Rebel Moon Part Two: The Scargiver is now streaming on Netflix
Rebel Moon creator Zach Snyder had hailed Part One: A Child of Fire as an exciting new dawn for the blockbuster sci-fi arena. He boasted of a two-part story that would kick off an expanded screen exploration of a bustling galaxy ruled over by a militaristic regime with a ragtag group of warriors, outcasts, and resistance fighters battling to dismantle it. But after two hours and 15 minutes in Snyder’s redressed version of the Star Wars universe, Part One proved an unsatisfactory, half-baked action movie cobbled together from the parts of far more inspired genre fare. Unsurprisingly, Rebel Moon Part Two: The Scargiver’s concluding chapter (which has arrived just four months later) offers only a slight improvement, thanks to its simpler story and a far more enticing climactic battle but two more hours of the same shallow characters and plot.
Barely coloring outside the lines of its inspiration, the plot of The Scargiver plays out like Seven Samurai/The Magnificent Seven meets Return of the Jedi, with the warrior crew returning to the moon of Veldt to protect the villagers from the Imperium army still seeking to steal their space grain. They have a ticking clock counting down until an Imperium dreadnought arrives in their atmosphere, and given that time pressure it’s especially absurd that Snyder spends a gratuitous amount of time showing the villagers and warriors harvesting the land. There’s so much slo-mo reaping, threshing, winnowing, and lens flare that you half expect the voiceover of Anthony Hopkins’ mechanical knight, James, to come in with a Lao Tzu-inspired quote saying: “Give a man a bag of grain and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to harvest and you feed him for a lifetime.” Incidentally, James’ robot-gone-native gimmick is utterly confounding and provides little value to the story, save for a late tag-team entry into the fray.
If these early scenes feel like filler, it’s because their abundance of flashbacks is a lethargic attempt at providing backstory and character insight that hinders the pace and rarely deepens any of the relationships. Take an early post-coital exposition dump from Kora (Sofia Boutella). As she lies in the arms of her farmer lover Gunnar (Michiel Huisman) she reveals the role she played during the assassination of the royal family. It’s somewhat hilarious to hear a string quartet furiously playing while a brutal murder takes place on screen, but it’s an otherwise predictable scene that relies on a voiceover to tell us about a threat to the Imperium war machine rather than conveying it through natural dialogue between the characters. There’s also an eye-rolling line dropped against Kora by her adopted dad, calling her a “cancer of ethnic impurity” due to her darker skin tone. It is 2024 and writers are still lazily copying and pasting contemporary racial biases onto sci-fi characters living in a diverse galaxy of species and aliens set thousands of years in the future, with no imagination whatsoever. Somewhere, Carl Sagan is rolling in his grave.
A similarly on-the-nose sensation occurs in a contrived group therapy session initiated by ex-Imperium general Titus (Djimon Honsou). Like a Warriors Anonymous meeting, each fighter confirms that their lives and/or homeworlds have been ruined by the Motherworld’s barbaric conquest in a series of monologues. To Honsou and Doona Bae’s credit, their ability to imbue depth and emotionality into their performances does slightly elevate the clunky narration.
These…
This article was originally published by a www.ign.com . Read the Original article here. .