Avoid Like the Plague: Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver
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There is an annual contest for writers to come up with the most hackneyed and cliched opening sentence they possibly can. They come up with gems like “She was a beautiful woman; more specifically she was the kind of beautiful woman who had an hourlong skincare routine that made her look either ethereal or like a glazed donut, depending on how attracted to her you were.”
This entire movie is like that sentence but it lasts for more than two hours and it’s meant to be taken quite seriously.
This movie is so bad that I’m detecting the hand of artificial intelligence in its making. Zach Snyder is a bad writer but this goes beyond mere human efforts at atrocity.
The movie starts with an extended recap of the previous movie as cinematic masterpieces do. I was honestly grateful for it. I had considered watching the first one again in preparation for this one but I simply wasn’t up to it.
Rebel Moon 2 is nearly an absurdist work of filmmaking. This has all the pretension of a student film but on a blockbuster budget. The story is only there to support Snyder’s basket of filmmaking tricks.
The characters are so weak I literally can’t remember any of their names. There’s Scargiver, her Simp, Sword Woman, Gladiator, Antler Robot, Gryphon Rider, Cyborg’s Sister, and the Squid Fucker (SF for short). I do remember the Big Bad’s name, Belisarius, but mostly because I felt he had no right to it. However, he is meant to be a remote villain, SF is the immediate antagonist.
The plot is that an Imperial Dreadnought shows up at some moon at the ass end of nowhere and it’s Admiral the SF, requires that a Space Amish village deliver all of its grain to him. Initially the SF offered to pay triple the market value, meaning they could just go buy the food they needed plus a couple of tractors. This was clearly a matter of an ironhand in a velvet glove. You don’t refuse the offer in situations like this. However, the Space Amish refused and velvet glove came off. After a few of them were killed they are now to deliver all of the grain and will get nothing in return.
You might be asking yourself does this dreadnought have a flour mill on board because that’s the only way it could make use of that much wheat. However, you must not let your common sense intrude while watching this abortion because it will become even more unwatchable. The dreadnought, The King’s Gaze is a mile and half long and has a crew of 5000, assuming they have some way to process the grain, it will keep them fed for about three days.
This ship has coal fired boilers in it but I’m not sure why because it’s powered by a Kali. Brace yourself for this one. “The kali were giant, female, humanoid figures akin to goddesses when compared to humans. When the Motherworld figured out how to capture them, they were able to pull seemingly unlimited energy from them, which they used to power their technology, allowing them to invent machinery with almost mystical capabilities. It’s unknown how the kali lived prior to their capture and what this energy was used for when in their own control, but the kali in captivity were kept in a perpetual dream-like state.”
You’re probably asking yourself da fuq? There is no point. Every single part of this movie is made in service to Zach Snyder’s limitless pretensions.
So Gladiator, the former general has a plan. They will harvest the grain (whether its ready or not apparently) and then stash it all over the village so the dreadnought won’t use it’s planet killing main guns on them. Their grain is to be used as a hostage. There follows an eternal sequence of 17th century level of manual harvesting. Snyder’s slow motion shots are shotgunned randomly throughout this eternal harvest montage of people cutting grain with scythes, flailing and husking wheat. Everybody is happy and smiling in a totally creepy 1930s German UFA-Film GmbH propaganda film kind of way. Look I was raised on a farm, ain’t nobody smiling during harvest because it’s dawn to dusk hard work to get the crops in.
After the Space Amish have gained joy through strength, they have to go through another montage where they are being “trained.” They have a week before the dreadnought shows up. So, they have to get all the grain in and then learn the martial arts in two days.
Snyder couldn’t even play to the cliches I was expecting. Farmers are familiar with firearms. It’s not just recreational, they have to protect livestock from predators. So you’d think they should at least be good shots. Of course not, firearms are strange and worrisome thing the likes of which they’ve never seen before. Naturally, the women are perfect shots from the start.
Also, there is shit ton of screaming at the top of everyone’s lungs. I mean it never seems to stop.
All of this was filmed using Snyder’s surprise box of movie making tricks. For each scene he sticks his hand in the box and pulls out a random filmmaking technique. Then he uses one of his Ebay lenses to shoot it. There is his favorite that only keeps the center in focus and everything else is blurred. This is second only to the lens that is visibly scratched and scuffed. Snyder keeps slapping these ancient lenses on modern cameras and calling it art. This lunatic had no business acting as his own cinematographer. He did the same thing in Army of the Dead, and it looked like shit there too.
We finally get back stories on our seven samurai. Which is to say they take an exposition dump all over the audience. They sit down at the table and tell their story and it’s the same damn story every freaking time. I was happy in my village. The empire showed up and did bad things, Now I’m sad. Having what is basically the same back story from everyone would be vaguely acceptable if Snyder had spaced them out, he had four hours to do that, but he didn’t. Snyder just steamrollered his audience with tragic backstories one after another in the middle of his second film.
The Scar Giver’s was easily the most pretentious. It was about the assassination of the royal family by Belisarius. He emptied his surprise box for that one.
The King is about to christen the Dreadnought The King’s Gaze. For some reason this is done in the coal furnace room. I’m still boggled by coal powered starships. Although the real power is provided by the captive Kali. If there was any one on that production with a half a brain they could have gotten away with it by calling the coal Kalibonium and its shoveled into the furnaces to keep the captive goddess fed. But no, it’s called coal.
The king and queen are surrounded by men wearing morning dress and freaking togas. In case there was the slightest possibility that the audience would miss the Ides of March cliche combined with the death of the Romanoffs. The Senators (I guess) pull out tantos and stabby stab the king and queen.
I had wondered why in hell Snyder had musicians with bags on their heads playing during this scene. Critical Drinker nailed the reason. Snyder had finally heard about diegetic music in film and just had to give it a try. Non-diegetic music is the music that only the audience hears, example; Shaft is strutting down the street, you hear his theme but he does not. Diegetic music is the music both you and the character hears. In Guardians of the Galaxy, Quill turns on his walkman while he goes through the ruins both you and Starlord hear the music. This however came across as a parody of the Red Wedding.
Scar Giver’s job was to shoot Glowing Princess Space Jesus who is the key to everything. Which she does. Belisarius, Scar Giver’s adopted father immediately blames her for the entire regicide. So do all the Senators who did the stabbing and killing. They are screaming out these accusations at the top of their lungs with no audience to hear them except the string quartet with bags on their hands. There is no need for this over the top melodrama other than Zack wanted to shoot it.
And forgive me stating the more obvious than usual but isn’t his daughter killing the entire royal family going to reflect badly on him?
So Admiral Seafood Lover shows up and the Scar Giver tries to talk him into leaving but he’s way too evil for something like that so the battle scene happens anyway. Lots of open mouthed screaming with veins popping out. Painfully slow motion action scenes. Swordwoman dies because she had Charles Bronsan’s job of dying in front of kid. More screaming.
Scar Giver goes to the ship that she’s been hiding on this moon for years and why the screaming fuck didn’t she use that ship in the first movie? I mean that whole Mos Eisley ripoff segment in the Part One was because they didn’t have a spaceship but it turns out Scar Giver did have one? Snyder is clearly a stream of thought writer but he can’t remember what he wrote, or else he did have ChatGPT do all the heavy lifting and didn’t pay attention to what it was writing.
So Scar Giver and her Simp fly on to the dreadnought by pretending to be a damaged ship with wounded on board. It works because they are idiots. Scar Giver sabotages the ship, briefly meets the goddess that powers the ship, then has a lightsaber fight with Admiral Seafood Lover. She almost loses but astonishingly Simp saves her with a back stab attack. The Dreadnought falls out of the sky incredibly slowly, allowing Scar Giver to escape. Her Simp dies so she can have a good cry.
Gladiator then informs her that Glowing Princess Space Jesus that she assassinated is actually alive somewhere and what’s left of the Magnificent Seven heads off to find her, leaving the village to fend for itself when the Empire shows up demanding to know happened to one of their capital ships.
Snyder is talking about making many more of these but given how little marketing muscle Netflix put into this compared to the last one, it’s not going to happen thank you Heavenly Father.
Snyder is also talking about a planned R-rated director’s cut where we see the SF having his way with the octopus in graphic detail. I feel so bad for that actor, I can only imagine how ridiculous he felt writhing naked in that green screen room while getting sprayed with slime.
I suspect Zack Snyder is counting on his fans to pressure Netflix into making these sequels but it’s not going to happen. Army of Dead was the breaking point for most of them. They looked at that cinematic trainwreck and said, we can’t defend him anymore. Giving him millions and total freedom was like giving cocaine and an Uzi to a ten year old boy. He started out directing music videos and at the end of the day, that is still Zack Snyder’s primary skill set.
This thing started life as a Star Wars script and it was so bad that Kathleen freaking Kennedy turned it down.
It takes a special kind of movie to get my lowest rating. It takes more than simple cinematic incompetence.. It’s about commitment to relentlessly pursue incompetence no matter where it leads.
This movie was released on to an unsuspecting world right after I had had total knee replacement surgery. The pain of recovery from that was as nothing compared to the agony of watching Zach Snyder’s ego unleashed upon the screen. The industrial strength painkillers I was on was the only thing that made it remotely tolerable
Rebel Moon Part 2 the Scar Giver isn’t just worse than its predecessor, it is the worst film Zach Snyder has ever made and that is one hell of an unholy mountain to climb but Zach did it. This will easily be the worst film of the year and possibly the decade. The script is incoherent and childish, the characters are so flat they could cut atoms, the lore is an incomprehensible mosh pit of other intellectual properties. And unless you love watching wheat being harvested more than life itself you will be bored to tears. This film fought tooth and nail to earn my lowest rating and I can almost respect that level of dedicated incompetence.
In spite of that I now pronounce my doom upon it.
The Dark Herald Says, Avoid Rebel Moon Part 2 The Scar Giver Like the Fucking Plague! (0/5)
