Rebel Moon Part Two: The Scargiver immediately falls flat
The one from last December Rebel Moon, Part One: A Child of Fire was a paint-by-numbers space opera filled with Zack Snyder’s maximalist colors. Pitched as “Seven Samurai but make it Star Wars” (literally, to Lucasfilm), the end product was at best a violent B-movie mashup and at worst an expensive Asylum-esque mockbuster. Not a great film, but somewhat promising? The most glaring omission: an ending. After hero Kora (Sofia Boutella) fought a crew for two hours to defend a farming planet from Imperium forces, the confrontation didn’t actually happen; Snyder stood by the payout Part Two: The Scargiver.
Unfortunately, anyone committed to a propulsive action-forward finale will have to adjust expectations: The Scargiver, now on Netflix, is a blaring stinger that lasts for two hours. The characters in it A child of fire They basically walked around and talked about RPG classes, but they went everywhere – from space brothels to ranch planets to the inner sanctuaries of the Imperium. In Part twoSnyder and his co-writers, Kurt Johnstad and Shay Hatten, contain and suffocate the drama about Veldt, home to an agrarian society defined by the Malickian poetry of touching wheat. An hour is spent preparing for war, with obligatory training montages and lame reflections on the state of the universe. The back half is a brown-hued, smoke-filled militaristic battle, occasionally intersected by red plasma gunfire. It’s ugly, it’s repetitive, and it’s seriously lacking stand up and cheer moments.
Help, the Rebel Moon franchise has fallen and can’t get back up!
But really… what happened here?
After falling asleep with twenty minutes to go, waking up, rewinding, and then watching to the end, I found myself more furious than expected when Junkie XL’s percussive anthem waild over the end credits. There was potential here. I don’t count myself among Snyder’s biggest fans, but Dawn of the dead remains excellent, his Justice League redux was a big improvement, and his first Netflix film, Army of the dead, won me over. I had low expectations after that A child of firebut in theory The Scargiver was a final act that a splash page creator could really work with. A sleazy sci-fi action movie should be a check for Snyder to cash. Instead, he delivered a bare, dirty downer of a film.
There is so much potential shimmering through the dust of the two Rebel Moon films. Sofia Boutella has action bona fides, convincingly plowing through hordes of bad guys in patented Snyder slo-mo – and she does it with palpable humanity. Her character, Kora, went from the adopted daughter of Emperor Palpatine’s replacement, Belisarius, to a high-ranking Imperium officer, to a fugitive who hopes to redeem herself by protecting the people of Veldt and dismantling galactic weapons. tyranny. The conflict is all hand-waved, but Boutella sells it as pulp melodrama A child of fire. The Scargiver gives her nothing to build on.
Snyder is really smart when it comes to casting. Djimon Hounsou is in full powerhouse mode in the sequel, even getting a chance to sing a war ballad halfway through (in a hybrid of African languages from his home country Benin). Doona Bae continues to hit with double swords The Scargiver. Ed Skrein’s odious Atticus Noble is even more of a Snarling Villain after his brain reboots and, well, he tries.
That’s the main problem: there’s a ton of talent on display, all plugged into stock characters and sloppy action.
In the first half of the film, Snyder gathers his group of heroes around a table on the eve of war to tell their backstories – and they all look and feel exactly the same! Each member of the team faced an explosion at a crucial moment in their past. Every planet they come from is covered in soot. Each memory is explained using the same visual vocabulary. I’m all for slow cinema, but even Paul Schrader would give up this level of expositional torture.
As Snyder told me last year during press rounds for A child of firethe Rebel Moon films were his chance to get weirder than ever before. “I was looking for something that really pushed the sci-fi fantasy elements to the limit,” said Snyder. There’s only one scene in it The Scargiver that comes close to capturing that big conversation, when we finally get to see the royal assassination that forced Kora to go on the run. In the background of the scene, an Imperium string quartet plays diegetic horror muzak during what becomes an even bigger reveal. Why would they keep playing when people are being straight up murdered? Who cares, this is cinema. Snyder is right to forego the bizarre in favor of over-explaining the why, but there’s nothing remotely “extreme” before or after the scene.
Snyder’s background is in the visual arts, specifically painting, and this is reflected in the chiaroscuro speed bumps found throughout his filmography. But the closest The Scargiver everything that is artistic is that you could compare it with that of Goya Saturn devours his son, in the sense that it’s almost monochromatic and feels like someone is biting your head off. Starting with Army of the dead, Snyder took over the shooting of his own films and directed them, and it feels like a loss in the Rebel Moon sequel – not only is there a lack of vision when it comes to frames, but even the geography and pacing feel slick On. Action films made on a quarter of Scargever‘s budget has a bigger impact than the sword-and-gun battles we see in the middle of the battle for Veldt. If the idea was to do what Star Wars couldn’t do, Rebel Moon should go faster then Villain one or Andor.
Rebel Moon part three, anyone?
Rebel Moon would become Netflix’s big franchise, a Star Wars-level “universe” to explore. Supposedly, Snyder, Johnstad, and Hatten have six films mapped out in the saga, and Netflix has preemptively poured money into the saga. Rebel Moon spin-off comics and a video game (where a theoretical TTRPG project was canceled for reasons beyond quality). After Snyder delivered his first two films, the company threw millions at them promotional events and marketinga sign that it… something. Maybe The Scargiver will defy reviews, become a huge hit for Netflix and spawn intended sequels – Part two has no post-credits scene, but uses the final beat to explain where the story will go in a potential screenplay Part three. They left that in.
A major roadblock for Snyder only came into view after the release of Part One. A new producer, Dan Lin (Itthe Lego films) has stepped in to take over Netflix’s film program, and a report has recently been published about this The Hollywood Reporter suggests he wants to get smaller with the slate, not bigger. While Netflix showed off Rebel Moon Part One‘s instant No. 1 status upon arrival, the long-term numbers didn’t deliver such an undeniable hit that Lin would have to greenlight the sequels. THR even noted that in its report on Lin’s tenure Rebel Moon premiered to just half the audience of the Julia Roberts-led sci-fi chamber drama Leaving the world behind – an apt title for what could happen in the Rebel Moon franchise.
In any case, there is something more Rebel Moon material waiting in the wings; as Snyder promised from the start: R-rated cuts A child of fire And The Scargiver were prepared in conjunction with the PG-13 versions that now exist on the platform. In a previous interview with Polygon, Snyder said that these versions, while more violent, are also “a deep dive into the universe – it’s much more,” adding that “it’s almost like the story takes place in a slightly different dimension than this movie. that’s about to come true.”
Let’s hope! The swampy version of The Scargiver currently on Netflix, doesn’t inspire much confidence in what could be gained from the Rebel Moon franchise in the future. Perhaps this was Snyder’s plan all along, to release a half-hearted PG-13 edit of his film so the richer, more emotionally powerful R-rated stories could really shine. Or maybe he just lost the thread because he remixed too many influences. Ultimately, as Rebel Moon ends with The Scargiverdoes this mean that the best Rebel Moon story is yet to come: the story Snyder will tell about ‘what had to happen in Rebel moon part three”, spread over his next ten years of interviews.