Rebel Moon—Part Two: The Scargiver review: Zack Snyder’s improved follow up is a messy but daring star war
The director’s vision of an adult-oriented space opera is compromised by a PG-13 cut and an emphasis on far-too-familiar influences
Film Reviews Rebel Moon
To call Rebel Moon—Part Two: The Scargiver pastiche is to oversell it. As was the case in Part One—A Child Of Fire, The Scargiver is an unmistakable blend of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and George Lucas’ Star Wars, so obvious in its make that pointing out the origin of its parts is redundant. The Scargiver doesn’t just smash these classic works together; it repackages them into artful havoc, squeegeed of its blood and glory for the consumption of modern streaming audiences. This decision is a baffling move by Netflix, who negotiated edits for Rebel Moon, possibly in fear that it had just sold a fraction of its fortunes to Zack Snyder, the agile provocateur behind such divisive works as Sucker Punch.
Snyder’s inclination to shoot lusty bodies framed against overly composed violence appears to have scraped against Netflix’s ambitions to sell Rebel Moon as its own ongoing, broadly appealing space opera; both cuts of Moon have blunted the director’s edge with sanitized PG-13 versions that make Snyder’s action sequences look more chaotic than they were likely meant to be. Axes are put through chests, laser rifles blast holes through soldiers, and many a throat is opened, yet The Scargiver is just as bloodless and chaotically edited as the film that came before it, so careful is Netflix to avoid offending casual viewers. Despite this, there is an R-rated release of Moon on its way—at least that seems to be the plan—but therein lies another challenge for the streamer: convincing people to watch Snyder’s compromised movie twice. History is repeating itself.
Compromised though it may be, no one can say Snyder hasn’t made Rebel Moon with love, and his guilelessness remains as admirable as ever. A Child Of Fire was a Saturday morning tent revival of muscular heroes, improbable yet awesome cosmic backdrops, and molten weapons calibrated to evoke those lightsabers from a certain galaxy far, far away. It was an exercise in geeky kitbashing, where familiar childhood ephemera was retrofitted to appeal to older audiences disenchanted by their lifelong fandoms.
Snyder’s recycled efforts were most apparent during that movie’s space-cantina recruitment scene in which we met Charlie Hunnam’s traitorous Han Solo surrogate, a sequence pulled whole-cloth from A New Hope. Indeed, Rebel Moon was Episode IV all over again, grungier, angrier, and imbued with the director’s violent opulence. Its rebel lead, Kora (Sofia Boutella), wasn’t called Skywalker but Scargiver, a lonely farmer with ties to a galactic empire who looked to the sky with eyes filled not with hope but dread.
Other characters filled out Snyder’s neo-Rebellion, too, and most survived to see this second installment play out: there’s the hard-drinking gladiator Titus (Djimon Hounsou), the cybernetic Nemesis (Doona Bae), Tarak (Staz Nair), a nobleman turned exile (whose animal-bonding abilities have been sadly discarded), and Gunnar (Michiel Huisman), Kora’s main squeeze, who is given a slightly elevated profile to lend Rebel Moon a flimsy romantic sweep. Their union made up most of Child Of Fire’s runtime, often making the movie feel like we were collecting action figures instead of thrilling to a raucous space adventure.
This time, their function is to fill out the ranks of Snyder’s play on Seven Samurai, and the plot of Kurosawa’s film informs most of what transpires in The Scargiver. It begins where A Child Of Fire left us, with the Imperium admiral Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein) revived after his violent clash with Kora through technological means inspired by Heavy Metal comic strips. Filled with renewed vengeance, Noble sets his Imperium Dreadnaught on course to Veldt—the remote farming outpost in which the tyrannical Regent Balisarius (Fra Fee) collects much of the Imperium’s grain—where he knows Kora and her team will be preparing for his arrival.
If nothing else, The Scargiver has a clearer direction than its prior installment, which allows us to spend more downtime with this over-large group of archetypes. Themes of generosity and sacrifice are planted during these beats, and even if they never fully take root, they at least lend some dramatic oomph to the perfunctory G.I. Joe-styled hostilities to come. Snyder, who co-wrote Rebel Moon with Kurt Johnstad (300) and Shay Hatten (Army Of The Dead), works in a surprising sense of sincerity, particularly when Veldt shows their gratitude to Kora and company and Boutella (and her cast mates) can display glimmers of humanity that briefly make The Scargiver feel like a much more impactful, emotionally resonant movie. (However, a later scene in which Kora, Titus, and the rest share tragic backstories as though they were reading stats from their character trading cards fumbles this goodwill.)
Perilously crowded though the cast may be, these quieter moments are a suitable showcase for each of their talents. To single out one among many, Hounsou brings a vivid energy to the film that speaks to his long-overlooked strengths as an actor and a physical performer; in fact, his vigor is so potent that it underscores the lack of charisma coming from most of the hated Imperium, especially Balisarius, who remains in the saga’s periphery for presumably franchise-building reasons. It’s an imbalance of energies that’s sated by Skrein’s Admiral Noble, whose sinewy presence recalls the raw physicality Snyder has shot so memorably in films like Man Of Steel and 300. Skrein is a worthy adversary, a collection of raw nerves and bile, a Vader of a different stripe.
One thing can be said about Zack Snyder that shouldn’t inspire debate: he’s devoted to his craft and his influences. Snyder has long been touted as a camera-toting über-nerd, the quintessential cinema Chad, a hero to his online defenders and enfant terrible to knife-sharpening critics who sneer at his slo-mo pop-artist sensibilities. Who else would so shamelessly contrive a movie like Batman V. Superman: Dawn Of Justice by painting a grotesque tapestry from Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns with the brush of John Boorman’s Excalibur? Who else would think to?
Who else but Zack Snyder would bother drawing from a well as frequently tapped as Star Wars just to put their own authorial spin on it? Well, quite a few people, as it happens, but few would, or even could, wind up with a Star Wars riff as earnest, messy, and (brace yourselves) daring as Rebel Moon. Through this ambitious two-part series (which reportedly has three or possibly six more installments in the offing), Snyder has labored over his influences to the degree that watching it will be a riot for the devoted and feel like work for everyone else. Either way, Snyder’s passion remains his strength.
48 Comments
Staz Nair looks straight up like The Rock, Jr. in the header image.Anyway, I’m just gonna wait for the R cut of these movies. That’s not to say it will be better or even good, just redder and nuder.
Staz Nair is an anagram of Star Nazi, so apparently he’s well cast.
My brother and I did a MST3K style watch of the first one over Christmas. It was quite fun.
I need to do this with my Wife, I think that will be the only redeeming quality of it.
Staz Nair should be in a Star Wars movie and be named Staz Nair
It bothers me that in Part 1 (I’m not going to bother with Part 2) the shirt-off guy always has his shirt off. It was fine when he was a slave working outside all day but after he’s freed he goes on a spaceship, into a town, in a hangar, etc and still no shirt. It’s just so impractical and he’s probably cold. Is he just too proud to admit that he’s cold? Did anyone ever bother to offer him a shirt? Is it perpetually laundry day?
That’s my plan as well. On the one hand the promised “director’s cut” even before the first release seems like a weird concept, I can see why Netflix would want a version for international markets with tighter censorship first. If I watch it, it will be the version Snyder wants to make. I am not a fan, but I will say that as bad as his Justice League cut was, it was better than the edited by committee version. If you hire Snyder, go full Snyder.
“three or possibly six more installments”
That must be very exciting for someone.
Does that make you sad?
I’m looking forward to finding out why the Empire doesn’t just nuke the village from space. That’ll be worth two hours of my precious time.
This village is a multi-million dollar installation! They can’t make that kind of decision, they’re just grunts!
I saw it and forgot most of it, but did they explain in the first movie why anyone gives a shit about this remote village on a remote planet (or moon, I guess) in the first place, other than that’s where what’s-her-name ended up living? That place could not possibly provide “much of the Imperium’s grain”— it’s one little moon. Hell, if I remember correctly, there was some dialogue about how they could barely feed themselves some years even before the Imperium took their cut.
fifty-oddYep. It’s precisely as stupid as “a village of fifty-odd people provides AND HAS THE CAPACITY TO STORE so much grain as to be strategically essential to an interstellar empire.” I can suspend my disbelief where the laws of physics are concerned. That’s the sine qua non of sci-fi. But this level of idiocy starts to feel like trolling.
“Snyder’s recycled efforts were most apparent during that movie’s space-cantina recruitment scene”You mean the entire first movie? This was the entire first movie. Going and getting a guy, then going and getting another guy, then going and getting another guy.
2 hours and 15 minutes of getting the band together. I have had worse naps
I didn’t finish the movie because it was bored, but after several scenes of going to a place and talking to someone, I suddenly realized that there was only like 20 minutes of movie left somehow.
I was half paying attention to the 1st movie and I thought I missed something when the Bloodaxe guy was recruited and I think I fell asleep and then it was the end. I was sure I missed something. Rewound and nope that was the movie.
You didn’t miss anything. All those people they collected did nothing.
It reminded me a little bit of Cats, where the cats pop up one by one to introduce themselves with a song, and then when they run out of new cats, it ends.
Hey, one of those guys they got was a girl.
The Scargiver is an unmistakable blend of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and George Lucas’ Star WarsSo… Battle Beyond the Stars?
That reminds me, I need to rewatch Battle Beyond the Stars! Of all the Star Wars ripoffs it’s the most fun.
No you are confused, this movie doesn’t have a boobie shaped space ship, just vagina shaped jump points
Sadly – I watched both so I know you are NOT even remotely joking. Rebel Moon literally opens with a penis-ship entering a space vagina (sorry – vagina-shaped-warp-hole)… Couldn’t make this shit up if we tried…
With Richard Thomas! Aka John-Boy, or more recently Agent Gaad.
Incel Star Wars.
sigh, life well wasted.
“Daring?” In what freaking world is copy-pastung a bunch of other far super movies onto a bunch of soulless CGI backdrops without adding literally anything new whatsoever, somehow daring? That couldn’t possibly be further removed from daring. Of course this site also called Lisa Frankenstein, which is also just an egregiously derivative copy-paste job, “stunningly original,” so… yeah, zero credibility.And of course if you look at Metacritic, the AVClub score for this is so much better than every single other review as to be laughable. This site continues to become an increasingly pathetic dumpster fire and laughingstock when it comes to reviews.
Another actual review, with comments on the director’s technique and the movie’s influences, instead of just paragraphs of plot regurgitation followed by a summary of whether the reviewer liked it? This bodes well for AV Club 3.0.
3.0? bud, we’re on at least 7.0
AVClub iteration 75623.4 by my calculations
I stopped counting after 69
Nice!
He he, the weed number!
I bet 420 will be epic.
Yep – I always get distracted when I reach 69 too!
True
Are we no longer in the darkest timeline?
All wasted on another synder turd.
I thought the thumbnail was Furiosa… It can only go downhill from here I guess.
i didn’t mind the last one as like a way less charming version of some janky sci-fi series like lexx or the chronicles of riddick. i also spent about 40 minutes of it shopping for pants online.
Counterargument: No.Just no.
“yet The Scargiver is just as bloodless and chaotically edited as the film that came before it”Yet? What, you expected that part two of a movie would be told in a different way than part one? While knowing that they were shot together, as one movie?
Tarak (Staz Nair), a nobleman turned exile (whose animal-bonding abilities have been sadly discarded)
Oh so that scene in the first movie was rendered even more useless than it already was. Wonderful.I don’t want to go to the overused Chekhov’s-gun analogy, but… come on.
Is he just gonna shit these out every year like the [Adjective] Movie franchise used to?
Messy but Daring is also the name of Zack Snyder’s sex tape.
if you think this is what a Heavy Metal comic is like?…. I don’t believe you have read a Heavy Metal comic.
Best comment I have read so far: “Maybe Snyder thought they said ‘Slow, don’t tell.’”