Filmmaker Zack Snyder’s profoundly unfortunate “Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire,” a turgid, ostentatiously vacant space opera, was, to put it politely, a dire film and hollow regurgitation of familiar sci-fi tropes. But it at least had a story with three bare acts, however tedious. “Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver,” the sequel, however— continuing the already unexceptional story of the ragtag group of warrior misfits defending a peaceful farming community on an off-world moon—is somehow even worse and barely justifies its existence on a fundamental level.
The problem was that “Rebel Moon” never had much of a story, to begin with, and was deeply presumptuous that you cared about something it hadn’t ever given you a reason to invest in emotionally. Despite the nonsensical gobbledygook mythological backstory dumps delivered in narration at the beginning of both movies that confused all audiences—about a tyrant who seized control of the Galaxy, strangely enough, barely part of either movie— ‘Rebel Moon’ was paper thin. It was ostensibly the story of a mysterious woman, Kora (Sofia Boutella), hiding out on Veldt, the aforementioned Planet Moon, carrying some enormous secret from the past that still haunted her today.
But revealed in the first film, and fleshed out in the second to unexceptional consequence—she was a former member of the evil militaristic Imperium (an obvious substitute for the Empire in “Star Wars”), and she had done many a lousy deed—that secret never amounted to much. Hiding in shame, seeing this farming community in peril, she eventually summoned her courage up for a shot of redemption by recruiting a team of bad-ass oddballs to defend against the warmongering bad guys. They fought back and enlisted various allies, and against the odds, they won, for now. But Kora’s baggage never held much suspense or weight—despite the film carrying on like it was some blockbuster burden—and thus “Rebel Moon” was more or less just a generic plot movie about a small team of good guys gearing up to square off against a bigger group of cruel guys and nothing more, despite all the excessive and ornamental trappings around it.
Generically written by Snyder, Kurt Johnstad, and Shay Hatten at some point, “Rebel Moon” was just one long movie, and someone had the brilliant idea to divide it into two films. But as clearly evinced by the tiresomely meaningless structure of the painfully dull ‘The Scargiver’ sequel, it’s all mind-numbing filler: a bloated story straining itself into a movie with long-drawn-out flashbacks of tortured pasts, wearying padding, and plodding delays.
It’s essentially just the leftover third act of ‘Part One’ distended into an entire movie, the war of it all, featuring over an hour of deferrals to put off that skirmish with many scenes of regrouping, harvesting, ponderous backstory detours, and other sluggish postponements in order to justify waiting for the final colossally epic battle. But so meanderingly boring, you mercifully want to fast forward to the fighting and overwrought conflicts if only to get somewhere narratively, however vacant and empty it will be.
And predictably aimless it is. When the hostilities finally commence, it’s all just as equally dismal, so much feverish sound and fury signifying absolutely nothing, to borrow a phrase from the Bard (a figure the movie seems to constantly try and mimic and do so poorly, in its grandiose, but vacuous “into the breach!”-like “Henry V” speeches).
‘Rebel Moon Part 2’ doesn’t carry any surprises, suspense, or tension, relying solely once again on gratuitous spectacle and excessively overblown melodrama. Picking up where the events of ‘Part One’ ended, the good guys won the battle, but the war was still to come. While the ridiculously evil Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein) perished in the first film, hey, this is sci-fi, so no sooner than later, he’s back on his feet and preparing for the round two everyone knows is looming.
So the first hour of ‘Part 2’ is both sides recuperating and reorganizing, which means for the good guys, lots of slow-motion montages of grain harvesting (so much harvesting!) imbibing and merriment and training the villagers to prepare for an attack (oh, they have five days to become warriors). For the bad guys, it’s lame excuses regarding Noble’s resurrection and healing that they must wait a little while before they can remount a new assault campaign. There are some minor details within, such as a rogue Imperium private Aris (Sky Yang) who helps them stall for time, but literally, that’s all hour one does: delay, delay, delay the inevitable.
The inevitable arrives, and it is noisy, chaotic, excessively overcooked, and just as meaningless as ‘Part One,’ thus feels like an immense, loud, calamitously desperate attempt at making you care about something that never earned your concern in the first place. ‘The Scargiver’ is such an oddly distancing and out-of-body experience, with mournful music cues to make you feel sorrowful about something the movie forgot to make you care about. It’s full of huge, swelling grandiosity, and yet it’s all puffed up for nothing because it failed to connect you to its generic characters in its first attempt. All it can do is double down and hope for the best.
And about the best you can credit ‘Rebel Moon Part 2’ with is not trying to adjust or recalibrate in any fashion, though mostly because it can’t, and there’s nothing to fix. It was fundamentally flawed and broken from the jump, and it’s best not to throw good money after bad (though let’s be candid, the original money was never wisely spent).
Much like ‘A Child Of Fire,’ “The Scargiver” is exhausting, enervating, and exasperating, frantically flailing around with explosions, lasers, laser lightsaber-like swords, grenades, et al., but always failing to make you give a damn. If anything, ‘Rebel Moon,’ is more interesting to examine as a poster boy for Netflix’s various failures as a creative entity—the same ones that new film chief Dan Lin has been precisely hired to try and correct. That’s another article, really, and arguably has no business within the walls of a review. But when you talk about excessive spending and lack of quality control on a woefully conceived, arrogantly self-indulgent product, well, tag “Rebel Moon,” you are most certainly it. [D-]
