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After being thrown a bone by Warner being able to bring his version of “Justice League,” he’s announced that these versions of his alleged “Star Wars Killers” known as “Rebel Moon” as more or less unofficial. They’re still movies in a sense, but not in his mind. He’s allegedly planning to release Director’s Cuts for both films, which includes potentially longer scenes and alternate takes on various scenes. So what is even the point of this whole shebang? Snyder is less an auteur and feels so much more like a brand manager trying to figure out an algorithm for a great movie–and he can’t quite synthesize the formula. He seems to base so much of his films around focus groups and buzz rather than instinct which make him such a terrible filmmaker through and through.
On the Last episode of “Rebel Moon”: A ragtag motley crew of rebels band together and defeat Imperial (Grand Wizard or something…) Space Nazis, led by Regent Balisarius and Atticus Noble. Noble was killed at the end of “Rebel Moon—Part 1: A Child of Fire,” but it turns out he’s not dead, after all, thanks to special ancient technology doohickeys. Cue dramatic music. Now, he’s back again and so angry that he retaliates against the small town farmers of Veldt, a white—erm–non-threatening idyllic moon with miles of cinematic fields filled with special space-grain, space children, and space barns.
“The Scargiver” is such an incoherent and anemic sequel that fails to give us even further reason to continue investing our time in the “Rebel Moon” universe. There isn’t a single engaging hero, nor is there an interesting shred of conflict that actually compelled me to pay attention toward. That’s pretty sad, too, since Snyder can stack a solid cast and garners some interesting character designs that, in another, actually competent film, would have become so iconic. Snyder is a man who has worked with James Gunn, and rather than learning from his formula of getting us to care about these unusual and bizarre heroes, he pushes against their development.
Snyder stuffs the screen with so many archetypes and tropes, but never does much of anything with them, instead leaning in on his penchant for injecting slow motion at every turn. “Rebel Moon – Part Two” is about as tedious and ridiculous a movie from Zack Snyder can get. At least the original film had some forward motion within all the nigh endless slow motion and pew pew scenes. Here, Snyder literally drops a huge exposition dump where our characters sit in a room telling their collective stories. Snyder brings the whole move to a screeching halt to tell the various traumatic flashbacks, and it goes on and on.
And on, to where it eventually reaches such a point of pure absurdity that you have to wonder if Snyder is just fucking with us at this point. He has to be. There’s no way any respective screenwriter would commit to such an amateurish move like literally stopping the whole film just to drop exposition on characters like we’re watching video game intros for some mid-nineties PC video game. I was absolutely aghast at how little faith Snyder had in his audience that, rather than show us and take us on this experience, he feels is a necessity to stop, sit down, and have these characters tell their back stories as a means of allowing us to catch up with the rest of the events.
After the third flashback involving fire, explosions, and slow motion, I challenge you to keep your eyes open. I don’t know what Snyder has planned for his Director Cuts, but I’ll hang back and opt out of another trip with Snyder and his flavorless stew of sci-fi cliches and lifeless characters.