By Jake Wilson
April 19, 2024 — 3.00am
REBEL MOON – PART TWO: THE SCARGIVER ★★
(M), 122 minutes
“When I deliver her to Belisarius and her body is displayed in the rotunda of the Senate, I shall bare my chest, and it will stand as a symbol that it is I who brought to justice the Scargiver.” If you think actors have it easy, try saying that lot out loud.
Sofia Boutella as Kora in Rebel Moon Part 2.Credit: Clay Enos/Netflix
The speaker is Ed Skrein as Admiral Atticus Noble, the jackbooted villain of Zack Snyder’s overblown space opera Rebel Moon, set in a galaxy far, far away, which is definitely not the same one that supplies the backdrop for Star Wars, although Snyder reportedly pitched a similar project as an authorised Star Wars spin-off a decade ago.
As seasoned Rebelheads will recall, the admiral was slain in the previous feature-length instalment of the saga, which premiered on Netflix last year. But after a stint in a rejuvenation chamber, he returns more sneeringly psychotic than ever, bent on revenge on the warrior heroine Kora (Sofia Boutella), a former ally who has turned against the Imperium, Snyder’s equivalent to the Galactic Empire.
To call this a blatant rip-off would be accurate but not especially damning. After all, just about any modern fantasy blockbuster could be described as a mishmash of familiar elements – and this could equally be said of the original 1977 Star Wars, conceived as a homage to the pulp science fiction tradition dating back to the 1930s or earlier.
Still, there’s no doubt the storytelling here is on autopilot. Most of the first Rebel Moon was spent watching Kara recruit allies one by one, in the manner of The Seven Samurai – the same formula Snyder always seems to fall back on these days, whether he’s making a superhero movie (Justice League) or a heist caper with zombies (Army of the Dead).
Elise Duffy as Milius and Staz Nair as Tarak in Rebel Moon – Part 2: The Scargiver.Credit: Netflix
With the full team now assembled, little remains but to await the final showdown on the farming moon of Veldt, with Kora as de facto leader, the crafty General Titus (Djimon Hounsou) taking charge of strategy, and Snyder displaying his unwavering love of low-angle shots and slow motion.
All fantasy requires suspension of disbelief but this particular example is unusually hard to buy into. If the Imperium is as powerful as all that, how is victory an imaginable possibility for the half-dozen heroes and the village they’re defending? As for the potentially rousing anti-imperialist message, this might seem more persuasive if it didn’t come with a muddled backstory involving a messianic princess (Stella Grace Fitzgerald), to be unpacked further in part 3.
If the story is hard to take seriously, there’s also little or no deliberate humour – which is certainly a departure from Star Wars, the original trilogy at least. Still, for all its mediocrity, Rebel Moon – Part Two isn’t that much worse than the current competition: if it lacks the brute force impact of Dune: Part 2 on the big screen, it’s nearly an hour shorter and only half as pompous.
And even The Seven Samurai might not seem quite so impressive if it had been released in instalments on Netflix.
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