A member of the Film Critics Guild and a Rotten Tomatoes-certified film critic with over eight years of experience.
Rebel Moon was just the worst. Zack Snyder—the director, co-writer, and (strangely) also the cinematographer—spewed lore as if he was penning a Wikipedia article, not a movie. It was apparent that he had no idea what it took to flesh out characters and develop their interpersonal dynamics. Snyder displayed an utter inability with the camera, too.
Rebel Moon looked like it had been shot on a giant parking lot with its endless horizons and poorly applied VFX. All this despite having the easiest of templates: a movie about gathering a team of galactic warriors. So, unless Snyder decided to scrap and reshoot the whole thing in four months—a trailer for Part Two: The Scargiver was appended to the end of Part One: A Child of Fire, after all —the sequel was never going to be a big improvement over the first one.
Even as they lie together in bed, rather than be vulnerable and share how they feel about each other, the characters bring in more exposition. You almost feel for them, not because of what they are telling you but the fact they find themselves stuck in a Snyder movie. And he’s so self-serious about the whole thing that even the inherent humour present in his info dumps eludes him.
(In one instance in Rebel Moon 2, a string quartet continues to play with zest while a royal family is executed, and a coup is enacted.) For Snyder, it’s all epic and grim and universe-altering. UGH! It doesn’t help that Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver, as with its predecessor, is filled with wooden acting by what seem like third or fourth choices for each cast member.
A battle awaits. But first, let’s farm!
Rebel Moon 2 opens with another lazy Anthony Hopkins opening voiceover that essentially serves the same purpose as a Star Wars opening crawl. (The Rebel Moon movies were conceived as a Star Wars pitch back in the day, but it’s almost as if Snyder is afraid of mimicking them too closely.) This time, Hopkins—who also voices the humanoid robot knight Jimmy / James, the last of its kind—recaps Part One in the most unintelligible fashion. The sequel throws a dozen names and places at you but doesn’t have the mind to show you any faces or replay scenes so we might (potentially) recognise them. What’s with all the tell and zero show? Has Snyder forgotten his knack for opening montages?
Hey, you, tell me your sad backstory
As you might have noticed, I haven’t mentioned a single character by name yet because they are replaceable and interchangeable. Most of them were given two-line descriptions in Part One but even those don’t matter anymore. Funnily enough, Rebel Moon 2 introduces new, important characteristics for some
that the original conveniently forgot about. Unable to sketch out its ensemble and having failed to do much on that front in Part One, Snyder devises something entirely artificial in Part Two, as a tertiary character lists out everyone’s traits and personalities and what they mean in a touching but empty scene.
Elsewhere, Titus (Djimon Hounsou)—a former general in the imperialist forces and now the leader of the village rebellion—sits everyone down and prods them to share their past. How much more blatant can Snyder get? Each character then narrates a sad backstory involving the tyrannical empire,
the Motherworld, and how it took everything from them. These stories feel forced and unnatural and all boil down to “Motherworld, bad”. Yeah, okay, we get it. By doing all this nonsense, Rebel Moon 2 wastes about 55 minutes before it really gets going.
Unfortunately, the long-awaited action set pieces aren’t anything special. They are two-dimensional, lack ebb and flow, and don’t give you a sense of how the battleground is laid out. The protagonist Kora (Sofia Boutella) and the cyborg Nemesis (Doona Bae) are involved in a couple of unmemorable swordfight,
but they stand out in comparison to what the rest of the ensemble—Kora’s farmer love interest Gunnar (Michiel Huisman), prince-without-a-kingdom Tarak (Staz Nair), smoky-eyed Millius (Elise Duffy), and Titus—are tasked with. (It’s okay if you cannot recall who’s who. As I said, it doesn’t matter.) To make matters worse, Rebel Moon 2’s VFX is shoddy and unconvincing and the ultra slo-mo aggravating.
Snyder dreams of four more Rebel Moon movies
The chief problem is that the characters don’t matter, and their emotions are meaningless. Which, in turn, doesn’t help you invest in the action and takes the thrill out of the equation. Part One was straight garbage. And though Part Two is more coherent because there’s a defined objective and it’s all in one place, it’s clearing the lowest bar ever to exist.
Here’s the thing: these two movies should always have been one. (At best, we would have gotten neither.) Except Snyder wants to deliver four more films in the same vein—the remaining two entries of the trilogy split into two parts each—with the ending of Rebel Moon 2 teasing a bigger fight to come in Part Three. The artificiality of Snyder’s franchise construction is obvious from even the naming of the two films. A Child of Fire and The Scargiver refer to the same bloody character in Kora, which really shows you where the imagination starts and ends and how much thought has been put into this.
screen presence in the film is commendable, these parts pull down his performance several notches.
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