Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver Review

Just an additional 2 hour overrun of PArt One

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WARNING: THIS ARTICLE MAY CONTAIN DISCUSSIONS involving SPOILERS FROM THE NETFLIX film. CONSIDER WHEN AND WHERE IT WOULD BE APPROPRIATE TO READ THIS PIECE. 

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122 More Minutes Of Exposition

Oh boy, where do we start? The first film in Zack Snyder’s Netflix franchise was a bloody mess, but it at least had somewhat of an adventure path I could get behind and follow. Anybody can find enjoyment from an Akira Kurosawa Seven Samurai-like story where a hero travels long and far to gather heroes to fight against a despicable evil. Part One of the film franchise wasn’t a good film by any means, but it at least somewhat kept my interest. Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver follows a completely different story structure though. Continuing off the extremely bland tale of former “played for villain team” Kora, and her merry band of misfits, the entire 122 minutes of runtime for the sequel takes place in anticipation, during, and after a single battle in a farming village. While the nerd culture hero, Director Zack Snyder, has always displayed a knack for the theatrics in terms of cinematic photography, he once again demonstrates a complete lack of understanding for developing a comprehensive story.  

Thanks for the refresher miss, I forgot who these characters were too

What exactly is the story of Rebel Moon? If you’ve completed Part 2 like I have, you will have clawed your way through 256 minutes in this universe that Snyder and Netflix really want to carve into something similar to Marvel’s MCU. Unfortunately, it lacks all the traits that make cinematic universes work. Using tired and lazy storytelling techniques, Part Two: The Scargiver spends a good five to ten minutes having characters verbally give expositions of their characteristics and background. In one of these scenes, Snyder writes a B-character to literally reintroduce the audience to each of the supposed main characters gathered in the first film by reciting their names one by one and describing what makes them different from one another. Another scene shortly after has the cast huddled campfire-style to describe flashback exposition of their past one by one because none of the characters had any character development in the first film. The entire scene exudes “first day of elementary school” vibes where a teacher has students stand and recite their name and an interesting fact about themselves to the rest of the class. 

Rebel Moon suffers so much from rudimentary exposition instead of developing a compelling plot to introduce these background stories to viewers. We lose an emotional connection to these characters when we don’t experience their stories in a proper sequence. It’s as if Snyder anticipated that audiences would forget the lineup of heroes from the initial film which was released a mere 6 months prior. This isn’t a recipe for success if you as an artist can’t even trust your own work to hold up. He’s not wrong either. With bland character design and a lack of individualism in terms of costume style, I had a hard time recalling the cast in the opening hour of Part Two. 

Jimmy is pretty cool

It’s telling when the main villain, a Nazi rip-off Admiral named Atticus Noble was the single lingering character from the first film that I latched onto from memory. Actor Ed Skrein masterfully portrays a sadistic yet calculated villain who genuinely was seen as a threat in my eyes. I would not want to go anywhere near this guy. He’s revived for this sequel and once again serves as the main antagonist to Sofia Boutella's Kora.    

It’s not necessarily all bad as Kora is a kick-ass woman lead who has some badass action moments. The droid voiced by Anthony Hopkins nicknamed Jimmy is also a character that hits hard and is extremely likable. However, as with Part One, it unfortunately doesn’t have a lot of screen time in the sequel either. Like basically all of the main characters, we don’t get to learn much about Doona Bae’s cyborg swordmaster, Nemesis either, but she’s the knock-off Jedi in the Rebel Moon universe and that is always fun to see on screen.

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A Big Budget Fan Film

No matter how anyone spins it, the Rebel Moon franchise cannot escape its true nature which is a rejected Star Wars concept pitch. It’s a big budget fan film that couldn’t utilize the legitimate intellectual property and it absolutely shows in the final product. Say what you want about Star Wars and the stories they tell. One thing is absolutely a universal truth: the characters are forever memorable. The costumes are iconic. Even the cheesiest one-liners are immortalized. Some plot points may be simple, others may be convoluted, but there is substance behind the overarching story in that universe that people absolutely cannot get enough of.

I mean this totally isn’t Star Wars

Rebel Moon is the complete opposite of that. The Scargiver deviates from the path of conventional basic film storytelling so much so that the two hour movie felt like an episode of a television show overrunning its allotted time slot. I get it, stories spanning multiple films have a difficult time plotting along a three-act structure. The problem here is that there were no real stakes that was introduced as new information in the sequel. We all knew the sadistic Admiral Noble was revived at the end of Part One. We all knew the party had escaped back to the farming village as it was one of the last scenes from the first movie. The conflict was going to happen regardless of what else would happen in the sequel. Well spoiler alert, nothing else actually happens. The entire sequel film revolves around that anticlimactic battle. There’s absolutely no alluring new substance that would entice you to want to keep watching.

Big battles are important. I enjoy them as much as the next person. But imagine Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and the battle of Helm's Deep. Now remove the first half of the film where Aragorn liberates and unifies Rohan to gain confidence in his role as a leader. Remove the actual main narrative storyline of Frodo and the ring. Imagine spending two hours just sitting at Helm’s Deep waiting for the battle to happen with slow-motion montages of farming and stories by the campfire. That’s exactly what Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver is. If you learn a bit about the production of Rebel Moon, you’ll quickly understand why this is the case. Zack Snyder originally wanted the entire story to be one super long film, but was rebuffed and accepted a two part contract instead. That’s what Scargiver is, a 2 hour overrun of Part One: A Child of Fire. It’s barely even qualified as a movie at all. 

This Sure Makes Sense

The acting is also all over the place. There are some extremely talented actors cast in poorly written roles. Awkwardly delivered dialogue is sprinkled throughout every scene from actors that I assume were directed to portray the content that way by Synder. It’s just an embarrassingly rudimentary mess all-around. 

This is an actual exchange from two of the characters in a climatic scene.

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Tarak: I thought dying in battle was all I wanted. Fighting for something. I think I was wrong. I don’t think I want to die at all. But if I must…

Milius: Together. Come on.

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I don’t know how anyone could sit in a pre-production room script reading and think “hey this is exactly the type of entertaining film I want to watch!” It’s incredibly frustrating to try and enjoy this movie as a viewer. I saw a meme on Reddit recently about Zack Snyder releasing another extended cut and the caption read “Or you know, just make the film good the first time around.” The screenwriter in me watches this sequel and can’t help but see it as an extremely bloated extended director’s cut of Part One because that’s genuinely what it was. I’ve seen so many examples of franchises spanning many films from Harry Potter, Marvel, to Star Wars, and Lord of the Rings. Even when a film leaves off on a cliffhanger, they’re all independently structured in a traditional way with each having a new inciting incident unique to that specific sequel. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back is arguably the best Star Wars film ever made. It was the first film to really blow the universe open with its introduction to deeper backstories of the world. Sequels have the ability to expand the universe so much more. 

Time to sit around the campfire for exposition flashback time

There’s no excuse for the lazy fragmented world building through monologue exposition in this Rebel Moon sequel. The most glaring perpetrator of this was when we learned about this important young princess named Issa strictly through flashback exposition. Her murder is supposed to be important. Her character is supposed to be important. “Oh hey by the way, she’s alive,” according to one of our main characters who out of nowhere ended the film with that “shocking” revelation. Why should I care about this girl at all? Because two characters talk about her in passing? I’m periodically told as an audience by Kora that she was deeply affected by the death of the princess. I’m supposed to believe that they were best buds because we saw one flashback of them interacting in the snow?

This is the major problem I’ve had watching this franchise. The audience is being treated as a student. A subject whose job it is to sit in front of a television and be told things to absorb by characters instead of witnessing things. Characters are reading their lives to us instead of letting us watch them live through it. This style of storytelling really takes viewers out of the world building and prevents us from building a rapport with the characters.

Two more major characters perish in the climactic battle and I didn’t feel a thing for them. I’m a crier who easily gets attached to fictional characters. I hate that I witnessed what should have been a tragic event and instead of being torn apart emotionally, I was relieved for the film to come to an end so I could turn the television off instead. 

Then there are illogical plot points that the story forces itself into. In what logical scenario are two days enough to train a handful of farmers to take down fully trained and ruthless Imperial soldiers? That’s what we’re told we should believe by the filmmakers. That a ragtag compilation of cowards who turned a blind eye a few weeks prior when one of their own was on the verge of being raped, could become a militia worthy of rebellion within a measly 48 hours of training. This is insulting on so many levels to a viewer. It leads to either one of two logics: 

A) The Imperials were not a real threat at all because they’re incompetent to be defeated by farmers with only 48 hours of training (which negates the entire premise of the first film) 

or 

B) There’s no common sense in this universe as everyone is equal in strength

This lot with 2 days of training is the universe’s greatest hope

With Great Power Comes No Logic

Hell, if we use Rebel Moon logic with Star Wars, Ben Kenobi should have just spent two days training Uncle Owen Lars and his neighbor farmers at Tatooine to take down Darth Vader and his Stormtroopers. That would have saved everyone a lot of time and effort if that’s all it took.

Rebel Moon is a prime lesson that showcases the flaws of allowing a filmmaker too much creative control. You may not get it from the vibe of this review, but believe it or not, I’m a fan of Zack Snyder. His early films that broke into the mainstream like 300, and The Watchmen were unequivocally some of the best comic book adapted properties I’ve ever seen. Unlike a lot of the elites in Hollywood, Snyder is a fan first and a filmmaker second. Just watch his Superman 75th short he made with Bruce Timm a decade ago. I still get goosebumps at just how well that short video showcases and respects the history of the Man of Steel. The Batman 80th video pales in comparison without his guidance. He loves nerd culture as much as the fans he caters to and that is evident in his work. 

He’s also a Director of Photography by trait. DP’s don’t always make good visionary leaders that good films require. Making decisions to trim the fat is a vital trait a director has to have. As a leader, everything you create seems pivotal to your story when you’re the one who came up with it. It’s clear as day that the more power and creative freedom Synder has, the more bloated and nonsensical his films become. Having a conflicting point of view from a studio isn’t always a bad thing. The Rebel Moon franchise (especially this second film) clearly illustrates to me that Synder is still struggling to find the right people to work with. He can’t be hammered down by a restrictive studio (like Warner Bros.), but he also shouldn’t be given free reign over the creative of a film either. I personally feel that Zack Snyder’s best works were when he was neither involved with the screenplay or influencial as a Producer. When you let him bring someone else’s vision that he respects to life, he’s a revolutionary. He’s still one of the best action scene innovators in the world today. He just has a difficult time with all the other aspects of story construction.

The Social Media Franchise

This new franchise feels like everything that is wrong with the world of Hollywood right now. It’s clearly a love letter to Star Wars, except it removes everything that makes Star Wars so iconic and enjoyable. This franchise is supposed to be the grown up version of Star Wars that everybody wants. Rebel Moon is more mature and serious than Star Wars, that much is true. But random disjointed scenes of violence is not more mature entertainment. It’s simply inferior story telling. 

While I can argue that cinematically, some scenes were so artfully delivered to the point where I marvel at the technological growth the industry has taken since the 1980’s. But none of that matters when a majority of the movie was nearly unwatchable. Why must the entertainment world be so gung ho on correcting things that really don’t need correcting in the first place? Sometimes being campy in specific spots of a storyline can benefit the character development. 

Maturity doesn’t have to only correlate to moody and dark no matter how much Hollywood seems to tell us otherwise. I’m baffled at how Netflix and Snyder truly believe that Rebel Moon will be the next huge multi-media franchise. Games, movies, clothing brands, and television shows are all either in production or already released based on just these two films so far. Have we as consumers fallen so low that a few slow motion explosions and pretty SFX shots of people killing others with glowing swords is all that is required to become a beloved franchise? 

Maybe we have. 

If you only selectively cut the flashy Snyder-style fight scenes into a 9:16 aspect ratio video and put it onto TikTok, Rebel Moon may look like the greatest movie of all time. Shortened attention spans thanks to the current generation of social media may have trained our minds to care less about character and story development. How else could one possibly explain the success of the soulless mess that is Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver if not that people only care for the violence?     

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