of the Dead, that sneaky Zack Snyder tricked us into believing he had rediscovered his sense of humor, a keen understanding of the fact that trashy fun and gory action mayhem need not be mutually exclusive. But just seconds into the leaden sci-fi saga Rebel Moon Part One: A Child of Fire, it’s clear the director is back to indulging his worst tendency for self-serious bombast. That opening features the sonorous voice of Anthony Hopkins droning away over a gloomy spacescape: “On the Motherworld, blah, blah, blah…” It’s a glop of garbled narrative foundation that makes the opening text crawl on the original Star Wars look like a haiku.

This is a derivative crazy-quilt endeavor loaded with enough plot to plug up a black hole but only the most feebly drawn characters to do the work. Its theme of resistance against oppression is too basic to carry much weight.

Then there’s the head-clobbering obviousness of a fascist militia enforcing the merciless rule of the Motherworld, controlled since the slaughter of the king by the power-hungry Regent Balisarius (Fra Fee). His emissary is the vicious — wait for it — Admiral Noble (Ed Skrein), a sinewy sadist sporting Bolshevik-style outerwear over Nazi-chic black and white, who favors bashing his victims’ skulls in with a staff made from the bone of some ancient creature.

Snyder never met a superhero team roundup he didn’t love, and although he’s put aside capes and spandex for rugged galactic garb, the screenplay he co-wrote with Kurt Johnstad and Shay Hatten plays like the result of someone feeding Seven Samurai and Star Wars into AI scriptwriting software.

The warrior in charge of recruiting insurgents to go up against Noble’s army is Kora (Sofia Boutella), a brooding stranger taken in by a peaceful farming community after crash-landing on the remote moon Veldt. Village chief Sindri (Corey Stoll in an unfortunate beaded beard) has barely finished urging everyone to honor the harvest gods with rabid lovemaking, or “thrusting of hips” as he lustily calls it, when Noble’s hulking warships appear in the sky.

He leaves behind a goon squad to take charge of the crops, and while Kora is preparing to flee, she hears the screams of sweet young villager Sam (Charlotte Maggi) being manhandled. “I’ll turn her from a farm girl to a whore!” declares an especially skeevy brute. In one of the worst bits of rape dialogue in recent memory, the senior officer snatches Sam away from that a-hole underling, bellowing, “I’ll split this sapling myself, and then you can have her. Then you can all have her, mwahahahah!” It’s in moments like this that Snyder confuses menacing with gross.

Luckily, Kora is handy enough with axe, guns, fists and feet to spare Sam, before convincing the farmers that they’re going to have to learn the art of war. She takes off with Gunnar, who has contacts in the resistance, looking to enlist skilled fighters to train the villagers. En route, she fills in the details of her past for him: “I’m only telling you this so you know who I am.” No, sorry, girl, you’re only telling him this because the audience requires that giant exposition dump to make sense of this nonsense.

Their first connection is with shady pilot Han Solo, who agrees to transport them on the Millennium Falcon. Oops, sorry, I mean bounty hunter Kai (Charlie Hunnam), who whisks them off on his freighter. Hopping from one planetary outpost to another, Kora and Gunnar win over formidable warriors to help their cause. Among them is an ‘80s calendar model, or something, Tarak (Staz Nair); a lethal swordswoman with fire blades for arms, Nemesis (Doona Bae); a fallen general, Titus (Djimon Hounsou); and an insurgent leader, Darrian Bloodaxe (Ray Fisher), who heads a rebel army fighting the Motherworld with his sister Devra (Cleopatra Coleman).