Rebel Moon: The Scargiver

dir: Zack Snyder

2024

If you were a Zach Snyder fan, the only thing better than a year where one of his films comes out is a year in which two of his films come out. So, 2024, a banner year for Snyderfans.

For the rest of us, it’s a second chance to sneer and deride and throw as much shade as can be thrown at a hack of his monumental proportions.

This here film Rebel Moon: The Scargiver is the sequel to that other film that he expelled into the universe, being Rebel Moon: A Child of Fire. No-one asked for these films, let alone sequels and such. I watched that earlier film, more with disbelief than hate, unable to believe that people with millions of dollars at their disposal would make something so generic and so familiar that it would have all the originality and creativity of an episode of Paw Patrol.

This here ‘sequel’ works so perfectly well that there is absolutely no reason for anyone to watch the earlier film. Watching the earlier film provides the viewer with nothing extra, nothing additional, nothing more illuminating. All the main characters / archetypes get a scene that explains their motivations for fighting the Empire, I’m sorry I meant the Imperium.

They fight the Imperium, and then that’s that, with another implied sequel at the end. We didn’t need that. We didn’t ask for that.

What did we ask for… I dunno. I expected there to be a big battle in the film, and I guess that’s there, the big classic showdown since this is space Seven Samurai / The Magnificent Seven / Battle Beyond the Stars. If it doesn’t make sense, well, where’s your sense of adventure? Your sense of whimsy? Has life crushed your spirit so much that you can’t suspend a little bit of disbelief to enjoy a Zach Snyder adventure-fest?

Yeah, me neither. It’s a bit of a chore watching action scenes that ape his own previous movies, staging things like 300 but with one side mostly shooting laser guns, and the other running around with swords and axes. It’s pretty goofy. They belabour the humble farmer stuff so much that you wonder how these Aryan lumpenproles were ever able to survive thus far.

The thing is, though, we never get to forget just how clever Zach Snyder thinks he is. He is like what Elon Musk would be like as a director, in that we keep being assured of his status as a genius, despite all evidence to the contrary.

There is a scene in this flick, so breathtaking in what it thinks it’s doing, and so completely idiotic in its realisation, that I fucking laughed, I tell you. It involves a certain character relating the story of how she played a role in the slaughter of the royal family. There is, for reasons only Snyder knows, a fucking chamber orchestra in the room playing their instruments with velvet bags over their heads. As a whole bunch of people pull out knives and start hacking away like it’s Saturday night at the Frankston train station, the musicians change the tempo and the urgency of the music they’re playing.

How… why… they can’t see what’s happening, they can’t see their instruments, even if they “know” something bad is happening, how did they know to orchestrate the music in alignment with the choreography of the “action” taking place? Did the assassins tell them before hand? “Pick a piece that starts off slow, then goes all staccato when we’re slaughtering them, and then morph into something sad like Barber’s Adagio for Strings for when they’re dead, but keep a back up piece to throw in there in case the woman we try to pin this all on happens to escape?”

It’s so fucking dumb. Almost as dumb as the bit where Kora (Sofia Boutella) tries to fight the jerks that turn on her, tries to shoot them, the guns out of laser bullets or whatever, and a few moments later, grabs some other gun, but forgets the guys that were just trying to stab her.

And she just runs away…

It’s, um, you feel bad for the actors, but you shouldn’t. I’m sure they were adequately paid.

The laziness is what gets to me, the intellectual laziness. I’m not going to repeat similar criticisms from the last flick here, pointlessly reprising stuff better covered elsewhere. But I am going to single something else out just to prove my point.

In a sequence where everyone (the core group of samurais / warriors / rebels, not the humble farmers) is giving their motivation, a guy who previously I only knew as the shirtless guy with the long hair gets to explain that he is a prince, and that his parents were killed or at least their planet was invaded by the Imperium, which led to his father being butchered, and his mother killing herself.

Sad, sad stuff. That’s not my point. My point is that when this world that we’ve never seen before and will never see again is represented, mostly in CGI, it’s basically a techno-Britain, except it’s ruled by Indian-British people wearing clothing that is a brutal mismatch of Victorian suits with Elizabethan collars.

It’s so fucking stupid. I didn’t laugh when I saw that, I felt like crying.

Anyway, the more I belabour these points, the more I realise that it doesn’t matter. Nothing I write is going to change anything, least of all Zach Snyder’s mind. He has always been fixated with how “cool” something might look even if how it comes to be makes no sense.

I mean, the humble farmers and the rebels are fighting a well-armed bunch of soldiers who wear armour and have tanks and shit, and yet, I’m not fucking kidding, they have this scary spaceship called the Dreadnought, and it’s powered by guys shovelling coal.

Which, which means it’s a steam-powered space ship?

I have a headache. It doesn’t matter if flicks are stupid, what matters is whether we enjoy them. Stupid does not preclude enjoyable, hence why Sylvester Stallone has had a long and prosperous career. I will never admit to enjoying this flick, but I don’t think it is as pointless or as inane as the first flick. I could quibble with some of the choices made in the story, but that would be like complaining about how long it took to get your meal at a restaurant even after you’ve realised you’ve got food poisoning.

It’s stupid, but I enjoyed some of the performances. Djimon Hounsou kicks copious amounts of arse as the brawny and brainy general, who starts of as an alcoholic, but someone gets sober with no withdrawals over the course of a day. All of them, all of the warriors, have to help bring in the harvest, so there are improbably long scenes of very buff people working on the land, in ways that indicate Snyder has never even driven past a farm, let alone worked on one.

I look at Djimon, who at 59 is aching with muscles and rude health, which is great for him, but I think well, that’s what he has to do in order to keep getting roles. And then I look at his former co-star from Gladiator, being Russell Crowe, who is a year older, and keeps getting roles despite the fact that, hey, he looks more like me than he does Djimon, and you know what, that’s the very definition of Kiwi privilege.

Sofia Boutella I guess is fine as the pseudo main character Kora, but not for one second did I care about the love of the most wanted criminal in the galaxy and the humble farmer, oh my gods no, and the resolution of that particular story arc did please me somewhat.

I don’t care if this becomes a franchise. I will watch one more, and then that’s it, never again. There are so many other things for me to watch…

5 times the humble farmers win against a galaxy-travelling spaceship running on coal out of 10

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“I was given memories of a world I will never see, loyalty to a king I cannot serve, and love for a child I could not save.” – all for a film that you can never watch, alas - Rebel Moon: The Scargiver