With zero fanfare, or buzz or anticipation whatsoever, Netflix has released the second half of Rebel Moon, giving it the ridiculous title The Scargiver.
If you thought now your questions would finally be answered, like what the hell a “rebel moon” is, you’d be mistaken.
At least they are giving us the other half of the movie, proving that this shouldn’t have been split up in the first place. As a standalone movie, this just simply doesn’t work.
All the “story” stuff was shoved into the first “film”, leaving part two with nothing but long extended slow motion shots of folks harvesting wheat. It felt like what it was, filler to pad out the runtime.
If 30 minutes of harvesting wheat sounds exciting to you, well… I mean, Zone of Interest won the Oscar for best foreign picture and that film is literally just housekeeping the movie. To be fair, at least stuff did happen in Rebel Moon Part Two aside from harvesting wheat.
It also featured some really bad and cringy dialogue. The kind of generic dialogue where you can guess almost every line before it’s said.
The issue is, until the small farm and oh boy is this thing tiny, gets invaded, nothing happens.
I’m going to try my best to capture every single plot hole and laugh out loud moments I remember. But there’s almost something in every scene, so I’m bound to pass over something and honestly, I don’t know how just telling you will translate. Some things just need to be seen to be understood.
Going into part two, I don’t really know if I was expecting more out of it. Part one, basically set the stage for what you could expect this go around. The only difference this time for me was I had a fancy new surround sound system to watch this with. And Netflix does a pretty good job with Dolby Atmos. So, I guess if anything, I thought maybe the booming sound will keep my interest up and me awake.
And I’m just now realizing that the expensive surround sound I bought could have been a tax write off or deduction. Shit, man. That seriously didn’t occur to me until just now while writing this. Too late now, I guess. I could have gotten the really really expensive Nakamichi Dragon that I actually wanted.
As I ponder that, let’s get back to the review. Oh, the enhanced audio didn’t help anyways. I still found myself falling asleep during the second half of this movie.
Part two picks up where the first half left off, with Kora, our very bland and unremarkable or even memorable lead character, as she and her fellow completely forgettable warriors show up at the village they are there to protect.
I mentioned this before, but man is this village tiny. I think it has maybe 4 huts that make up the whole thing. With maybe 30 people living there, yet we see about a hundred of them dying left and right when the battle happens.
I honestly have no idea why they are trying so hard to protect this place. Everything we’ve seen of this planet so far has been pretty barren, I don’t see why they couldn’t just pack up and go somewhere else.
I’m not sure how long Kora have been gone, but I guess it was long enough for the harvest to grow. In that time, the villagers maybe could have relocated or at least grown a separate crop away from the village.
Do I need to recap the first film? Just read my Rebel Moon: Part One review for it instead. Basically, it’s Seven Samurai mixed with Warhammer 40K.
That’s another thing I want to touch on as well. Why make this expansive world with so much lore but limit it within a retelling of Seven Samurai? It reminds me of the first Purge film, where they set it in this fun and interesting world but limited it to just a generic home invasion movie.
Not that what Zack Snyder has done here is all that interesting with this universe’s lore. It is mostly a hodgepodge of a bunch of other things you’ve already seen before like Star Wars or Dune or Warhammer… the list keeps going on, making none of what Snyder has presented here as interesting, but at least the lore is better than a rehashed Seven Samurai story line.
Speaking of…
Our heroes arrive and are welcomed into the village. I believe they brought six people with them. Well, duh, it’s Seven Samurai of course it’s 6, seven if you count Kora, I guess.
The soldier they left behind, who looks a lot like generic brand Furiosa, which was a point of confusion for me because not only do these two characters look alike, but generic brand Furiosa is a character the first film introduced at the very last second, and you have absolutely no idea who she is.
She is quite literally Mr. Poopybutthole from Rick and Morty. A character that has never been introduced but claims to have always been there.
Where was I? Oh yeah, the soldier left behind who joins the villagers is still in communication with an imperial dreadnought, The King’s Gaze. Hilariously though because of everyone’s accents it sounds like The Gays.
Several times they’d mention how the gays are coming. The gays are coming in their fabulous ship.
So, the village has 5 days to harvest the wheat and set a trap for the gays.
In those 5 days, not only do they harvest everything, in slow motion I might add, but the teen girl Kora saved from gang rape by soldiers, handcrafted the warriors this crochet blanket… I don’t know what they are.
She goes around to each of them and presents it to them. How did she have the time to make these? I was also interested to see what she’d say about generic brand Furiosa as hers was presented. I think she said some bullshit about her strength. I call her generic brand Furiosa because her head is shaved and has black makeup spread over her eyes like Furiosa in Fury Road.
There are a lot of moments like this with the crochet blanket presenting that is played to be emotional but comes off as melodramatic and at times super cringy.
Speaking of, right after this our ex general character Titus, interrupts their celebration to just sing out a song. Explaining it might not give it justice to how strange this moment is, but adds on to that melodramatic, almost pretentious thing that is running rampant in the first half of this movie.
I’m shocked Zack Snyder couldn’t find a way to film this scene in slow motion.
After that, we get a scene where our main characters give us their backstories. If you’re thinking maybe this should have been done in the first movie, you’re right. It sure as shit should have!
Titus starts us off with his cliff notes, by talking about how he refused to nuke a city, so he had to watch his men get nuked instead.
Up next was the Asian lady with lightsabers whose name is… let me look this one up real fast. Nemesis? Really?
Her backstory made absolutely zero sense. They don’t mention this until the last half of the first film but hers is a story of revenge because the Imperium killed her family.
I honestly didn’t know she was meant to be a cyborg though. Her backstory is her world got attacked and to get revenge she cuts off her own arms to add these robot arms that I guess help her fight and makes her swords glow.
My first thought was, that’s dumb, but also how do you know where to cut? Like what if you don’t cut the right amount off and you have uneven robot arms? Or what if you don’t cut enough and you have super long robot arms?
Next!
Now on to our Tarzan character, if you remember he is the caveman-like guy who used to be a prince. But oddly, his world was like that world in Super Mario Odyssey, where it was this cross between real life 1940’s noir but with giant eagles.
He said some really stupid shit about you don’t become a man until your father dies or something idiotic like that because his father the king went to negotiate with The Imperium, but they killed him instead.
God, who was next in line to give us the cliff notes of their backstory… oh wait it was generic brand Furiosa. Her big story was she was a miner who the rebels saved. That’s it. The utter pointlessness of this character knows no bounds.
Kora’s backstory was told to us in an earlier scene, which was also hilarious. She’s the bodyguard to the princess and as the king and queen of The Imperium are exploring a new or was it old ship, they are trapped in an old fashion assassination attempt taken from how Caesar was killed.
What made this scene really funny however is they walk into a room where a band is playing and the music they play matches the situation they are in, getting intense and dramatic as the king and queen are being killed.
At first, I thought it was just the score, but nope, it was the band playing along to their murder. Then to add to the hilarity, we get this slow motion scene of the elders who just killed the king and queen turn on Kora, slow-mo barking at her. It’s so bizarre.
While all this is happening with the village, we cut to Admiral Noble who Kora killed at the end of the first movie but is somehow resurrected. But resurrected with super strength. It isn’t at all clear what is going on with him, is he a clone? A robot? Don’t know. But he does give the funniest line in the movie as Kora left him with a scar on his chest and he says something like the Scargiver has given me a scar. The dialogue here was written by a child with ADHD, I swear.
Somewhere along the way Kora and the milquetoast farmer Gunnar become lovers, whose name becomes insanely ironic towards the end, just you wait.
After the farming scene, we then get a training montage where the warriors try to teach the villagers to fight. And the preparations are hilarious because all this is taking place in 5 days, so in those 5 remaining days they managed to harvest the wheat fields, crochet 6 blankets by one person, learn to fight, build underground tunnels and plant explosives.
Just for fun, let’s look up how long it would take to dig a war trench. So, if you have 450 men, you could build one like seen in the movie in about 6 hours. But there is no way this tiny village had that many people in it or that many men.
Let’s look up a war tunnel.
30 days. You can’t see it, but I’m doing the Captain Picard facepalm meme.
They also dug out Kora’s ship, which magically still works, but plants it in a mountain big enough to probably hold half the village like say the women and children who they cram in a hut that immediately gets attacked by the enemy.
Okay, for shits and giggles, how much weight can horses pull. Or accurately, let’s see how many could pull a tank as that’s about the equivalent.
From what I found it would take about 40 horses to probably pull Kora’s ship out from the dirt. They had maybe 10. If that.
Research, guys. It might not seem important, but it really is.
The gays finally show up in their dreadnought, scanning the tiny 4 hut village and notice not only did they pack all the women and children in one place, but have stacked all the grain around the huts so they can’t fire on them from up high.
They send out troops to surround the village, forcing Kora to surrender but Gunnar wants to fight, so he rings the town bell, the alarm that lets everyone know it is time to strike.
This is where all the action happens, so it has to be better than the last hour, right? Not really. For one, I have an issue with the weapons they use. It looks like they are shooting paintballs at everyone, getting hit with colorful splats as they take fire.
Speaking of taking fire, our warriors being Titus and Tarzan, just openly run out in the line of fire, never getting touched, however almost 100 of these 30 villagers get shot left and right.
The whole time though I’m also wondering where the hell generic brand Furiosa is, as she is nowhere to be seen.
Our robot ninja lady however, who they setup to be this untouchable badass, is the first to die. Pretty unceremoniously too. She instantly gets one of her robot arms cut off and has to have a kid jump in to save her by stabbing the dude in the dick.
Aside from some random villagers who I assume we are meant to remember or care about, no one else dies. Oh wait, there is one more, but I won’t get to that until a bit later.
The villagers blow up a few of the ships, and set off a few bombs under the tunnels, taking out the first siege, but somehow missed the hundred others behind them who now have a tank.
That’s when generic brand Furiosa finally shows up to snipe soldiers from a window before getting set on by the tank. She goes underground and grabs the rocket launcher, blowing up the tank. Hooray, she did something. I still don’t know or care who she is though.
Kora and Gunnar fly their ship up to the dreadnought, disguised as an enemy ship, sneaking onboard. Their goal is to blow up the engine. This is also bizarre, so the engine to the ship looked like a face. And as she plants a few bombs on it, its eyes open like it’s alive.
I don’t really understand the implication here. Like are these enslaved beings they use to power their ships? Is it really alive? The funny thing though is we do see under it and it’s like an old coal powered cruise ship with workers shoveling in stuff to burn in a furnace.
I got to hand it to Zack Snyder, I’ve never heard of a coal powered spaceship before. That’s a new one. It’s stupid as shit, but I guess it’s original.
Now for Gunnar’s big play, not really living up to his name, unless it’s one of those ironic nicknames like calling a fat dude slim.
Kora gets ambushed just outside their ship, that Gunnar stayed behind to get ready for their quick exit. It’s literally just outside as he sees Atticus Noble, and a subordinate have her surrounded. I don’t even think their weapons are drawn, but Gunnar decides to shoot the subordinate instead of the super powered reanimated corpse. Which does lead to him getting stabbed and eventually dying.
Oh, and this whole showdown is just a rehash of the last fight Kora and Noble had, but this time the ship is tipping out of the sky because they set off the bombs.
I’d have to go back and rewatch the ending to part one, but it felt shot for shot the same.
I completely forgot about the robot. Anthony Hopkins voices Jimmy the robot. I forgot about this character because he literally does nothing the entire two films. In the first he runs off to be one with nature, returns in part two to overlook the tiny village and then give Kora some encouraging words like you’re all going to die. And then he fucks off back to wherever he goes to when not being a creeper.
He does finally show up at the last second to take out the remaining tank and the other soldiers. He’s also bullet proof from their splat weapons.
Then Devra Bloodaxe and her rebels show up to do nothing as everything has pretty much been taken care of by then.
And to wrap things up, they tease us with a sequel. No, please stop him, Netflix. With 200 million you can do so many more things, most likely better things. If there are more, take writing the script away from him and give it to someone else, literally anyone would be better.
Zack Snyder has proven again and again the man can’t write. He can’t do characters, dialogue, story, anything other than that of a cinematographer. But his last film Army of the Dead, he can’t even do that right as that film not only has countless dead pixels but is literally out of focus half the time. I know I keep bringing this up but what a terrible movie that was.
The real question though, what is better? The Rebel Moon movies or Army of the Dead? I shit on Rebel Moon, but at least visually, it has some things going for it. Very little things, but something is better than nothing, which is what Army of the Dead had.
Apparently, Snyder wants to make Rebel Moon a trilogy, which mean 6 movies. Maybe on the 6th film we will finally find out what a rebel moon is.
Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver gets SKIP rating!
Want EARLY access to our videos, uploads, and movie/script reviews? Members get them FIRST! Follow this link to our Discussion Forum.
