Review: ‘Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver’ is a nadir for Zack Snyder, and streaming cinema as a whole

When part one of Rebel Moon, A Child of Fire, introduced us all to Zack Snyder‘s new sci-fi franchise, there was one thing that became absolutely clear; it is not possible to discern whether this man has fully bought in to the narrative surrounding him, or if he’s starkly oblivious to it. The narrative, of course, being that he’s an acolyte of the “rule of cool,” with both the genre fiction eagerness and storytelling ability of a small child.

That question has only become more impossible with Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver, boasting the exact same, unprecedently amateurish makings of its predecessor and doubling down on them in the least effective way possible. It’s a film that is so impossibly committed to its own helpless emptiness, that engaging with it at all is something of a chore, and while the actors generally hold up their end up the deal performance-wise, the sheer dearth of competency in the rest of The Scargiver actually results in that working against the film. In a sentence, what’s become absolutely clear this time around is that it is not possible, at this point in time, to critique anything in the Rebel Moon franchise without constantly being in danger of redundancy; that’s right, The Scargiver is, quite literally, contagiously uninspired.

The film sees Sofia Boutella reprise her role as protagonist Kora, who’s returned to her adopted home planet with the band of warriors she recruited in A Child of Fire, and prepares for the defense of her village against the tyrannical Motherworld. Noble (Ed Skrein), meanwhile, plots a more personal assault on Kora herself as retribution for the scar she gave him.

Yes, that last part is why the film is called The Scargiver, and there is literally a scene in this movie where Noble monologues about how he’s going to show off the scar to the whole of the Senate to symbolize his victory over “the Scargiver” when he defeats Kora. Nothing quite epitomizes the depths of a script’s weakness than a villain telling you why his big moment is going to be cool, even if that big moment never happens.

Indeed, it’s one thing to have a messy plot or ridiculous dialogue, both of which can be easily remedied by enthusiasm from the cast (the Fast & Furious films have this down to a T), but The Scargiver has none of these things. The plot isn’t messy so much as it’s non-existent, with the overwhelming majority of the runtime consisting of useless exposition, fighting, and far more slow-motion farming than any film, much less a space opera, should have. The dialogue isn’t ridiculous so much as it’s blankly encyclopedic, hardly ever serving as anything more than a descriptive audio equivalent and/or connective tissue for its swath of unearned emotional beats. The cast isn’t enthusiastic so much as they’re trapped by a script that more or less forces them to approach to their characters as straight as possible, and while the main cast sell that approach with all their might (particularly Boutella, Skrein, and Djimon Hounsou), they’re entirely powerless against the script from Snyder, Kurt Johnstad, Shay Hatten, and whatever tabletop RPG textbook-writing AI software that they might as well have fed a Star Wars-themed prompt to.

To the point of character, Snyder doesn’t seem to understand that having a whole bunch of cool lore for everyone in his own head does not automatically make them interesting to other people; characterization does, in fact, need to occur. Going into The Scargiver, all we effectively know about Kora’s band of rebels is that they’re really good at fighting; a point that’s verbally repeated on more than one occasion throughout the film, just in case we forget. By the end of The Scargiver, all we know about Kora’s band of rebels is that they’re really good at fighting, and that their lives were all torn apart by the Motherworld in some way, shape, or form; we learn this because Titus literally gathers them all so he can tell them to share their backstories with each other. This universal characterization failure all comes to a front with one major character death; one that gets played like a devastating gut-punch despite the fact that most of the film’s extras had been given roughly the same development, and could have been rotated into the death scene to similar effect.

It’s not just we the audience that suffer from watching these exposition-spewing nothing-burgers go about their farming and insurgencies. Whether it’s the out-of-the-blue romance between Kora and Gunnar (a romance almost entirely summed up—across two movies—with an evening of off-screen love-making followed by Kora telling us part of her backstory once they finish) or the single, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it attempt at inter-squad banter (again, across two movies) that highlights the film’s disdain for characterization more than anything, it is well and truly painful—even embarrassing—watching them try and have any interpersonal rapport with each other whatsoever.

And sure, maybe the visual effects are fine, maybe the score is well-crafted, and maybe the combat is marginally diverting, but the problem with The Scargiver is that it has no identity for any of this stuff to even attach itself to, so it just winds up as noise for the sake of noise, unable to be enjoyed in the wake of such foundationally insulting filmmaking. Creating art is important, and Snyder, like anyone, should feel no shame about his art in the context of his experience. But to occupy this sort of professional, lucrative creative space while putting out something like The Scargiver, is a whole other ballpark/context that can — and should — be subject to shame. And with Snyder having promised even more extreme sex and violence in the inevitable director’s cuts of the Rebel Moon films rather than any actual creative improvements, he seems to be entirely convinced that The Scargiver and its ilk are ready to be produced at the caliber that they are, and that is 100% an open invitation to be labeled as a hack.

All in all, it’s time for Snyder to pull the plug on Rebel Moon, bring it back to the factory, and either reassess the approach or, ideally, commit to a Rebel Moon tabletop RPG as the primary pivot point for this IP; the latter would probably be the less laborious of the two given that both films are, textually, more similar to a game than a movie. It’s clear that the universe Snyder has in his head is sprawling, and there’s absolutely a world where Rebel Moon manifests as the best version of itself, but with The Scargiver having given us more of the same that A Child of Fire introduced us to, Rebel Moon, as it is now, is clearly operating as the worst version of itself, and it is abhorrently stressful to think that that operation is set to continue.

And if by some chance Snyder himself happens upon this, I only hope he knows that the words “The Scargiver sucks, you should know it sucks, you need to do better” come in equal measure from a place of wanting all art to be as great as it possibly can, and utter despondency with which I and many others have had to watch Rebel Moon unfold the way it has so far.