Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver
Having made it back to her adopted homeworld, Kora (Sofia Boutella) leads the allies that she has assembled in training the villagers to defend themselves from the imminent threat of the Imperium, unaware of the resurrection of the terrible Admiral Noble (Ed Skrein). In the terrible battle that ensues, lives are lost, secrets are revealed and the the future of the Imperium itself is changed forever.
I think I can put it as plainly as possible when I say that you can pretty much look at my thoughts on Part One of this would-be saga – A Child Of Fire – and pretty much get the majority of my thoughts for this sequel. I say sequel, but it is essentially just the second half of a single story. As such, it carries with it pretty much all of the strengths of that first instalment, and all of the weaknesses too. So many weaknesses. This is visionary director Zach Snyder’s movie alright, and all of the problems of Part One are present in Part Two.
So it is a film that is replicating a wide range of sources. Even leaving aside the very obvious, indeed ridiculously so, elements of Star Wars that populate just about every frame to some degree, there is so much else: off the top of my head I can name things as varied as Warhammer 40K, Dune, Firefly, Titanic, Saving Private Ryan, Princess Mononoke, Julius Caesar and Heavy Metal wherein elements have been used as an influence, or just flat-out lifted entirely. Whether it is characters, plot points, scenes or just props, it really does feel as if everything in The Scargiver was found in another property, picked up, dusted off a bit and then inserted clumsily into this smorgasbord of gothic sci-fi.
The characters remain mostly empty shells, just as they were in A Child Of Fire. Yes, there is a remarkably clumsy Last Supper-esque scene (let’s add the Bible to that list of influences then, with this as obvious as that Gethsemane scene in Man Of Steel) wherein the Seven (Eight/Nine?) Samurai get the chance to blurt out their backstories in more detail, each in the form of an exhausting slow-motion flashback of generic tragedy, but it’s like someone is reading out a fandom wiki page for each of them. They remain those empty shells, and when they are empty shells then it is very hard to care about any of the peril that they end up being put in for most of the second half of this production, and very hard to really rate any of the performances behind them. This cast, as accomplished as so much of it is, can’t do much with these tools. And sometimes the script itself lets them down in other ways: the tired, sexist and frankly creepy trope of a woman falling for a man who saves her from being sexually assaulted pops up here, and adds a certain sense of revulsion to a fair bit of the film’s narrative.
And it is an ugly film. It’s a Snyder-movie, and where that style sometimes works, the grim darkness of this universe, wherein slow-mo is used in a manner that seems almost to punish the audience by making you stay in ugly frame after ugly frame for much longer than you really want to, means that Rebel Moon, from start to finish, exhaust you. There’s only so much exchange of lasers amid dust storms and bleak armour that you can take before you start getting bored, and then before you start getting annoyed. There’s no respite from it anywhere: if we’re not farming on a dirtheap planet we are fighting in kicked up amounts of that dirt, or in dingy barns or in that spaceship that Games Workshop should really be raising an eyebrow at. Everything is sark, bleak, oppressive, suffocating. This sort of universe needs more brightness, more inventive uses of colour, more imagination. The fact that we stay resolutely on “Veldt” in The Scargiver, as opposed to the planet-hopping of A Child Of Fire, doesn’t help in that regard.
And it isn’t as if Zach Snyder doesn’t have an imagination, because there are a few moments in this film that demonstrate that he very much does. The problem is that it is employed in creating scenes and moments so odd, they stand out as some of the strangest I have ever seen. How else can you describe a flashback to a royal assassination that features, alongside child murder, a literal string quartet sitting off to the side that change the way they play as the scene progresses, getting tenser as the knives appear? Or the full Snyder dramatic slow-motion treatment for a sequence where the characters all help to get a harvest in? Or the revelation that the Imperium’s fearsome war machines capable of interstellar travel appear to be running on coal shovelled into furnaces by 19th century Dickens characters? Other moments of inventiveness, like a sword fight taking place as the combatants slide down the hanger of a plummeting spaceship, come too late and don’t last long enough to make the kind of impression they need to make.
I don’t want to belabour this, because I really do feel that this is one instance where I am repeating myself ad nauseum, for a film that really is just the second half of an experience I formed a judgement on back in December of last year. I generally have liked the work of Zach Snyder over the years, or at least have had a greater appreciation for it than a lot of others. But I can’t really endorse this new effort at a grand operatic space-based franchise. To reiterate then, we have a film that takes roughly 99% of its make-up from other sources, populates its narrative with worthless characters that the cast cannot do much with and it looks remarkably unpleasant for the genre that it deigns to be a part of. And we’re probably going to get another six of them I suppose. Not recommended.
(All images are copyright of Netflix).
Never Felt Better 