Film Review: "Rebel Moon--Part 2: The Scargiver" is a Misfire in Every Way
The second part of Zack Snyder's space opera is largely as much of an expensive waste of time as the first half.
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I spent quite a while trying to figure out whether I even wanted to write a review of Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon Part–Part Two: The Scargiver. To be quite honest, I struggled to even make it through the film, as it proved to somehow be just as boring and aimless and lifeless as its predecessor. If you know anything about me, though, you know that I can’t keep a thought to myself and, besides, I often find it quite productive and helpful to use my writing to think through my feelings about a film. More to the point, I also think it’s useful to share those thoughts with my readers, in the hopes that a dialogue can enhance both of our understandings.
So, here we are, and I might as well explain my dislike of the film.
First, though, I need to make it clear that I’m not a Snyder hater. In fact, I’ve always quite enjoyed his films, including 300 (which, for all of its xenophobia and ugly racial politics is still a compelling and visually arresting engagement with the mythology of the 300 Spartans), Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (which I think has a certain blunt, Nietzschean beauty about it), and even his cut of Justice League. He may not be Hollywood's sublest filmmaker, but he does have a unique visual and narrative sensibility that I usually find compelling.
The Scargiver, unfortunately, is another misfire, a rather paltry and uninspired follow-up to the first part. I’ll spare a lengthy summary except to say that it resumes Kora’s story as she works with the residents of the moon of Veldt, where she hopes to be able to deliver a final defeat to the nefarious Motherworld and its rapacious and unhinged military leader Atticus Noble.
It’s actually quite hard to know where to begin, but I’ll do my best. This is, to begin with, a film in which we get a protracted and agonizing scene in which we watch people literally cutting wheat for what feels like an agonizing amount of time. To be quite honest, I’m still not sure why the wheat storyline continues to suck up so much oxygen, as I would assume a sprawling organization like the one depicted in Rebel Moon would have some other place on which it could grow wheat. As if watching people cut wheat wasn’t bad enough, most of the sequence is conveyed through Snyder’s ever-present crutch of slow motion. Let me tell you, while it can be thrilling to watch Spartans slaughter Persians while the camera slows down, it is not nearly as exciting to see people farming. I’m sorry. It just isn’t.
If there’s one bright spot in this otherwise inert mass of planetary conflict, it’s Ed Skrein’s Attitus Noble, and props to the actor for being one of the few in this misbegotten adventure to actually look like he’s having fun. Yet even here he is not given much to do other than strut around and appear quite mad, which is fine as far as it goes but, since we only get a bare glimpse at the franchise’s true big bad, Balisarius (another undercooked role), I would have hoped that we could have at least had a compelling villain to look at and be entertained by. Alas, no dice in that department, either.
There are two other positives worth mentioning (mostly because I don’t want to be entirely negative, no matter how much I disliked the movie). The much-derided scene in which the various members of the group recall their own history with the Motherworld is, to be sure, quite tedious to sit through, but there are glimmers of more interesting worlds and stories than the one we’re currently watching. One can’t help but wish one of them would have been greenlit rather than the one Snyder ended up directing. And, of course, there’s Djimon Hounsou and Doona Bae, both of whom manage to deliver two of the best performances in the entire film.
It honestly boggles my mind that a film from Snyder could be this narratively inert and often visually uninspiring. There are a few moments that make for visually arresting spectacle, but these are frustrating because they show what this film could have been if Snyder had given just a few more months’ worth of thought to developing both a story and a world that made any kind of sense. I would have even been able to forgive this if there’d been an emotional heart to any of it, but I found it utterly impossible to care about Kora or her doomed romance with the equally uninspiring Gunnar.
Ultimately, The Scargiver never really manages to escape from the shadow of its own predecessors. There’s nothing new or interesting here, nor is there any real effort to take the tropes and narrative conceits of space opera and make them compelling or worth our time. Hell, it can’t even give us a satisfying narrative conclusion, since it leaves us on a cliffhanger in which it is revealed–to the surprise of no one–that the princess is in fact still alive, which presumably gives our heroine and her fellows something to do in the next who-only-knows-how-many films.
I’ve heard some complain about the injustice of judging Rebel Moon based on these versions of the film, given that Snyder has already announced that more “complete” ones will be forthcoming. That argument doesn’t really cut it with me, though. These are the films that we have at the moment, these are the ones that we’ve been tasked with viewing and evaluating. It is asking too much of viewers, I think, to ask them to sit through yet another 4 (or 5!) hour slog.
Having endured two entries in Rebel Moon, I can honestly say that I have absolutely no intention of watching any more, should we be subjected to the next several entries that Snyder apparently has planned in the cycle. He’s already made it abundantly clear with these two entries that his partnership with Netflix is, like so many other things the steamer has put out lately, all about content and not even a little bit about visual art or even anything remotely resembling entertainment.