Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver (2024)

Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver Review

Rebel Moon — Part II: The Scargiver is a Netflix movie written and directed by Zack Snyder. Does that sentence tell you everything you need to know about the quality of this film? It should, but we’ll continue with this review anyway. This is the second part in Snyder’s planned Rebel Moon sci-fi franchise and it’s picking up right where the first film left off, with this boring group of characters preparing for one last stand against Not-the-Empire from Star Wars. Everything is coming to a head as our heroes help train a bunch of villagers how to fend themselves from the evil empire, which includes the very epic act of… harvesting wheat. That’s our story folks. It’s A Bug’s Life for idiots, so let’s buckle up and do what we do on this site.

I truly went back and forth on if I even wanted to watch this goddamn movie or not. I hated Part One and by all accounts, this second part was said to be even worse. I told myself that I wasn’t going to bother with this story that didn’t matter to me, but then I eventually got curious abouta good old-fashioned hate watch and here we are.I’m pretty mixed on Zack Snyder’s overall filmography, but I’m always willing to give him some inkling of a chance.Me watching this movie is giving it a chanceand now that I’ve seen it, I feel like some form of compensation is in order.Hell, I’ll even take a crappy T-shirt that says something along the lines of “I survived Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon.”

So the plot is a really basic and predictable rip-off of things like Seven Samurai, Star Wars,and A Bug’s life.Our heroes are training this lonely group of hopeless villagers into defending their village who’scomingto wreak havoc on them and steal their wheat for…reasons.It makes absolutely no sense that a highly advanced empire with all of this high-tech futuristic warfare and the technology to bring people back from the dead needs wheat to thrive. The movie gives no explanation for it and we’re expected to roll with it for the sake of some generic story about an oppresive empire trying to rull the galaxy or whatever.And it makes even less sense that in a span of just a few days, these villagers are miraculously trained into defending against said empire and making battle an actual challenge to them.

The character development in this film is pretty much the same as it was in the first one. That these characters are both given no development and too much development at the same time is actually quite strange. Although it should be a contradiction, this movie somehow makes it happen. I of course mean the scene that has already been criticized, where our characters have a roundtable exposition dump and each take turns giving these long-winded monologues about their tragic backstories and why they’re fighting against the empire. It’s lazy exposition dumping for sure, but it’s also bad because all of these backstories amount to the same thing: Empire bad. All of this could’ve been done in a less boring, less time-consuming way but this is Zack Snyder we’re talking about. This is how he knows how to develop characters and there’s just no teaching him otherwise. It’s still shits the bed; the only scene in the movie that comes even remotely close to making us care about the characters.

Zack Snyder’s direction in this movie obviously has to be brought up. And by direction I mean an ugly brown color palette mixed with an excessive amount of slow-motion. Snyder really loves himself some slow-mo shots but here he takes it up to 11. We get slow-mo shots of people harvesting wheat, filling up their canteens, falling over into water from a bridge that’s barely a few feet from the ground… etc etc etc ad nauseam you get what I’m saying. One simple moment of a faceless character getting kicked over a bridge gets turned into nearly thirty seconds when it should only last one second total; This would be like if The Birth Of A Nation had more than four minutes of blackface but taken seriously instead!. But all seriousness aside it’d be one thing to say that feels like parody Snyder film but honestly think its just indulgence on Snyders part he has scenes in this movie of slow-mo farming where these characters are doing nothing more than harvesting grain while the soundtrack consists of a girl doing some opera style song its completely self-indulgent directing and I never thought that i’d see the day when farming is made to look like the most pretentious shit imaginable.

As far as pace is concerned, this movie feels like it takes an eternity to get going. But then things start happening and it’s basically just one giant battle for the rest of the time. So it’s aggravating to think about how much of this film’s first half could’ve been trimmed down (also some parts in Part One), and then we only would have had to sit through one movie instead of two. Granted, still a shitty movie, but just one that came out last year so we’d be over it by now. And I wish I could say the big epic climax was entertaining on some level, but it’s not. The characters are boring, the slow-mo is egregious and the writing doesn’t even try to hide that it’s ripping off Star Wars. When shit hits the fan we’re given an all out lightsaber fight with these laser energy swords while a bunch of ugly CGI is exploding in our face. This movie is literally just Zack Snyder playing with action figures like a five year old on too much adderall.

Are there any positives to this movie? Any at all? Hmm… maybe there are one or two rare visual shots that aren’t total garbage to look at? That kinda comes with Zack Snyder movies since he’s such a visually driven director. It’s been said he’d do great as a purely visual director so long as he doesn’t write the story but this movie made me go against that idea entirely cause it gonna be more slow-mo shots that go on for way too fucking long. At this point I don’t even care if he can make one good effects shot every now and again.

But here we are at the end of it all and Snyder has the audacity to set up more installments in this world with these characters? He clearly wants sequels, spin-offs, prequels, etc etc etc until this half-baked franchise is dry as a bone. And not only that but now he’s talking about how these two movies have longer director’s cuts coming out soon? WILL IT NEVER END?! Snyder was given Netflix, his own sci-fi epic and virtually no studio interference and now he’s saying it deserves a second shot with a director’s cut that only his most loyal fanboys will want to see? At this point I’m half convinced this is some sort of scam or money laundering front. It’s a cinematic reason to waste millions of dollars that could go towards countless other things that would actually benefit humanity.

When all is said and done, Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver deserves to be that kind of Netflix movie which should give you a free month of Netflix just for watching it. You could watch this on an airplane and still come off the plane by opening the door and sucking yourself out along with everyone else to fall thousands of feet to their death, and that would somehow still be the more merciful option. This movie is hilariously bad, like miles worse than the first one, but also devoid of any sense or reason or practical filmmaking decision-making in just about every shot. I’m kind of over Snyder’s movies at this point. I actually defend Man of Steel against some of the flack it gets, but now I’m just done. To put it lightly, he is not a competent filmmaker. Or better yet, to paraphrase a line from a recent HBO show at the other end of the quality spectrum: “You’re not a serious person.”

Watch Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver For Free On Gomovies.