REVIEW: ‘Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver’ is an maddening bore of a sequel
Sofia Boutella stars as Kora in Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver, written and directed by Zack Snyder
Amid the critical pile-on that greeted the first movie in Zack Snyder’s expensive passion project, Rebel Moon, I felt an instinct to defend some of Snyder’s choices. While it’s true that the film - subtitled A Child of Fire - is an unforgivable, ridiculous remix of titles as disparate as Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Seven Samurai, Warhammer 40,000 and many others, here and there some of Snyder’s visuals caught my eye. After all, that’s one of the filmmaker’s strongest suits: beautiful images at the expense of all else.
I liked the juxtaposition of intricate medieval armor, ornately sculpted robots, Roman togas, laser guns that leave molten debris, and the decidedly David Lynch/H.R. Giger styling of the spaceships. Some of the interstellar worlds were legitimately fun to look at, in the way that you might appreciate the cover of a pulpy sci-fi paperback or a bit of fantasy art for a desktop wallpaper. I even found myself curious about the ultimate villain and what a showdown with him might look like.
But those were ephemeral pleasures in an otherwise dull brick of a movie. A Child of Fire features some of the most derivative, dimensionless characters I’ve ever seen, plodding through a plot so flimsy that the only way to have any fun is to yell at your TV and question everything that we see and hear. “How does he know that?”, “What is the point of this?”, and most importantly, “Why does the giant spider lady have breasts?”
Of course, any film that ends on a cliffhanger, especially a bad one, poses a question of its own. Will the next installment make the act of watching the first movie worthwhile? And when the first movie is as bad as Rebel Moon - Part One, the naive hope is that the next part will somehow provide some narrative closure, so that despite all the other frustrations, you might achieve some catharsis as a viewer. Sure, most of the experience was unfruitful, but at least you know how the story ends.
Rebel Moon’s second chapter, The Scargiver, isn’t even merciful enough to do that. Instead, it has the temerity to set up yet another film, meaning that Snyder feels like his vision for this uninspired world demands yet another go-around. Despite what the last chapter promised, there’s no confrontation with Fra Fee’s maniacal Big Bad, Balisaurius (in fact, he has barely any screen time). We’re forced to retread the last film’s faceoff with Ed Skrein’s Atticus Noble, a character who has gotten no less thunderously boring since being magically revived after his last battle with our hero Kora (Sofia Boutella). He doesn’t even have sex with a tentacle monster this time. Throughout both chapters, there’s a sense of Snyder withholding the juiciest parts for later. He keeps promising that the best stuff will come soon: in a director’s cut, in the next sequel (if someone is dumb enough to greenlight it). Personally, I’d rather not be strung along ad infinitum.
A Roman toga won’t make Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein) any more interesting.
The last film took us on a fleetingly entertaining, world-hopping tour of the galaxy. The Scargiver, meanwhile, sticks us in the pastoral village that Kora is intent on saving from Atticus’s evil Imperium forces and leaves us there. The one real glimpse we have of another planet is during an interminable orgy of flashbacks where the characters sit around and talk about what the Imperium did to radicalize each of them. We see the home of the beast-taming and frequently shirtless hero Tarak (Staz Nair), and it makes about as much sense as anything else in these movies. It’s a brainless fantasy of a gothic, Victorian metropolis where Tarak’s people ride on Hippogriffs as the Imperium ships smash into the steampunk cityscape. Why does Tarak dress like Conan the Barbarian, though? This movie sure isn’t interested in telling us.
The David-and-Goliath battle that the movie spends most of its time foreshadowing plays out exactly as you’d expect. We get several montages of the heroes training the villagers how to dig trenches and fight, ripped directly from Seven Samurai and all too many Westerns. We also get way too many slow-mo sequences of the same villagers harvesting their grain, enough that I began to wonder if Snyder was trying to crib from Terrence Malick (though without any of the heartfelt spirituality). When the soldiers finally show up, it’s your classic Ewoks versus Stormtroopers sequence from Return of the Jedi. Except at least the Star Wars sequel had fuzzy little bear guys.
Snyder has claimed that these two releases of the films, rated PG-13, are not his true vision. They’re apparently hollow, mercenary works, the result of the deal made with Netflix. The streamer reportedly wouldn’t agree to financing unless Snyder made these cuts for a wider audience, while allowing him to release his “complete” R-rated versions sometime this summer. But there’s nothing in here that more runtime, violence, profanity, or sex will save. Snyder would be better served in spending the time in these “base” versions to make any of the other components work; the story, characters, and dialogue would be good places to start.
Djimon Hounsou’s face here mimics my reaction to this travesty.
I lost count of the number of utterly goofy dialogue exchanges in The Scargiver. In Kora’s painful recollection of the assassination of the royal family, the drama felt baggy and barely rehearsed, as if Snyder used the first takes of everything he shot. The aforementioned baring of souls between the heroes on the eve of battle should have probably taken place in the first film to help draw them together, and instead it lands here, out of place and not making a speck of difference on the characters’ relationships. In the final scene, Kora decides to make a seemingly momentous admission in the middle of a funeral service, while turning her back to everyone she’s speaking to. All of it is constructed to service Snyder’s adoring camera, and none of it is for the audience.
Ultimately, that’s the core failing of Rebel Moon as a two-film project. Everything in these movies seems to be for Snyder alone. It’s as if the only point of four and half hours of movie runtime is for him to prove that he can spend all this money to capture his meticulous little scenes on his camera, refracted through his gauzy vintage lenses. Never before has the act of filmmaking felt more like someone painting Warhammer figures in their basement (I wonder why). Granted, there is something admirable in that artist’s approach; as the age-old advice goes, “Make it for yourself, not for them.” But when it’s in the context of something like Rebel Moon, I kind of wish Snyder had kept it all on his laptop.
Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver gets one star out of four.
Stray thoughts
Nemesis (Bae Doona) proves to be kind of useless here, barely holding her own against three thugs.
Jimmy the robot gets the expected deus ex machina moment (or is it in machina?).
The bad guys should have simply nuked the village from orbit, setting Kora off on a John Wick-esque revenge quest.