"Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver" review — Doomed sequel still manages to disappoint
“The time has come, for all that you love. Protect each other and show them no mercy!”
Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver, a title more longwinded than it has any right to be, is a film about grain. Wheat. The tall, yellow plants that dominate fields today. That thing. Well, to be more specific, the film is about a village on the remote moon Veldt that is terrorized by the galactic republic, and so resorts to hiring a rag-tag collection of heroes from throughout the galaxy to aid in their defence. What does the empire want with Veldt? Wheat. Despite the futuristic galactic ambitions of Rebel Moon, the whole movie is about grain. This simple reality has utterly plagued me since I saw the film. It serves as a microcosm of so many faults within Zack Snyder’s latest sci-fi epic: I simply do not believe in the conflict. Does Snyder honestly expect me to believe that in the entire galaxy the grain from this backwater, technologically behind, insignificant village is so important to the functioning of the massive galactic empire with faster-than-light travel that they might starve without it? That one planet? Really? Give me a break.
And, now, one might be quick to say, “Oh, the empire doesn’t need the grain, they are simply exercising power over this moon because they’re evil.” But, in private, on their own ship, the officers talk about how much they need the supplies to survive. And it’s not as if this ship is somehow broken or can’t return to the Motherworld: we see that its faster-than-light engines work just fine in the previous film. Of course, what Snyder is doing here is ripping off the central conflict explicitly and directly from Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (which turns 70 this year), in which a group of bandits threaten a Japanese peasant village for their grain supplies. In that film, the conflict works, because these feudal-era bandits raid villages to just survive. But the conflict in Rebel Moon isn’t against some lowly bandits, it’s against, again, the galactic empire, with its vast resources and infinite wealth. But when I think about this fundamental, all-corrupting problem, I must ask myself, “Should have I expected anything else?”
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| Staz Nair and Djimon Hounsou in Rebel Moon. Photo via Netflix. |
The writing has been on the wall for Rebel Moon — Part Two since the release of Part One four months ago, although, if I’m being honest, the writing has been on the wall since the film was announced. Many of the problems that made Part One such a chore to get through are back here to an even more aggressive extent. The film follows Kora (played by Sofia Boutella), a former Imperial soldier who finds herself in hiding on Veldt and has now recruited an army of freedom fighters to defend the moon from the Imperial army. Kora’s connection to the conflict is both external and personal: she’s fighting for the survival of the people she now cares deeply about as well as fighting the demons from her past life of military service. Supporting her is a collage of personality-less fighters, including her lover Gunnar (played by Michiel Huisman), former general Titus (played by Djimon Hounsou), and nobleman-turned-blacksmith Tarak (played by Staz Nair). Opposing them is Atticus Noble (played by Ed Skrein), a maniacal imperial admiral with a score to settle with Kora. There are seeds of interesting conflict here. Kora’s fight with her inner demons takes the viewer into flashbacks involving regicide, protecting a super-powered princess, an imperial takeover, rebellion, and the depths of war. Each of the freedom fighters has their own tragic backstory, encompassing a galaxy’s worth of stories.
Despite all of this context, the film chooses to be about wheat, a fact that totally kills any ounce of potential from the story. Perhaps this stupidity of the central conflict should have dawned on me while watching the first film, but the endless barrage of personality-less planets, poorly developed characters, and lacklustre action kept my mind elsewhere. On the positive side, the conflict here is much more focused as it all takes place on the eponymous rebellious moon instead of the menagerie of locals featured in the first film. The film feels like a unified narrative with an arc and a purpose, instead of a collection of fetch quests that end in a shootout. Yet, despite how obvious this should be in a narrative like this, this modicum of praise is the highest compliment I can bestow upon this film in good conscious. Rebel Moon 2 still reeks of the problems from Part One. The characters feel like cardboard cut-outs of people, the action relies on tropes rather than being motivated by the characters, and the endless exposition makes the film feel like an unnecessary side-step in a larger epic that I’d rather be watching. It’s a rather off-putting dish that Snyder has puked up onto Netflix.
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| A still from Rebel Moon. Photo via Netflix. |
The greatest, most pervasive problem that faces this film is that its world is so fundamentally devoid of imagination. Snyder’s visual blasé still breaks into the film. The locations, cultures, environments, and politics are all so uninspired and unoriginal, completely devoid of character or anything that would make them stand out. It’s almost shocking how ugly this film looks. While we exist in an era of studio filmmaking where gross visuals seem to reign supreme, Snyder somehow makes his film not bad-looking, but devoid of any semblance of iconography or visual creativity. A filmmaker once known for this distinct (if not contentious) visual style — see 300 (2006), Watchmen (2006), or any of his DCEU films — Snyder’s lack of any concrete language or texture for this universe is so utterly upsetting. Rebel Moon makes for a pair of hideous films. Snyder rips off plenty of his cinematic forefathers here, with George Lucas and Kurosawa being the most notable, but his rip-off doesn’t even manage to capture what made those other films good to begin with.
The best science fiction makes the viewer, or reader, want to get to know its world and its characters more. No sci-fi story can fully encompass the breadth of the universe in which it takes place. However, the details and worldbuilding present in the narrative provide not only an intriguing setting but also give the story an inherently new angle. The broad ideas of a stellar war or a galactic empire are well-trodden territory in the genre, but the universe that each great sci-fi narrative takes place in tells the viewer, “But you’ve never seen this story told like this.” Star Wars and Dune both use the trope of a galactic empire, but the universe that these stories are told in makes this shared concept seem wildly different. Rebel Moon’s fundamental problem is that it has nothing to intrigue its audience with. The visuals are muddy and uninteresting, they have no discernable character, and there’s not a semblance of thought put into the way this world works. This means that the conflict, the characters, the action, and every other part of the film are coloured with the same lack of creativity and care. We’ve seen this before and we’ve seen this better.
There’s a moment in the first in the first season of Arrested Development where protagonist Michael Bluth (played by Jason Bateman) opens the fridge in his kitchen to find a brown paper bag labelled, “Dead dove, do not eat.” Out of curiosity, Michael opens the bag, only to discover a dead dove. He says to himself, defeatedly, “Well, I don’t know what I expected.” I’ve never related to Michael more than having seen this film. I don’t know what else I should have expected, and yet I’m still disappointed. For that, I’m impressed. Rebel Moon is a creatively bankrupt, artistically disgusting morbid curiosity. This is a film only masochists could ever really enjoy.
Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver is now streaming on Netflix.
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