REBEL MOON: PART TWO – THE SCARGIVER

Rebel Moon: Part Two – The Scargiver, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 19, 2024

More than two hours of setup and exposition apparently weren't enough for the makers of this two-part science-fiction "epic." Rebel Moon: Part Two – The Scargiver provides yet another hour of establishing the premise of the simplistic plot and the back stories of its main characters before finally getting to a routine climactic showdown between a band of freelance warriors and an imperialistic army. That this installment opens with a 90-second recap of the events of the previous movie feels as if co-writer/director Zack Snyder is just adding insult to injury.

It's not the run time that matters, obviously. It's what the filmmakers do with it, and this continuation, which promises/threatens an additional chapter or several of this story of an alliance of rebels fighting against an evil galactic empire (but, for legal reasons, neither of the specific parties from the particular movies those phrases bring to mind), doesn't do much. The plot here is as predictable as the first movie's setup suggested, as a team of six samurai-like fighters (They lost one on the way back) have finally arrived at a farming village on an isolated moon ready for battle.

Unfortunately, Snyder and his fellow returning screenwriters, Shay Hatten and Kurt Johnstad, aren't quite ready for the obvious payoff they told us was coming from the very first act of the previous installment. Kora (Sofia Boutella) and Gunnar (Michiel Huisman), who left this world to recruit warriors to fight soldiers of the Imperium threatening to take all of the village's precious grain, have to have a hasty romance, after all. That includes some uncomfortable pillow talk, as Kora explains how she went from the main bodyguard of a princess to a fugitive. At this point in the story, it's a revelation that means very little. We're well past the point of even being curious about these broad archetypes, who already received an entire movie's worth of opportunity to explain these details.

Instead, though, the four recruits get yet more opportunities—this time going one after the other filling the unnecessary blanks of their tragic histories. Titus (Djimon Hounsou), the disgraced Imperium general, explains that what we previously saw of his back story is exactly what it looked like—that his men were executed in explosive style in front of him for disobeying murderous orders.

Tarak (Staz Nair), who can tame and control wild beasts, was a prince before the evildoers killed his father and destroyed his home world, and Milius (E. Duffy), who was essentially the team's third choice for having an official rebel among the crew, was rescued from slave labor. The only slight surprise is to learn how Nemesis (Doona Bae), the wielder of energy-emitting blades, got her robotic arms, and that is pretty much the extent of the movie's ability to surprise with material that's cobbled together—and not at all well—from familiar stories.

Oh, there's a lot of harvesting in that first section, too. Yes, the warriors and villagers still have to rush to gather the crop before the resurrected Admiral Noble (Ed Skrein), who basically gets to recreate his climactic showdown with Kora amidst a slightly different but equally noisy backdrop, and his planet-devastating spaceship arrive. A lot of that is shown in slow-motion, because, surely, the processes of reaping and milling grain are the most pressing of matters at the moment. Less important, apparently, is training these meager farmers to use blaster rifles and other weapons to defend themselves against an army of well-trained and heavily armed soldiers, walking tanks, and flying fighter vehicles.

The whole of the movie's priorities are off, but that shouldn't come as a surprise after the previous entry, which, as we now know, couldn't even lay the groundwork of these characters and the not-so-imminent conflict. When the big battle finally arrives, the characters get to show off their skills with various degrees of success, and those who might have wondered what happened to the pacifist robot Jimmy (voice of Anthony Hopkins) will now likely wonder how his programming shifted to transform him into a death-dealing, literal deus ex machina. The android's not the only example of that here, by the way.

All of Rebel Moon: Part Two – The Scargiver unfolds exactly as anyone who has knowledge of any basics of storytelling could predict, and unlike the first movie, this follow-up only has one generic location to span its lazy tale. After all that is said (and said and said again) and done, it's still not enough, because the ending sets up another adventure for our heroes—or, at least, the start of a theoretical adventure that might actually happen two or three or who-knows-how-many movies from now.

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