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So this isn’t a 40K movie but there is enough in there to imagine it could be set thousands of years before the known history in the 40K universe.

Also true of Battletech, Dune, Star Trek, Blade Runner, Alien(s) and pretty much any other sci-fi property you care to name.

The 'unknown history' of 40k is intentionally vague generic building blocks where it isn't deliberately cribbing stuff like Dune..

I think the actual "This is TOTALLY not a WH40K film.. (Okay.. it is..)" Is Hunter Prey, a little know movie you can watch sporadically on Amzon prime, or outube sometimes (if the original owners don't catch wind).



Seriously- tell me how that is not a T'au! Worse yet, the squad wears helmets most of the time and gets advice from an AI assistant.. not to mention the back and forth between the Centauri and the human captive:
"We spread our knowledge to the stars- this is what the high council has decreed"
"And you genocide any that don't follow?"
'If that's what the council have decided, then yes!"
..Sounds like "Greater Good" to me.

Also: this is TOTALLY not an Ork merc:


The movie tries to marry itself to "Enemy Mine" by mentioning the Draks in passing- but to 40k fans, it's obvious.

I’m expecting the forthcoming wh40k movie being made by Amzon to be declared not a wh40k movie by half the established fanbase as they fail to live up to the head canon of millions of individuals

Voss wrote:

So this isn’t a 40K movie but there is enough in there to imagine it could be set thousands of years before the known history in the 40K universe.

Also true of Battletech, Dune, Star Trek, Blade Runner, Alien(s) and pretty much any other sci-fi property you care to name.

The 'unknown history' of 40k is intentionally vague generic building blocks where it isn't deliberately cribbing stuff like Dune..

Well that depends what is considered to be generic and what is considered to be core to a setting. A battle mech in a game destroyed by the pilot getting stabbed through a a glass window? yeah that is generic. But if the mech has two PPK, two lasers and a set of two Rocket Launcher pod or is a rifle man, it is more then just being generic. Some elements of this, some shots, look as if they were taken from w40k art (the banner sceen, how the main characters pistol looks like a bolter etc). And sure GW got those stuff by "inspiriation". But there is inspiriation by Tolkien Elves to make High Elves/Luminars, and there is taking Frazzetas Deathdealer character and making a model of him as a nurgle champion. Doesn't make WFB or AoS a 100% clone of Frazzetas art, but there is inspiration (God Emperor and Dune) and there is "Inspiration" (sisters of battle and fish speakers).

mrFickle wrote:
I’m expecting the forthcoming wh40k movie being made by Amzon to be declared not a wh40k movie by half the established fanbase as they fail to live up to the head canon of millions of individuals

Meanwhile I'm looking forward to fielding my bolt action germans as the 40k army they always were. Fingers crossed gw doesn't sue for copyright infringement

Edit: just kidding ofc, your comment made me chuckle. But seriously, I never got "40k commissar" from the bad guy, more "ww2/star wars hybrid"*. The hat looks decent enough but he loses it pretty quickly, but most importantly his behavior isn't 40k at all. He came across as the kind of obvious evil dude you can find in settings where a good vs evil narrative is an integral part, star wars being the prime example.


*I failed miserably at adding images from mobile, but to see what I mean google "bolt action feldgendarmerie" for the gorget and "bolt action winter heer" for both greatcoats and a "commissar" hat. The pimp cane is also very ww2 german, see "Herr Flick" for example. This stuff (partially) inspired gw's commissars, and it's pretty clear this movie badguy's look borrows heavily from the same sources.

shortymcnostrill wrote:

mrFickle wrote:
I’m expecting the forthcoming wh40k movie being made by Amzon to be declared not a wh40k movie by half the established fanbase as they fail to live up to the head canon of millions of individuals

Meanwhile I'm looking forward to fielding my bolt action germans as the 40k army they always were. Fingers crossed gw doesn't sue for copyright infringement

Edit: just kidding ofc, your comment made me chuckle. But seriously, I never got "40k commissar" from the bad guy, more "ww2/star wars hybrid"*. The hat looks decent enough but he loses it pretty quickly, but most importantly his behavior isn't 40k at all. He came across as the kind of obvious evil dude you can find in settings where a good vs evil narrative is an integral part, star wars being the prime example.


*I failed miserably at adding images from mobile, but to see what I mean google "bolt action feldgendarmerie" for the gorget and "bolt action winter heer" for both greatcoats and a "commissar" hat. The pimp cane is also very ww2 german, see "Herr Flick" for example. This stuff (partially) inspired gw's commissars, and it's pretty clear this movie badguy's look borrows heavily from the same sources.

Yeah it wasn’t a straight up ripoff of 40K and it’s mostly just a spin on the spin GW put on their influences.

And let’s be real, Netflix are gonna employ a load of lawyers to go over its content cos the last thing the want is to be sued for IP theft

When your personal life experience is full of 40k, of course you're going to see other things through that lens.

But personal incredulity doesn't prove that someone else's personal lens must also be seen through 40k.

All I'm seeing are hammers claiming that because they see a nail everyone else must obviously be hammers seeing nails too.


The assumption that 40k is necessarily the most likely reason these things exist in this film is an entirely egocentric view with no evidence other than personal experience.

While I can understand how some parts of the movie take the mind to 40k, I tend to agree that it's most likely coincidence. My take was Roman Empire in Space, stock Nazi bad guys (the admiral was an Italian fascist, though - you can tell by the tie) and Space Catholic entourage (the red guys) for the divine mandate. It's easy to see the overlap, but if you go into detail there's a lot of differences to 40k. No machine cult, no theocracy beyond the usual monarchy by divine right, no intolerance against aliens, and so forth.

I wouldn't rule out that there's the odd imagery some artist familiar with 40k slipped in, but I don't think 40k was meant to be an influence of any significance.

 Big Mac wrote:
I was excited to see it base on the previews, but somewhere I felt that was the best of the movie, turn out to be true. Its still worth a 1-time watch for the 40k similarities. Part that made no sense was the Dreadnought ship taken down by a spear, you would think the controls are in another spot, that's just a sponson gunner.

When the gunner died, the pilot failed his morale check and was removed as a casualty. I go back on my previous statement. Here we have definite evidence that Rebel Moon is a 40k ripoff.

Karol wrote:

Voss wrote:

So this isn’t a 40K movie but there is enough in there to imagine it could be set thousands of years before the known history in the 40K universe.

Also true of Battletech, Dune, Star Trek, Blade Runner, Alien(s) and pretty much any other sci-fi property you care to name.

The 'unknown history' of 40k is intentionally vague generic building blocks where it isn't deliberately cribbing stuff like Dune..

Well that depends what is considered to be generic and what is considered to be core to a setting. A battle mech in a game destroyed by the pilot getting stabbed through a a glass window? yeah that is generic. But if the mech has two PPK, two lasers and a set of two Rocket Launcher pod or is a rifle man, it is more then just being generic

Yes... those would be Destroids from Superdimensional Fortress Macross.

Which dovetails nicely into what others are saying. People see what they want to see. Whether its 'a tau and definitely a 40k ork', or a repainted & smoothed Markab head prosthetic from Babylon 5 (or another generic alien) and a goblin head straight out of the LotR props department.

 Hellebore wrote:
When your personal life experience is full of 40k, of course you're going to see other things through that lens.

For more than three decades now, every single time I'm on a road trip, with all the multi-level clover leaves, exit ramps, power lines and cell towers, I feel like I'm on a 40k table. I've always wanted to build such a table.

I wasn’t particularly impressed by Rebel Moon, but it definitely struck me as influenced by 40k, along with many other sources of inspiration as others have noted. And often the same sources that have shaped 40K.

A decade ago I might have thought that’s all it was, shared sources of inspiration, because it would have been reasonable to think the film makers might not be familiar with 40K. But even if he doesn’t acknowledge it directly, Snyder very much is familiar with 40K and it’s aesthetic because he spent almost a decade working with Henry Cavill who I expect was as passionate about sharing his hobby with Zack Snyder as he seems to be with everyone else.

I don't think the director designs props or costumes for the movie, tbh.

Cyel wrote:
I don't think the director designs props or costumes for the movie, tbh.

True, but they do have an influence on the overall design aesthetic and style.

I did see some strong 40k influence in the film, though it's not nearly the most influential source.
Not enough to call it a ripoff, but it's there. Personally, I smelled allot more SW and Marvel in the weak sauce that was this steaming mess of a movie.

40k influence is not surprising though as the longer 40k around and the bigger it gets, it's just inevitable that it will have an increasing amount of influence on media creators. Directors pull from their experiences and influences. Many of the most active and influential people in sci fi film are of an age where 40k might well have been a part of their early influences.

However, more interesting than that for the 40k player is that we now have a cinematic example (without the usual GW gloss) of just how brutal it might actually be for a planet to come under the control of the Imperium.

I put the movie on and my girlfriend almost immediately went, "Oh, this is some 40k nonsense. No wonder you wanted to watch it."

It's not *just* 40k influence; definitely some strong SW vibes in there, but the faux-latin-speaking "imperium" with a commissar for its face and a "slain king" that it venerates pretty clearly has some 40k in its DNA.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
I put the movie on and my girlfriend almost immediately went, "Oh, this is some 40k nonsense. No wonder you wanted to watch it."

It's not *just* 40k influence; definitely some strong SW vibes in there, but the faux-latin-speaking "imperium" with a commissar for its face and a "slain king" that it venerates pretty clearly has some 40k in its DNA.

That could also be the Star Wars influence as well. The Imperials come down hard on a planet in the name of the slain Palpatine, slap on some extra sci-fi bits and faux-latin to make it its own IP and you get the movie we see before us.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
I put the movie on and my girlfriend almost immediately went, "Oh, this is some 40k nonsense. No wonder you wanted to watch it."

I wonder how she really feels about 40k?

Again, just because it's coming through someone's personal lens of experience doesn't make that evidence for or even representative of the creator to have done the same.

That's like someone seeing something with beer in it and saying that it's obviously inspired by Germans because they invented beer (hint the germans did not, in fact, invent beer).


Personal feelings are not evidence.

Not even the combination of things in 40k is original, and pointing to using latin in your scifi is ridiculous - latin is a staple stand in for the mystical knowledge language in our western collective conscience and has been for centuries.

All science was previously literally written and discussed in latin.


It's really quite sad that modern fiction gets immediately attached to previous fiction simply because that fiction prominently used concepts and images that had been around forever.

Tolkien did not invent a lot of what he used either, but apparently if you reference elves and orcs in fiction you are now forever chained to tolkien.


There is a reason copyright does not extend to ideas - nothing would be created if you literally owned concepts and ideas. Tolkien would never have been able to publish his works and 40k wouldn't exist.


So i really wish people would stop assigning some kind of moral rights to people who were just the most well known at doing something.

There's already enough issues with immortal corporations owning IPs for eternity and destroying the copyright system that was originally designed to keep artists fed off their work, without giving over conceptual rights as well...

ccs wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:
I put the movie on and my girlfriend almost immediately went, "Oh, this is some 40k nonsense. No wonder you wanted to watch it."

I wonder how she really feels about 40k?

She likes it well enough and has her own CSM army.

Aash wrote:

Cyel wrote:
I don't think the director designs props or costumes for the movie, tbh.

True, but they do have an influence on the overall design aesthetic and style.

Sometimes. Other times they just let the prop staff rummage around in the communal leftovers bin at the studio, and throw it all together in a mish-mash bar scene.
Which is why Star Wars canonically has classic movie monsters as 'aliens.'

Fortunately Zack Snyder didn't use any of his usual DPs and did all the shooting himself and it looks like somebody just set the camera to auto and never did any colour-grading. It doesn't look like the "Snyder style" at all and that was something, no matter if you enjoyed the plot or not you could always count on a Zack Snyder film, to look a certain way to look stylised, slick and polished. So the dull by-the-numbers generic seven samurai story combined with the similarly dull by-the-numbers generic setting, albeit seemingly cribbing from 40k more than 40k's inspirations is combined with a similarly indifferent visual presentation to combine to total indifference. See also the DnD movie though in that case it's because DnD is already generic American interpretation of Tolkienesque fantasy, DnD has memorable monsters not memorable settings. (Though the fat red dragon bit looked amazing)

I was amazed that Snyder went talking up how this was inspired by Heavy Metal and all because I didn't see any of that. It looked very generic modern sci-fi (So much of what makes Heavy Metal from it's haydays even more interesting today is it's anachronistic style) combined with bits of 40k. Warhammer in general is obviously inspired by all kinds of Heavy Metal artwork and White Dwarf is essentially aping Heavy Metal in it's title font and often it's cover illustrations particularly before the magazine became the Warhammer only magazine interested in GW products and was a more general tabletop magazine but here it's clear this is more inspired by 40k and more modern 40k than Heavy Metal directly.

So any reduced impact from a true 40k live action adaptation is lessened because this is the equivalent of a watery flat-coloured outsourced disposable digital art from modern 40k compared to the older inhouse artist (Or close to inhouse or former inhouse) or frequent commissioned artist working in physical mediums.

A similar dodged bullet for the Cavill project (Still is being made by Amazon so we'll see how they feth it up, they always find a way to feth up their original series) is that Denis Villeneuve went so Denis Villeneuve and went for a very sterile, oddly modern in parts and very unornate world in Dune so any risk it'd rain on a 40k live action production's parade has been avoided. It also helps he miscast it hard and generally avoided any of the interesting world building in Dune being addressed despite modern young audiences actually liking that stuff since they have the internet to look it up and "explainer" videos on social media to view. (I assume he did it because the Lynch film being poorly received for being too weird and dense with weirdness was the canonical explanation for it's commercial failure so he wanted to make it normie-proof and a giant floating autistic foetus in the first few minutes might have scared away general audiences though in 2021 I think it might have gone down really well.)

I didn’t know much about Snyder so looked up his worked and realised I had seen quite a few of his movies. 300 was the only one I thought was good, all the DC stuff was naff. The only good DC movie was the second suicide squad film the introduced peace maker.

Isn’t all the Snyder stuff being rebooted by the reset DC timeline? Not a glowing reference imo.

Sorry for turning this into a movie critique thread but I’m glad Snyder didn’t get the real 40K movie.

Being old, one thing always pops out these days.......realizing the age of others who haven't yet realized that nothing in life is original since it all relies on the experiences and visuals that you have collected over the years.

Your own creativity relies on you seeing and experiencing things in life...therefore it's not "Original".

The movie was a lot of fun and I am watching it a second time. Many here come off like the posers who talk about how bad Nickelback is....not because they are one of the highest grossing bands, but because is cool to talk trash. I see this all of the time.......One of Us.....One of Us!

 Leopold Helveine wrote:
S

So is Zack snyder getting sued by games workshop? I think he should.. he's clearly rubbing against using WH content, albeit adjusting it just enough to irritate people that think it is, and making a mockery of it if you ask me.
Not that his movies were good to begin with but that completely aside.

-Leopold Helveine

Ironically any way in which Snyder could be sued for ripping off GW, GW could be sued for ripping off other IP.

 Da-Rock wrote:
Being old, one thing always pops out these days.......realizing the age of others who haven't yet realized that nothing in life is original since it all relies on the experiences and visuals that you have collected over the years.

Your own creativity relies on you seeing and experiencing things in life...therefore it's not "Original".

The movie was a lot of fun and I am watching it a second time. Many here come off like the posers who talk about how bad Nickelback is....not because they are one of the highest grossing bands, but because is cool to talk trash. I see this all of the time.......One of Us.....One of Us!

Equally, many people will take the contrarian line to the prevailing opinion for the similar reasons. At least most of the people here who are criticising the movie have provided reasons why.

Creativity is about taking those experiences and filtering them through your own ideas to create something that is genuinely your own. Rebel Moon just doesn't feel like that, because there's so little depth to any of it. Everything comes across as a tired trope rather than an interesting, original idea.

The thing that annoys me about rebel moon is that even though I strongly think that it’s a poor movie I will definitely watch the second one to see if it’s any better

NightReconnaissance wrote:
Fortunately Zack Snyder didn't use any of his usual DPs and did all the shooting himself and it looks like somebody just set the camera to auto and never did any colour-grading. It doesn't look like the "Snyder style" at all and that was something, no matter if you enjoyed the plot or not you could always count on a Zack Snyder film, to look a certain way to look stylised, slick and polished. So the dull by-the-numbers generic seven samurai story combined with the similarly dull by-the-numbers generic setting, albeit seemingly cribbing from 40k more than 40k's inspirations is combined with a similarly indifferent visual presentation to combine to total indifference. See also the DnD movie though in that case it's because DnD is already generic American interpretation of Tolkienesque fantasy, DnD has memorable monsters not memorable settings. (Though the fat red dragon bit looked amazing)

I was amazed that Snyder went talking up how this was inspired by Heavy Metal and all because I didn't see any of that. It looked very generic modern sci-fi (So much of what makes Heavy Metal from it's haydays even more interesting today is it's anachronistic style) combined with bits of 40k. Warhammer in general is obviously inspired by all kinds of Heavy Metal artwork and White Dwarf is essentially aping Heavy Metal in it's title font and often it's cover illustrations particularly before the magazine became the Warhammer only magazine interested in GW products and was a more general tabletop magazine but here it's clear this is more inspired by 40k and more modern 40k than Heavy Metal directly.

So any reduced impact from a true 40k live action adaptation is lessened because this is the equivalent of a watery flat-coloured outsourced disposable digital art from modern 40k compared to the older inhouse artist (Or close to inhouse or former inhouse) or frequent commissioned artist working in physical mediums.

A similar dodged bullet for the Cavill project (Still is being made by Amazon so we'll see how they feth it up, they always find a way to feth up their original series) is that Denis Villeneuve went so Denis Villeneuve and went for a very sterile, oddly modern in parts and very unornate world in Dune so any risk it'd rain on a 40k live action production's parade has been avoided. It also helps he miscast it hard and generally avoided any of the interesting world building in Dune being addressed despite modern young audiences actually liking that stuff since they have the internet to look it up and "explainer" videos on social media to view. (I assume he did it because the Lynch film being poorly received for being too weird and dense with weirdness was the canonical explanation for it's commercial failure so he wanted to make it normie-proof and a giant floating autistic foetus in the first few minutes might have scared away general audiences though in 2021 I think it might have gone down really well.)

So much in this post that I like and agree with...


Automatically Appended Next Post:

mrFickle wrote:
The thing that annoys me about rebel moon is that even though I strongly think that it’s a poor movie I will definitely watch the second one to see if it’s any better

Also well said - I am sure I will do the same (even though I can barely remember the details and I only saw it a couple of weeks ago).

[quote=Snord 812462 11629043

Automatically Appended Next Post:

mrFickle wrote:
The thing that annoys me about rebel moon is that even though I strongly think that it’s a poor movie I will definitely watch the second one to see if it’s any better

Also well said - I am sure I will do the same (even though I can barely remember the details and I only saw it a couple of weeks ago).