Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver is a drastically more watchable film than its predecessor, which spent so much time place-setting that it forgot to tell an actual story. The Scargiver is, essentially, the propulsive second and third acts that Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire was missing. All the heroes that our heroine, Kora (Sofia Boutella), collected in the first film have finally arrived on the farming planet of Veldt, ready to help defend it against the encroaching fascist armies of the Motherworld. From here, it’s basically the fast and loose Seven Samurai redux that A Child of Fire had been hinting at from minute one, with our legendary heroes helping to prepare this village of pacifist farmers to go to war.
Once the first shots get fired, Snyder’s directorial muscle is on full display. The fights are big, bombastic, beautifully shot, even with his speed-ramping fetish in full effect, and display a tactile brutality that’s rare to see in a modern, effects-laden blockbuster. But just as in A Child of Fire, there’s not a whole lot propping up the big fight narratively.
There’s nothing outright bad about the story that the Rebel Moon saga tries to tell. It’s derivative, but even Star Wars owes its very existence to Kurosawa Akira and Flash Gordon, and it’s hard to knock Snyder for doing the same. Boutella, Djimon Hounsou, and Doona Bae in particular wring quite a lot out of pathos out of the fleeting scraps of characterization that they get. There’s even a sequence of our main heroes having a private dinner where some key elements of their backstories get filled in, and there are effective, harrowing story beats therein.
Staz Nair’s Tarak, in particular, gets a flashback showing him and his indigenous family as wealthy royals on a steampunk planet, which feels like the violent ending of an intergalactic Killers of the Flower Moon riff. These are stories worth chasing, but consistent with his other screenplays that aren’t drawing upon preexisting material, Snyder showcases poor judgment when it comes to figuring out what information is worthy of inclusion.
The Scargiver feels like a loosely threaded series of grand ideas and sincere emotional beats that require so much more connective tissue to thread together into an actual narrative worth investing in. It would require a script more dedicated to letting the film’s characters exist as more than just vague sketches of human beings, and even with nearly four and a half hours to blow, there’s scant few examples of that in Rebel Moon. It’s no small feat to invent lore out of thin air, and Snyder’s affection for this world is obvious, but the Rebel Moon saga is in desperate need of a steadier and more patient hand to craft and deliver that to audiences.
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