Review: Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver
The second part of Zack Snyder’s Netflix space opera Rebel Moon, The Scargiver, feels less like a whole movie than the third act of a film drawn out to 2 hours and the threat of more Rebel Moon on the way.
Picking up where A Child of Fire left off, Kora (Sofia Boutella) and her assembled band of warriors returned to the peaceful farming planet of Veldt. Believing that the planet is safe from the Motherworld because of their defeat of the sadistic Admiral Noble (Ed Skrein), they soon learn that Noble survived their previous battle and will arrive to Veldt in 5 days. The warriors and the villagers of Veldt need to scramble and harvest the precious wheat that drew the attention of the Motherworld in the first place and train to defend themselves. Despite its runtime, not much happens in The Scargiver, and it’s also nothing you haven’t seen before, pulling liberally from various media, like Seven Samurai, with nothing surprising or exciting to add. Everything that happens in both Rebel Moon movies feels like it could be condensed into one film, but there’s nowhere near enough content for slightly over 4 hours of runtime, and, god help us, when the extended versions drop. For an example of how padded things are, most of the first half of The Scargiver is devoted to an excruciatingly detailed sequence of grain harvesting, complete with Snyder slo-mo for no reason. The storytelling and character development (if there is any) are also done in the most blunt manner imaginable, with characters sitting around a table telling their backstories at one point. Almost all of the first movie was devoted to traveling around and meeting and recruiting each character. There is a more elegant and exciting way to give us what we need to know about the characters and possibly even care about 1 or 2 of them.
Acting-wise, everyone is pretty much one note, set into some archetype and not deviating from it. Of the cast, Doona Bae probably does the best to draw some connection from the audience and give some emotional beat. However, her plot is incredibly cliche, and you know exactly what will happen as soon as this movie starts. Ed Skrein, much like the first movie, is the only one who seems to know how absurd everything is and is leaning toward the mustache-twirling villainy of his character. Thanks to his resurrection, this time around, he’s now some superhuman with enhanced strength that is used to decent effect in some of the action sequences.
The action is typical of Zack Synder, although the final battle blends into a mass of lasers and dust with few stand-out moments or exciting scenarios. There’s still tons of slow motion, but it seems only there because it has to be, and it doesn’t help emphasize any cool or badass moments. The movie has some fantastic design elements, like the knock-off lightsabers that are superheated metal and the look of some of the Motherworld’s weaponry and armor that makes it seem like Zack Snyder has at least a passing interesting in Warhammer 40K. Some of the side world-building stuff is hilariously absurd, however, like a string quartet providing the score during a flashback sequence, playing even as chaos erupts around them. If everything in both movies were condensed into one movie, this would probably be a decent payoff after two hours or so of the movie, but after four hours, you get to the point where you want it to wrap up. The Scargiver ends on another cliffhanger to add another (or 4?) movies into the franchise, which kind of saps whatever emotional closure the movie might have had since now it all seems like a 4 hour prequel to what the actual plot of the series is going to be about.
If you’re a die-hard Zack Snyder fan, you will probably get enough from the visuals and action, but both The Scargiver and A Child of Fire are bloated and blunt and could have used some editing and script help and not Netflix giving Snyder carte blanche to do whatever he wanted. The characters are bare-bones archetypes, and there’s not really any point in getting invested in any of their plots or backstories, and the action, while sometimes cool or exciting, mostly blends together in slow motion, lasers, and dust. Hopefully, if there are more movies in this universe, things can get a little tighter, and they can figure out how to make the characters more compelling and exciting, although I’m not that excited to see more either way.
