Rebel Moon Part Two: Not terrible. Its worse.

Rebel Moon Part Two: The Scargiver (2024), Dir. Zack Snyder, 122 mins, Netflix

This was so bad. The bar was set pretty low after suffering through Rebel Moon Part One, but all the same, it still managed to disappoint.  The scary thing is, I really don’t think Zack Snyder can see it. He’s so out of touch with film-making reality, lost in his Snyder-verse of what makes a decent film, that he just cannot see it. There’s something genuinely tragic about that. This is a guy with considerable visual talent, but my goodness his flaws are like a gaping maw, swallowing his career up.

I liked his Dawn of the Dead remake more than I expected, and 300 was a pretty decent stab at converting a Frank Miller graphic novel to film, and I will always defend his Watchmen (even if Alan Moore won’t)  as one of those unfilmable projects that somehow worked out. But after that, its been a long slow slope of style over substance finally crashing into the rank cesspool that is the Rebel Moon project. It’s not like we couldn’t see its coming- Sucker Punch, Man of Steel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Justice League… they were all films with isolated moments of visual brilliance, moments of Pure Cinema, increasingly dragged down by abysmal plotting, cardboard characterisation and risible dialogue, steadily becoming more and more banal almost to the point of sheer lunacy. There is something increasingly juvenile, perhaps bordering on infantile, in how narrative functions in these films which curiously corresponds with his vociferous fanbase of teen nerds who refuse to grow up.

Nobody can really match him for his visual flair in transferring the energy of comicbook panels to the silver screen, so vividly managed in 300 that it has shaped -and limited- his career ever since. His slo-mo is the equivalent of Tarantino’s penchant for littering his own films with bad language, its become shorthand for his directorial method (but at least Tarantino can write, for all his own faults, his films at least make sense). But comics are dumb, (largely) made for kids- or at least kids who would later grow up and start reading proper books. There is a reason why, back in the 1970s, there was huge disbelief and media attention when the Salkind’s bet a fortune on making a big-budget, serious motion picture based on that old Superman comicbook. Comics were for kids, films were for adults. At least, that’s how it used to be. Has it gone full circle now, are the comics for the adults and the films for the kids?

Rebel Moon Part Two: The Scargiver is so stupid, so badly written, that even the world’s finest actors couldn’t save its dialogue or plot- and this film’s actors are NOT the world’s finest actors. They are clearly not helped by Snyder’s direction, either, which I suspect primarily involved stand here, pose like this and frown, and repeat, etc. Even the action is boring and badly staged, and that’s usually Snyder’s prime selling point- here the endlessly repetitive slo-mo doesn’t intensify anything, instead it constantly veers into parody.  This film could be given a laugh track and it would probably work as some sit-com piss-take of Star Wars. I was watching it appalled at just how lazily it telegraphs everything, how badly it is paced and edited and how it is riddled with plot holes like the craters on the moon.

Basically, its a lesson in how not to make a movie, but more importantly, maybe its the film that wakes up Netflix and other streamers to how Hollywood creatives are taking them for a ride. Quality should mean something, it shouldn’t just be content for content’s sake, and the creatives should be taken to task for taking the piss like this. If this film crashed and burned at the box-office with huge noise and attention, instead of just disappearing on a streamer, it would likely derail Snyder’s career. Instead I guess he’ll just carry on as usual, and we’ll get more of the same.