Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver review – Here we go a-grain!

Here’s something I wasn’t expecting to say: Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver is a better film than its predecessor. There are two ginormous caveats that go with that assessment though.

Firstly, it’s all relative. The Scargiver is better than Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire in the same way that a punch in the teeth is better than a kick in the nether regions. One is definitely preferable, but they both still hurt. Secondly, The Scargiver is not a film. Not a whole one anyway. Following on from all the waffling team building of the first Rebel Moon, The Scargiver is nothing more than the extended Act 3 of a collective four-hour story that could easily have been told in two hours. Its entire plot can be summed up in just eight words: “Farmers fight against an evil empire over grain”. (Just why said empire, possessed of advanced enough technology to travel between galaxies, has to have this specific grain, is never even explained)

Lead Sofia Boutella tries to breathe some badass life into Kora, her former Imperium soldier and titular “Scargiver” turned reluctant rebel leader, while Ed Skrein’s toothy sadism at least makes his returning Imperium Admiral Atticus Noble (he was dead, he got better) a bit of a fun villain, but they and the rest of the cast have threadbare fare to work from. In an unexpected upside though, it’s precisely because there’s so much less going on, there’s also less that can go wrong.

As a Child of Fire zip-zapped from one end of this same-same-but-different-but-still-same universe to the other, it tried and failed abysmally to build a new sci-fi mythology around the evil Motherworld empire and get us to care about the papier-mâché characters fighting against it, all of which were stolen without shame or guile from far superior works. The Scargiver, on the other hand, narrows its scope considerably, ending up as nothing more than a straightforward skop, skiet, en donder action film, set exclusively in/above a village on the dusty planet Veldt. Half of its two-hour runtime is a single noisy battle.

Said battle is the film’s entire raison d’etre, and here Snyder’s eye for splash-page action comes to the fore, even if his trademark slow-motion is so overused that it borders on the sexually deviant. One particularly fiery 1v1 throwdown between Kora and Noble aboard a rapidly descending spaceship is a thrilling highlight. It’s also on said ship that the Rebel Moon universe’s admittedly intriguing production design shines. An intergalactic ship engine that is a living stone head which still needs manually fed coal ovens? Humans brought back from the dead by techno-priests with slimy chrysalises and neon light cables plugged into their gaping skulls? Sign me up to know more about these anachronistic mashups!

Of course, we don’t get to know more about much of anything really. Outside of one particularly clumsy scene in which General Titus (Djimon Hounsou) has Kora’s other assembled would-be rebels take turns in explaining their rote backstories, the rest of the film’s non-battle runtime is instead mostly spent on… *checks notes*… farming montages. If you’ve ever wanted to watch musclebound warriors harvest and mill grain – IN SLOW MOTION – this is the movie for you. Meanwhile, the characters are narratively still so gaunt and derivative that they’re nothing more than a collection of visual cues: the terminally bare chested one with axes, the mopey cybernetic one with totally-not-lightsabers, the hunky but lame farmer, the… other one who I had totally forgotten was even in this movie. At least Jimmy, the Imperium robot knight defector inexplicably voiced by Sir Anthony Hopkins, and who is by far the most interesting character in this entire cosmic kerfuffle, actually gets to do more than just run away, unlike like last time.

Not that it matters what Jimmy or any of these characters did in the previous film. There’s so little to parse here that you could watch Rebel Moon – Part Two without having seen Part One and not have an issue following everything. That simplicity can be regarded as a plus. But at the same time, given that with Part One, Snyder and co-writers Shay Hatten, and Kurt Johnstad took a fragment of narrative that other films normally relegate to a few montages and then stretched it into more than two hours of setup for a resolution that was pushed back to a whole other movie, that’s rather annoying.

Even worse than that, when The Scargiver finally and much too briefly digs into Kora’s past and her involvement in the death of the mysteriously divine Motherworld princess she was assigned to protect, we’re instead given even more setup for a potential third film. The resolution doesn’t actually resolve. This is on top of the R-rated “Snyder Cuts” of both existing films that we’ve already been threatened with promised. These upcoming releases are advertised as extended versions containing better worldbuilding and more violence, strongly indicating that even the filmmakers consider the films we already got to be inferior products.

Given all that, it’s hard to recommend Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver to anybody concerned with anything so pretentious as characters or plots. But viewed as nothing more than a trashy B-grade action movie with shiny A-grade visuals, The Scargiver works. Or at least it works well enough to not leave me scarred.

Watch (or don’t watch) Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver on Netflix now, as of 19 April.