I honestly don’t think there was anything approaching an original thought within 100 light years of this movie.
It’s basically a “Battle Beyond the Stars” remake, which was itself little more than moving “The Magnificent Seven” from the Old West to space… except that film had already just transplanted “The Seven Samurai” from Feudal Japan.
It’s a copy of a copy.
Just about everything else in it was directly inspired or wholesale stolen from other movies, though you could also make that statement ahout the original Star Wars.
Entire sequences and dialogue from Star Wars were lifted wholesale from WW2 films like Dambusters and 688 Squadron, with story elements coming from Dune, Valerian, and Kurosawa. That movie had cringeworthy dialogue too… just maybe not quite as much.
That said, the original Star Wars had heart and a certain humanity that’s entirely missing from this film. That’s before we get into the memorable score and groundbreaking SFX.
At its core, the original Star Wars is a very tight and efficient story that’s told from start to finish. Ultimately it’s just a fairy tale in space, and anyone who’d ever heard a tale of an orphan saving a princess from a black knight in a castle was in familiar territory.
Even knowing the source material, Rebel Moon struggles to make that same kind of human connection. The story also is both missing key background but also bloated and too long.
Not only are pieces from the trailer missing, but I’m kinda glad they were. As it is, you could take the “Hey let’s have the guy whose entire purpose is to show his abs (because Zack Snyder has to show abs) ride black Buckbeak from Harry Potter with the cinematography from Avatar” sequence you mentioned out of the movie entirely and it wouldn’t impact the narrative at all.
Same with Nemesis vs Shelob lady. Remove that action beat along with the entire character, and the only thing impacted is the runtime.
A throwaway line about “You fought in the Clone Wars?” in Star Wars did far more heavy lifting than any exposition in this movie and left the audience wanting more. Compare that to multiple extended sequences showing Kora’s backstory that definitely aren’t setting up a “shocking” reveal about one of the side characters we barely remember exist by the end of this movie.
A person comes out of Star Wars knowing the names of the key characters, even minor ones. They know the names of the planets and the ships. As you stated, in this movie most characters’ names go right by, most of them barely have any lines, and even with title cards I’d be hard pressed to know or care about most of the place names.
It’s like they tried to cram the prequels and entire original trilogy in this one movie, and then after all of that, it ends on a cliffhanger.
I suspect enough material was written and even shot to create a much stronger story than the one we got.
Act one was actually pretty strong, except then all but two characters suddenly vanish never to be seen again. What happened to the soldier that acted on principle to save the farm girl (who is definitely just an ordinary farm girl) who somehow made the robot who refused to fight since the royal family died suddenly decide to fight again? Did the solider even have a name? I was far more interested in him than abs guy.
I’d have loved the rest of the movie to be about them, but it wasn’t. Instead we kept getting new characters added with each new scene, and the final battle not only wasn’t where the story started, but wherever it was didn’t even have a name.
If this had stayed as a Star Wars film and Snyder hadn’t felt compelled to do this much world building I suspect the story would have been stronger. Then again, we’re talking about a director who felt the need to show Batman’s parents get killed not once but twice in Batman vs Superman, so who knows.