Rebel Moon

[Pierre Maertin]

 

REBEL MOON – SCARGIVER   Review By Pierre Maertin

 

We want to claim we held off on reviewing Part One while waiting for Part Two but that would not be true. Part One was brisk and more compact, yet completely insipid and uninspired. And now Part Deux. Honestly the movie does not merit a single star, it is total trash and the sci-fi elements, as many have noted, are INCONSISTENT AND ASYNCHRONOUS (interstellar traveling galaxy ships running on coal and burning diesel fumes in the afterburners when flying in the atmosphere of a planet?)

 

Then we have Snyder plagiarizing several sci-fi tropes and that doesn’t help either story-wise or visual depiction wise, there is Star Wars of course (his version of light sabers) and there are shades of Dune with primitive ADVANCED tech that look straight out of the STEAMPUNK handbook, AND THEN WE have the MAN OF STEEL in the person of the ROBOT complete with Cape made from a pock-marked rag cloth (James The Robot voiced by Sir Anthony Hopkins) I bet some of you thought he was the leftover from Lost in Spice or The Tin Man from Dorothy and Oz.  Anthony Hopkins’ voicing adds a much need warm touch to the movie but it remains uneven throughout.

 

Starring some familiar faces starting with Charlie Hunnam who is no stranger to science fiction and fantasy (2013 Pacific Rim, 2017 King Arthur Legend of The Sword) as Kai a twisted version of Han Solo whom you believe wants to help the rebels and has a real tragic story that would compel him to be part of the heroic band. Also starring Djimon Hounsou who has been with us for a very long time starting in Gladiator in 2000, The Legend of Tarzan (2016), Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), Furious 7 (2015), Aquaman (2018), Captain Marvel (2019), as The Wizard in all three Shazam/Black Adam movies (2019-2023) and in Gran Turismo (2023). Hounsou plays General Titus, a legendary military leader in the Motherworld Imperium Forces who has been betrayed and abandoned to rot in his guilt. Ed Skrein who typically portrays the good guys (2014 The Transporter Refueled, 2019 Midway) plays a raging sinister villain and admiral of the flagship battleship The King’s Gaze, so eerily similar to Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) in Star Wars Rogue One.

 

Finally in the lead role there is Sofia Butella as elite bodyguard to the Royal Family with a dark secret that made her a fugitive from the Imperium (The Empire).  You may have noticed Boutella in recent films such as Kingsman The Secret Service (2014), Star Trek Beyond (2016) and The Mummy (2017).  As Arthelais, she is supremely trained as protector and assassin (John Wick in Star Wars) and goes around by her nom de guerre Scargiver. In Rebel Moon she finds refuge on a remote planet sparsely populated by very kind and defenseless farmers who through a turn of improbable events require her skill and ability to gather soliders of fortune to battle the new deadly threat on their planet, Veldt.

 

 

The trouble with Rebel Moon is that the story, and characters, feel so familiar that the plot becomes overly predictable.  Part II is overly sprinkled with music video sequences of the farmers harvesting their crops that feels like Little House on The Prairie Meets Miami Vice. In an action space saga that usually tells us the story ran out of meaningful dialogue and resorted to the music videos for filler to pad the run time of the sequel. The question that comes to mind, is how stupid are these farmers when they know ahead of the initial contact with the battleship, that they could be facing certain death. Yet they reject the offer to mechanize and automate the farming of the required wheat imposed on them because their way is to do it the Amish Way.

 

And of course that puts them on the war path with the Imperium turning farmers into soldiers after just five days of having been alerted to their doom, using up three days to haul in the harvest at never before done breakneck pace and then having two days to train in the deadly arts of warfare AND to booby trap their village for the arriving soldiers of the King’s Gaze.

 

And what makes the sequel even more implausible is that the vast resources of a galactic empire chooses to harass and threaten and depend on the hand harvesting of crops needed by starving soldiers rather than the King’s Gaze simply lands on this big planet, commandeers thousands of uninhabited hectars of land and assigns a small platoon with a battalion of robots and automated machinery to harvest 10 times the needed crops from the farmers.

 

For science fiction and the premise and technology already built into the story and Part One of Rebel Moon, the second part makes the entire saga unbelievable rubbish, contrived in its plot to simply force the viewer to accept a confrontation and battle actions scenes one after the other to regal us with a lackluster B movie space adventure. Written and directed by Zack Snyder (The Man of Steel, Batman vs Superman and The Justice League), this movie is a reminder that a good director should sometimes stick to directing and leave the story writing to more talented people.

 

If you got nothing to do then sure, our opinion won’t matter and you can heartily indulge in Rebel Moon.  However, we do hope you have better use for more than four hours of your time, or hopefully better movie selections to choose from.

 

All contents © 2024 for West Coast Midnight Run™.  All rights reserved.

[Dave2000]

If it wasn’t on Netflix no one would watch this movie. Truly so poorly planned.
I could go into detail about how aircrafts that travel the universe have combustible engines?
All guns basically shoot endless bullets and don’t need to be reloaded but not the shot guns?
The one time they use a rocket launcher it knocks out 2000 people and blows up a ship- then the next time girl shoots ship from 7 ft away she only gets a little dirt on her.
Random hero who’s story arc is he is a prince- only fights with axes dressed like Tarzan and never gets shot or wounded – some kind of invisible force field (Jedi Powers)?.
First movie had as many words as Dunkirk LOL and ZERO character development so this time they all went around in a circle and told a 2 min story.. then right back to no dialogue.
They got on the mother ship by faking being injured soldiers- but the medics put them inside and on the elevator to evaluate them without ever taking off their face masks or helmet… just “ cant find an injury” EVEN THOUGH THEIR SHIP CAN SCAN BODIES HIDING IN BUILDINGS FROM SKY ABOVE (SUPER SCANNERS)
Village has a total of 35 people and a whole legion is unable to stop the 3 shot guns and Tarzan with axe?
This is literally the dumbest movie ever besides the first one. It’s like watching a movie where the amount of water and size of cigarette keeps changing moment to moment due to not paying attention.
That’s this for 2 hours

[JefferiesMaine]

your review didnt go far enough in describing what ails this movie (Snyder wants to make a third movie since the finale is open ended).  Trouble is, for all of its ambition and story setting, the movie is a low, low budget production incapable of giving us  the scope of a galactic war.  The second part (Scargiver) completely demolishes what little scope the first part managed to show us a galaxy at war.  The second movie feels like a rogue military ship or a pirate ship picking a fight with a small band of farmers in a remote corner of the universe.  It doesn’t connect with the overall story, or what little connection there was is lost.

The movie Civil War released at the same time as Rebel Moon this month in theaters, with a fraction of the budget of Rebel Moon manages a far more exciting and visceral war battle scenes, far more convincing, at the finale, than any battle in Rebel Moon.  There is more for me to explain why Rebel Moon is a dud but then I would have to write an essay and it wouldnt be fair to the other commenters from the official movie reviews at Rolling Stone and big name publications

[GQGI]

agree most strongly with the Civil War part of your comments

[StarTresQ]

Never before have I ever been so disinterested in a protagonist/s development or the action around them. The first film set this up beautifully and yet this film failed to deliver on, anything at all really. Lazy regurgitation of tired tropes and dialogue that could be mistaken for a first round at storyboarding, delivered by bored actors. I spent the last hour wishing for a power cut as my partner insisted she wanted to see the end of this utter dross.  Imagine a college drama department rehashing Star Wars, during covid, and none of them have ever seen a good movie.

The only good part of this film was that it ended, I hope they don’t make a third.

[Atlanta_n_Jeff]

Dreadfully slow.

This movie had so much dialogue that I was already bored out of my mind by the time the action finally started. The first hour is just straight slow dialogue.
The slow motion scenes just made the movie even more painfully slow. We had a ten minute slow motion montage of farming! Zack Snyder, making every scene slow motion makes it lose its effect.

Once the action did start, It does get a little more tolerable. But I never felt like I had a connection to any of the characters nor did I feel like there was any chemistry between them as a team.  James the robot was probably the best part.

[Eric]

Strong visuals, tacky story, tacky characters… full of fantasy cliches.   Would be more suited for a game than a film.   The Two minute sob story flashbacks for each of our heroes long after the introduction of the character is just lazy storytelling.

Do us a favour and do not make a sequel.

[Cheryl-Krow32]

Boring first half with very little in the way of character development. Each of the rag-tag bunch coughs up their backstory all together in a couple of scenes.  It’s hard to feel anything for any of them.

[GQGI]

166 million for this? …. hahahahahahaha this is some z movie garbage.

[Author]

Posts