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| Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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 When your film learns absolutely nothing from its predecessor, you know you messed up badly.
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Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver is a 2024 American epic space opera film directed by Zack Snyder from a screenplay he co-wrote with Kurt Johnstad and Shay Hatten. A direct sequel to Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire (2023), the film takes place on the moon of Veldt where Kora and the crew of warriors venture to help the farmers to defend and fight for their home against the Motherworld. Sofia Boutella, Djimon Hounsou, Ed Skrein, Michiel Huisman, Doona Bae, Ray Fisher, Staz Nair, Fra Fee, Elise Duffy, Charlotte Maggi, Stuart Martin, Cary Elwes, and Anthony Hopkins reprise their roles from the first film.
Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver was released in select cinemas in the United States on April 12, 2024, and was released on Netflix on April 19, 2024. Like its predecessor, it received generally negative reviews from critics. An R-rated extended cut, titled Rebel Moon – Chapter Two: Curse of Forgiveness, is set for release on Netflix on August 2, 2024, at the same time as the director's cut of the first film. While initially announced as the second and final film of a two-part saga, new films were announced to be in development in April 2024.
Synopsis
A colony on the edge of the galaxy fights for survival against the tyrannical ruling force, relying on the efforts of a small group of rebels.
Why It Should Be Scarred For Life
- The characters were boring and forgettable in this film's predecessor, and since this is a sequel, you'd likely expect them to improve upon the characters in a case of character development. However, this film does almost nothing to improve these characters further, and doesn’t even spend enough time exploring them, despite its 2-hour runtime. Although it does at least try to explore the characters to some extent, it’s still not enough. The only form of development we get for anyone is a dinner scene reminiscent of The Last Supper by Leonardo Davinci.
- Despite the film being two hours long, and while this film has better pacing than its predecessor, it still suffers from pacing that is too fast much like its predecessor.
- Just like in many Snyder films, 10% of the movie is filled with slow-motion sequences, and much like its predecessor, most of the slow-motion scenes are completely wasted, pointless, and even jarring here which is still frustrating as the action scenes are the highlights of Zack Snyder films. It is somewhat of an improvement over its predecessor, but that isn't enough to save this film.
- Much like its predecessor along with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, The movie is outright boring, due to having an overly grim, sour mood that tries too hard to be dark and serious, and has very few lighter and humorist moments.
- This movie also falls victim to poorly written dialogue, all of which are so generic and devoid of specificity that they could have been written by AI models, while further draining any personality.
- The CGI is hit or miss. Sometimes it looks great, and other times looks like a video game cutscene.
- This movie is overfilled with narrative cliches from its character archetypes to critical plot twist moments like the betrayal.
- Dune: Part Two is another recent example of a narrative that plays to the antithesis of familiar hero tropes, yet that movie does this a lot better compared to this slop.
- Much like its predecessor, This movie can be described as Seven Samurai meets Star Wars. A helpless community is under attack by an evil military and the hero organizes a rag-tag group of misfits to stop them. Its predecessor does nothing new to its premise and it feels more like a setup for sequels than its actual movie, while this movie does absolutely nothing to improve upon its predecessor and still sets up more sequels. While the evil military has been defeated, it is revealed that Issa is alive and the heroes set off to find her.
- Given how much negative reception this and its predecessor received, it should come as absolutely no surprise that the Zack Snyder franchised that Netflix should have focused a lot more on was Army of the Dead, especially considering that Rebel Moon may not be offering long-term returns after this one, along with Army of the Dead and Army of Thieves being much more well-received.
- What's even more of a slap in the face is that Zack Snyder confirmed that Rebel Moon is set in the same universe as Army of the Dead, yet those two franchises have little to no connective threads with each other, and if anything, both of them feel a lot more like separate entries.
Redeeming Qualities
- Despite what was said earlier, this film at least does try to explore the characters a bit (albeit not very much).
- The costumes and ship designs look very cool.
- The action scenes are better than the previous film, although they are still nothing to write home about.
- The CGI is an improvement over its predecessor, despite some of them are really poorly.
- The director's cut is an improvement over this film but not by much
Reception
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 17% of 70 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 3.8/10. The website's consensus reads: "Less a course correction than a compounding of everything that tangled up its predecessor, The Scargiver is an uninvolving space opera full of flat notes." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 36 out of 100, based on 23 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable" reviews. Robbie Collin of The Telegraph awarded the movie two stars out of five, writing that “this follow-up to last December’s first installment looks good, but this space opera never makes you care who wins or loses.”