Rebel Moon—Part Two: The Scargiver (2024)
2/10
I can’t defend Zack Snyder anymore. For all Snyder’s reputation as a master of visuals and despite having made great movies in the past, Rebel Moon—Part Two: The Scargiver, the abysmal second half of his Star Wars/Seven Samurai ripoff, shows all Snyder’s worst qualities as a filmmaker. The first half, A Child of Fire, managed to be a decent if unoriginal time-passer, despite poorly fleshed out characters. I gave Snyder the benefit of the doubt because the worlds were interesting and there was a possibility the conclusion might make up for the first film’s deficiencies. No such luck.
The Scargiver is laughably bad, with some of the worst writing I’ve ever seen in a major film. Even the visuals, once Snyder’s strength, are terribly muddy looking. The action is repetitive and dull. The characters are either one-dimensional or so forgettable, it’s a struggle to even figure out the name of lead heroes (I’m speaking specifically of the Furiosa ripoff). Anthony Hopkins voices a robot named Jimmy, whose only purpose is to act as a deus ex machina in the climax. A reveal about our protagonist Kora (Sofia Boutella), one of the only interesting characters in A Child of Fire, makes the character despisable even as Snyder reverses track and renders her arc meaningless. Eventually, the underlying stupidity of the premise passes breaking point and brings the film’s whole edifice crashing down.
The story of Rebel Moon, in which villains order a small farming village to hand over their grain, is taken straight from Akira Kurosawa’s epic Seven Samurai. The latter was set in feudal Japan, where it made sense in that film that a village’s grain might be important for a group of bandits. But in Rebel Moon, it makes no sense whatsoever that a galaxy-spanning empire that has mastered faster-than-light interstellar travel, and can even bring people back from the dead, would be dependent on a small village of about 50 people to feed their armies with basic grain.
Grain plays such an outsized role in Rebel Moon that the first half of Scargiver is spent not on exploring characters or their relationships, but on slow-motion agriculture porn in which characters plant grain, harvest grain, cut grain, and stockpile grain. Their entire battle strategy is based on the idea that the Imperium will not fire on the grain it needs to feed its soldiers. Then at some point in the last act, pointlessly resurrected villain Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein) tells an underling to fire on the villagers because he just wants Kora, so the grain doesn’t actually matter. Good thing we spent so much of this four-hour movie focusing on grain!
The characters are written so terribly it beggars belief. After three hours of screentime, we still barely know any of them. In a laughably futile attempt at making us care about these characters, Snyder includes two hamfisted scenes before the final battle. First, farm girl Sam (Charlotte Moggi) presents each with a banner symbolizing their character traits, which the viewer will need to take on faith since we’ve barely seen any of the heroic qualities she describes. Then, in a now notorious scene, General Titus (Djimon Hounsou) tells the band of heroes that if they’re going to fight the next day, they might as well get to know each other. “I’ll go first,” he says. Each tells their tragic, interchangeable backstories: the Imperium killed people they loved and now they want revenge.
Speaking of General Titus, that character represents all that’s wrong with Snyder’s screenplay. Hounsou gives it all and has a nice scene in which he sings a song with lyrics in two African languages, but he’s let down by poor writing. When we first saw Titus in A Child of Fire, he was a depressed alcoholic full of shame for his past and competing in gladiator tournaments. All it took to get him on board to join Kora’s team was a few generic lines about honour and revenge. Immediately Titus was on board and fighting with Kora. By The Scargiver, Titus has given up drinking and shows us his natural leadership qualities by giving at least three inspirational speeches. Snyder completely fails to show us this radical change in character, which occurs so suddenly it’s like the writer-director flicked a light switch.
How about a character who doesn’t change despite going through the remarkable experience of death and resurrection? Atticus Noble, Snyder’s more blatantly Nazi Darth Vader stand-in, is brought back to life in Scargiver. Early on it seems he’s developed enhanced strength, though this doesn’t come up later at all. The Imperium is so over-the-top evil at every juncture, Noble and all the rest might as well be twirling their moustaches and tying maidens to railroad tracks. They’re so cartoonish in their villainy as to become dull, causing unintentional laughter. Noble gives Kora the name of “Scargiver” based on the scar she gave him, which isn’t the most threatening nickname since it implies her victims will live. But Noble keeps saying it and it sounds just as lame every time. To paraphrase Mean Girls: stop trying to make “Scargiver” happen, it’s not going to happen.
One of the most unintentionally hilarious scenes is the big reveal about Kora’s past. (Spoiler alert, though this movie is so bad it doesn’t matter.) Balisarius (Fra Fee), usurper to the imperial throne, involved Kora in the murder of the king, queen and princess, with Kora personally killing the princess after Balisarius ordered her to. It’s one thing to give your hero a shady past. It’s quite another to have her kill a child when ordered to by an obvious villain, which makes us lose all sympathy and respect for the hero. Possibly the dumbest thing about this scene is how a string quartet in weird masks play music to the rhythm of the royal assassinations, effectively playing the movie’s own soundtrack.
If Snyder wanted to make Kora a true antihero and explore whether we can feel sympathy for a character that committed such a horrific act, he pulls his punches and eliminates any dramatic impact this reveal might have. Kora cowardly only tells the villagers she killed the princess after the battle has been won, at which point it hardly makes a difference. Then Titus reveals not only did he know all along Kora killed the princess—the princess is still alive and they need to go find her! It’s so dumb a 10-year-old child could have written it. I don’t think I’ve seen more insulting sequel bait, especially since I’ve never seen a would-be blockbuster where I wanted a sequel less.
The only saving graces are Tom Holkenborg’s musical score and the actors, especially Hounsou. Otherwise this is a laughable mess, the work of a filmmaker whose cult following has led to hubris and not understanding his own limitations. With this film Snyder has officially attained self-parody status. His pathetic attempts to get us interested in these characters amount to nothing. His romantic subplots and deaths of supposedly major characters mean nothing.
Rebel Moon—Part Two confirms that Snyder is a hack who requires talented screenwriters and/or iconic source material to make anything worth watching. Rarely has Macbeth’s description of life worked better as a film review: “It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.”