Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver’ on Netflix, Another Zack Snyder Slo-mo Bacchanal in Space

Just typing the words Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver (now on Netflix) is exhausting. The dash. The colon. The stupid made-up compound word. The fact that four short months ago, I had to type the words Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire after gutting out 133 minutes of Zack Snyder’s tumescent Slo-Mo Sci-Fi. The opening missive of the love-him-or-hate-him filmmaker’s would-be/wannabe/might-not-be sprawling franchise was slated to be a holiday-season “tentpole” for Netflix, but it only managed the ninth-best debut from the streamer in 2023 – a disappointing number that doesn’t bode well for the future of these films. But Rebel Moon 2 was filmed concurrently with the first, so onward we slog, with extended R-rated versions of these movies pending, and dangling plot threads teasing Rebel Moon – Part Three: Oh God Please Don’t I’m Begging You Please Please Please.   

REBEL MOON – PART TWO: THE SCARGIVER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: You almost certainly don’t remember what happened in Rebel Moon 1, considering how derivative and generic it is. Fortunately, we get a recap at the beginning of Rebel Moon 2; unfortunately, the summation isn’t visual but verbal, via Anthony Hopkins voiceover, which immediately buries us in a pile of obtuse sci-fi proper nouns like Glornmar and Flerg and Yttlbean. First rule of screenwriting: don’t do this. It’s boring and stultifying and the storytelling equivalent of putting lead boots on Usain Bolt then firing the starting gun. Anyway, you’ve probably forgotten that our hero Kora (Sofia Boutella) got into a furious battle with bad guy Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein) and left him for dead. But she should’ve made sure, because bad guys in movies that rip off Star Wars without a slightest smidgen of shame always can be resurrected with the dread evil science of Space Nazis. And so Atticus is pulled very much alive from a goop-and-tube chamber, angry that Kora left a scar on his chest that looks like someone set a really really really really really really hot cup of coffee right beneath his pec. And so he dubs her The Scargiver, and vows revenge. Perhaps it’s worth noting that the first thing Atticus does upon awakening is deliver some exposition, because god help us if we don’t keep up with the plot.

To help fight the Space Nazis in the first movie, Kora, you probably vaguely recall, assembled a crack team of misfits for her 2 Space Fast 2 Space Furious crew: Her lover Gunnar (Michael Huisman). Titus (Djimon Hounsou), a warrior with a knack for making grand expository pronouncements. Tarak (Staz Nair), whose abs could stop a freight train. Nemesis (Doona Bae), a cyborg who wields lightsabers laser machetes. And Milius (Elise Duffy), who wears a warpainted stripe over their eyes that tells us they Mean Business. The crew holes up on Kora’s adopted home of Veldt, a moon populated with humble farmfolk who all look like they belong in a production of Little House on the Space Prairie. They catch word that Atticus ain’t kaput, and will descend upon Veldt in his space U-boat and legions of faceless laser fodder, bent on destrucitificating everyone, thus allowing him to drink deep from the crystalline waters of vengeance and squash the rebellion that threatens to topple his dear Motherworld empire.

And now we get to the thing with the wheat. This will be a major discussion point about Rebel Moon 2, because the sequence is very long and consists of golden hour-drenched shots of the heroes and the farmfolk scything wheat and gathering hay and grinding grain to flour and putting the flour in bags and tossing the bags over their shoulders and dropping the bags in barns. Sorta like spice in Dune, if you control the wheat, you control the universe, although it’s never quite made clear why, other than the implication that said flour would make some halfway decent bread for toast and PBJs and such. Next comes a sequence in which the warriors help the villagers train to become soldiers by setting up straw men and letting the newbs shoot laser guns at them, and voila, now they’re ready to maim some jerks. Then, on the eve of the big battle, we pause for all the aforementioned warriors to bore us with their traumatic backstories, a portion of the film that doesn’t really flesh out the characters much, but absolutely fills a lot of time, so feel free to fast-forward through it so you can get to the big battle sooner. And then there’s the big battle, with the scrappy ragtag misfit heroes vs. the imperialist monolith. Gee, I wonder who will win.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Dune 2 and Rebel Moon 2 dropped into the watch-at-home sphere in the same week, and represent two methods of sci-fi storytelling: The shitty way and the good way. It’s your guess as to which is which.

Performance Worth Watching: I’ll take this moment to assert that I’d like to see the sublimely talented Hounsou do something besides take bit or supporting roles in megafranchises (he’s turned up in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the DC films, all the A Quiet Places, a Fast and Furious flick and a few lessers like Tarzan, King Arthur and Charlie’s Angels).

Memorable Dialogue: This technically doesn’t exist in Rebel Moon 2, where the werdz people speak add up to a nigh-unclimbable mountain of turgid exposition. But I do appreciate how stupid and funny everyone sounds when they don’t use contractions, e.g., Kora gravely intoning, “Do not speak of me when you speak of honor and bravery.”

Sex and Skin: None, although the impending R-rated version allegedly has wild alien nookie scenes. 

Our Take: Do not speak of Rebel Moon when you speak of movies that are good and watchable. One of the meager joys audiences may get from enduring this junkola is dusting off the ol’ stopwatch and timing the slo-mo – it’s gotta be at least 40 percent of the movie, whether Snyder captures the heroic poses of our soot-and-blood-caked protags in the thick of battle, or the heroic poses of our dust-and-dirt-caked protags in the thick of cutting wheat. Wheat. Fields and fields of wheat. Wheat. Yellow wheat. Red wheat. CREAM of wheat. Wheat.

Alas, the only harvest Snyder yields is indigestible. Watching Rebel Moon 2 is the equivalent of being tied down and force-fed dry shovelfuls of the Veldtians’ finely granulated flour. Granted, it’s a streamlined film relative to the first Rebel Moon, which was two hours of setup with the occasional snatch of zaperoo sci-fi excitement; this one is structurally divided neatly in half, frontloaded with tedious garbage and backloaded with a lengthy battle sequence with all the requisite sub-battles that allow the protagonist heroes their moments of glory. May I call it the Battle for the Grain? There’s a moment when Atticus orders his shitbird minions to obliterate everything on Veldt, and one of his subordinates blurts, “But sir – the grain!” This is the only moment when the movie inspires something from its audience besides ennui; too bad it’s a derisive laugh.

The hourlong fight is clearly the film’s big fat main course, and while Snyder doles out something resembling excitement, it’s exceedingly difficult to give a damn, considering the characters are lifeless, the dramatic stakes are muddled, the director frequently foregoes stunt choreography for editing-room trickery, and it all would last about half as long if it was shot at regular speed. I’d say all the slo-mo is Snyder engaging in self-parody, but it’s so excessive, it smothers the whole endeavor with phony gravitas. It’s weird how his signature move is so distinctive while the storytelling is sub-generic dreck drafting off Star Wars and Aliens and The Seven Samurai and countless other films.  

Our Call: SKIP IT. Snyder’s style isn’t as tasteless as his closest competitor, Michael Bay, but it seems perfectly suited for this era of utterly forgettable Netflix programmers that seem engineered to be forgotten lightning-quick.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.