Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver Review: The Imperium Strikes Again
Cast: Sofia Boutella, Djimon Hounsou, Michiel Huisman, Staz Nair, Doona Bae, Ray Fisher, Cleopatra Coleman, Anthony Hopkins, Alfonso Herrera, Ed Skrein, Fra Fee, Cary Elwes, Elise Duffy, Stuart Martin, Rhian Rees, Charlotte Maggi.
Director: Zack Snyder
Streaming Platform: Netflix
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 3/5 (three stars)
After seeing the first part last December, the public can now discover how the saga directed by Zack Snyder, Rebel Moon, continues, whose second part, Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver (Rebel Moon Part 2) will be available on Netflix starting Friday 19 April. Also in this part 2 the protagonist is Sophie Boutella in the role of the ex-military Kora, flanked by Michiel Huisman in the part of the farmer and lover Guntar, Djimon Hounsou who is the ex-general Titus, Doona Bae who plays the infallible swordsman Nemesis, Staz Nair who is Prince Tarak and the robot soldier Jimmy, who in the original dub has the voice of Anthony Hopkins. We didn’t say nice things about Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire. The first installment of the sci-fi diptych that Zack Snyder created for Netflix seemed like a point of almost no return for the director’s cinema.
A work conceived and above all feared on a grand scale, the result of the ambition of an author who drew inspiration for a cosmos full of quotations from the remnants of an idea discarded for a project linked to the Star Wars universe. So full that it remained weighed down by the weight of sterile, artificial images, cloned in a story that in reality only ended up remaining inert under the effort of wanting to show itself as already iconic. The second part of this space opera which landed directly on streaming on the wrong foot, Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver, therefore finds itself crippled in the race. It picks up where the screenplay by Snyder, Kurt Johnstad, and Shay Hutten left us. After running across the galaxy to assemble a team of rebels, the renegade Kora/Arthelais (Sofia Boutella) has returned to the planet of Veldt to prepare the resistance against the armies of the Mother World. The very ferocious Admiral Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein) has survived the clash with Kora and is preparing to invade the village where the group has taken refuge.
Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver Review: Story Plot
After defeating Admiral Noble at the end of the previous chapter, Kora returns to Veldt with the allies recruited for the upcoming battle, and preparations begin for the final rebellion against the Imperial forces. But for Noble, who returned to life thanks to not entirely natural techniques, and his superior Balisarius the inevitable clash became much more personal after they discovered that Kora is the fugitive Arthelais, Balisarius’s adopted daughter and a leading figure in the imperial army before the killing of the sovereign and his family, which pushed her to reject her father’s philosophy. The girl, for her part, continues to deal with the feelings of guilt that have been gnawing at her for years, hoping to one day be able to redeem herself for her past actions. Kora and his company of rebel warriors, having survived a first battle against Admiral Noble and certain of having killed the enemy, return home to the planet Veldt and prepare to regroup to face a new, decisive clash against the armies of Mother World.
The warriors insert themselves into the rural life of Veldt and pretend to contribute to the wheat harvest to obey the orders of the invaders and give them all the resources cultivated on the planet. But the plan, in reality, involves trapping the enemies. In the meantime, however, the time spent together and the need to pool forces also push the warriors, picked up by Kora around the Imperium in the first episode of the saga, to lay themselves bare and each tell their own uncomfortable and painful past. The only one who can’t do it all the way is Kora, torn apart by guilt, shame, and the pain of betrayal. When the moment of reckoning with the invaders arrives, the warriors are all determined and ready to fight together with the people of Veldt for the salvation of the planet, but the implacable Admiral Noble still proves to be a tough nut to crack and the clash will be devastating. The main problem with Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver is the management of the narrative pace. For the first hour practically nothing happens, with an initial thirty minutes in which Zack Snyder for some unspecified reason reiterates scenes of wheat harvesting and harvesting as if it were a National Geographic documentary (in slow motion, obviously).
This is where everything immediately begins to falter: the first part fails to give depth to the characters and in Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver the same thing happens again. For the first hour, Snyder continuously inserts flashbacks to give meaning to the figures of the co-protagonists, hampering the narrative without anything happening for sixty minutes, except for the preparation of the peasants who wink at The Seven until it makes them cry Samurai or The Magnificent Seven (one is as good as the other). Peasants who, moreover, are already very skilled in any warrior field: a real stroke of luck given that they only had five days to prepare against the invasion of trained, brutal, and militarily much better-equipped forces. But anyway, in Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver there are precisely moments in which the narrative stops, and one by one the various characters go on stage, remember who they are, and pass the microphone to the next one, without leaving the slightest emotional sign in the viewer’s gaze.
Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver Review and Analysis
Sofia Boutella is even more magnetic in the second round, with the precious support of Djimon Hounsou who brings his usual measured intensity. In terms of villains, Ed Skrein, already intriguing in the first film, has even more fun with his over-the-top villain (while the Irishman Fra Fee in the role of Balisarius). And while waiting for the longer version, which in theory will give him even more space, the character of Jimmy evolves interestingly, the imperial robot who has joined the rebels and speaks with calm and at the same time very powerful voice of Anthony Hopkins, once again the most precious presence of the newborn franchise on a purely acting level. After the long background that was the first part, the second gets straight to the point, clarifying the stakes and effectively laying the foundations for what is effectively a single, ambitious battle scene lasting about an hour, managed without the slightly alienating cuts that in the previous episode betrayed the need to re-edit the film to make it more “mainstream”.
Based on the agreements between Snyder and Netflix (first the two-hour “for everyone” version, then the longer one purely Snyderian with sixty minutes more). But despite the show put together with criteria and passion, and which at times comes close to the most complete expression of the director’s poetics, there remains a legitimate doubt about the wisdom of the dual versions in the context of a streaming service, specifically the one which for years has attracted directors of no small importance with the promise of absolute freedom, without compromise. And here, with all the mitigating circumstances (this is not cultural vandalism like what happened during the post-production of Justice League), there is a compromise.
It takes a while, but then the show arrives. When, finally, after a long preparation, Rebel Moon Part 2 arrives to tell the story of the clash between the people of Velt, led by Kora and his warriors, and the armies of the Mother World, the eyes are filled with the grandeur of the fighting, the plasticity of the hand-to-hand combat, explosions, firefights, and knife fights. Between slow motion, shots that amplify the athletic tightness of statuesque bodies in motion to kill, flames, sparks, and weapons that fire without sparing themselves, the familiar and spectacular video game effect that is a recognizable aesthetic feature of Zack Snyder’s cinema is certainly not missing, to the delight of the director’s fans. But this spectacular apotheosis arrives only in the second part of Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver, introduced by a much more reflective part in which the return to the Veldt of the veterans of the first great clash with Admiral Noble is told and in which.
Finally, the cards are revealed, delving into the terrible story of the mysterious Kora, but also of all the other warriors who thus acquire three-dimensionality compared to the first part of the saga. In particular, in this second film, the figure of Nemesis and that of General Titus take their due space. Nemesis in particular is the character that stands out the most, due to the narrative balance with which his past intersects with his destiny in the present, in a story that is the most vivid and emotionally charged among those concerning warriors. There is also the story of the wheat harvest, of the fatigue of working in the fields (with very suggestive images), and of the subsequent training of the peaceful farmers, and of the evenings at rest, together in front of a meal and a mug of beer, which it is the moment in which the community joins forces and recognizes itself in the common commitment necessary for its survival and, in the meantime, builds and recognizes itself and its common values.
And it is precisely from the sense of community cemented in this daily and ancient way that the peaceful planet Veldt finds the strength and determination to take up arms and fight against those who want to destroy it. This part of the film is perhaps the one that contains the main message of the entire Rebel Moon saga which is the story of an invasion of a humble, agricultural, and peaceful society, forced to find the strength to defend itself from arrogance. With this outburst of community pride against the invasion the spectator can empathize, something which unfortunately he is unable to do with the heroine Kora who, despite a painful history behind her and the weight of an enormous sense of guilt from which she seeks continually redeeming himself and other misfortunes to come, he never manages to arouse the viewer’s deep emotional participation, remaining a nervous, dynamic figure, but stylized rather than in-depth.
If you are willing to accept this simplistic ecological fantasy of good versus evil (where the latter arrives on the backs of ships and wagons spewing black smoke), the film reduces the arrogant momentum of its predecessor and accepts itself as a more traditional, marked by simpler and more composed coordinates. On one side trenches are dug waiting for the enemy, on the other the enemy is preparing to launch the attack. Of course, if you want to play the game you also need to ignore certain conveniences of a script that tips the scales somewhat comfortably towards the David who challenges the Goliath of the moment. Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver in this linearity, however, finds the groove in which to wedge itself, slipping along its two hours without any hitches that compromise the rather ephemeral entertainment. And that she cannot resist the temptation to discuss the war as an act of exposition even before suffering and blood. Will the arrival of the extended versions rated for minors take care of this? Who knows, but the mere fact that they were conceived editorially is irritating, to say the least.
As a final gloss, we therefore inevitably have to do the math on our fingers on this first part of the collaboration between Netflix and Snyder, who escaped from traditional studios to be able to give vent to his creative flair. One cannot help but wonder, a little incredulously and a little sarcastically, if all the vicissitudes of his recent artistic past have had the sole effect of arriving here, faced with a blank paper and a wad of money wasted in what it’s little more than a cinematic puff. Wondering, in short, whether there wasn’t too much ado about nothing. For two shots, a green screen and little else. Waiting (waiting?) for the next chapters of the saga.
Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver Review: The Last Words
The action is even more spectacular, with less explicit editing in the exhibition of compromises with Netflix, but the feeling of having only seen fragments of what Zack Snyder had in mind remains. In short, Rebel Moon Part 2 is a film that can satisfy those who are hungry for action, fights, spectacular scenes, and a plastic and full-bodied aesthetic, but under this beautiful sight it remains, even in this second part (which, given the ending, it certainly won’t be the last), a little bit. Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver, the second part of the sci-fi diptych that Zack Snyder created and directed for Netflix, takes some steps forward compared to the terrible previous chapter. The film gains compactness from the unity of time and place in which it is set, shaping itself as a fairly traditional war movie, without however any particular twists and spoiled by the director’s usual, sterile cinematographic fixations.
Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver Review: The Imperium Strikes Again - Filmyhype
Director: Zack Snyder
Date Created: 2024-04-19 16:31
3
Pros
- The actors, especially Anthony Hopkins, are excellent
- The world imagined by Snyder is very fascinating
- The battle scenes are flawless
Cons
- The hour of missing material is felt at several points in the film
