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REVIEW -- Rebel Moon: Part Two - The Scargiver (2024)

Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver is a 2024 American epic space opera film directed by Zack Snyder from a screenplay he co-wrote with Kurt Johnstad and Shay Hatten. A direct sequel to Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire (2023), the film takes place on the moon of Veldt where Kora and the crew of warriors ventures to help the farmers to defend and fight for their home against the Motherworld. Sofia Boutella, Djimon Hounsou, Ed Skrein, Michiel Huisman, Doona Bae, Ray Fisher, Staz Nair, Fra Fee, Elise Duffy, Charlotte Maggi, Stuart Martin, Cary Elwes, and Anthony Hopkins reprise their roles from the first film.

Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver was released in select cinemas in the United States on April 12, 2024, and was released by Netflix on April 19, 2024. Like its predecessor, it received generally negative reviews from critics. An R-rated extended cut is set for release after the film's initial release. While initially announced as the second and final film of a two-part saga, new films were announced to be in development in April 2024.

Cast

Sofia Boutella as Kora / Arthelais, a former Imperium soldier who rallies warriors from across the galaxy to fight against the Motherworld.
Djimon Hounsou as Titus, a former general of the Imperium recruited to lead the fight against the Motherworld.
Ed Skrein as Atticus Noble, an admiral and Balisarius' right-hand man. He was killed by Kora before being resurrected by the Imperium.
Michiel Huisman as Gunnar, Kora's love interest and a farmer who joins her in her attempts to defend his homeworld Veldt.
Doona Bae as Nemesis, a cyborg swordmaster.
Ray Fisher as Darrian Bloodaxe, a warrior and Devra's brother recruited by Kora.
Anthony Hopkins as the voice of Jimmy, the last member of a race of mechanical knights.[9]
- Dustin Ceithamer as the body-double on the set of Jimmy
Staz Nair as Tarak, a nobleman-turned-blacksmith with the ability to bond with animals of nature.
Fra Fee as Regent Balisarius, a tyrant and Kora's adoptive father who seized control of the Motherworld.
Cleopatra Coleman as Devra Bloodaxe, Darrian's sister and the leader of a band of insurgents opposing the Motherworld
Stuart Martin as Den, a local farmer and hunter.
Ingvar Sigurdsson as Hagen, a friend of Kora who helped her rebuild her life after she abandoned the Imperium
Alfonso Herrera as Cassius, Noble's team warrior.
Cary Elwes as the King.
Rhian Rees as the Queen.
Elise Duffy as Milius, a rebel fighter recruited under Darrian's command.[2]
Sky Yang as Aris, a young Motherworld soldier who stands up against his comrades' brutality
Charlotte Maggi as Sam, a farm girl who warmly welcomes any outsiders that come to her village.[10][11]
Stella Grace Fitzgerald as Princess Issa

Premise

SPOILERS BELOW *

Kora and the surviving warriors return to Veldt, believing that Kora had successfully killed Admiral Noble and prevented the forthcoming assault on the planet to claim its food supplies, but Aris, a Motherworld soldier working as a double agent for the village people, informs them that Noble is alive and the dreadnought ship will arrive in five days. Titus commits to training the entire village to fight, harvesting the entire grain supply in three days so the flour can be used as leverage to prevent the Motherworld forces from simply bombing the village from orbit.

Kora and Gunnar become lovers, and she admits that Regent Balisarius compelled her involvement in the assassination of the Motherworld's king, queen, and young Princess Issa, with Kora herself shooting the princess. Balisarius had then attempted to frame her for the coup, but she had instead fled to Veldt in a Motherworld shuttle to hide from the law.

Titus, Nemesis, Tarak, Milius, and Kora train the villagers in combat, preparing a plan involving digging trenches and tunnels in the fields, laying explosives, and preparing Kora's shuttle. The group also reveal their pasts to each other, but Kora declines to share her involvement in Issa's death. When Noble arrives with the dreadnought, his forces scan the village, identifying where the women and children are hiding, protected by Nemesis and Aris, and send forces to capture them to force Kora out. Kora attempts to surrender to him once Noble promises to spare the village, but Gunnar triggers the ambush anyway, and Titus and Tarak lead the villages in successfully repelling the first wave, though Nemesis is killed defending the women and children.

The heavily armored and mechanized second wave of Motherworld troops pushes the defenders back, destroying much of the village, but Kora and Gunnar use the shuttle and stolen uniforms to infiltrate the dreadnought, laying explosives on the engine. Jimmy arrives to help the village defenders push back the assault, and the explosives bring down the dreadnought. In the process, Gunnar kills Noble but later dies from his injuries. Devra Bloodaxe and her rebel forces arrive in ships to destroy the remaining Motherworld troops, leading to victory.

In the aftermath, the village mourns the dead, and Kora admits her past, which Titus reveals he already knew. He also reveals that Issa is secretly alive and in hiding, and the assembled group declare their intentions to find her and restore the royal lineage to the throne in order to depose Balisarius.

The Verdict

The story continues immediately following the events of Part One without dwelling too much on recapping those events. It was a safe bet to not linger on bringing viewers up to speed as let's be serious here as most wouldn't be watching this if they weren't already invested or morbidly curious to see the story continue.

This time around, I'm not going to dwell too much in recapping the characters/cast, but I'm going to comment on the much desired and needed backstories on the bulk of the cast that was bizarrely cut from Part One on the cutting room floor.

The story resumes with Kora and her unlikely band of warriors returning to Veldt thinking that they killed Admiral Atticus Noble and that his pending attack on their planet to claim their food supplies had been thwarted. This proves to be false as Aris (the Motherworld soldier who remained on Veldt who is now operating as a double agent for the village people) informs them that Noble is alive and they have five days until his forces arrive.

Titus assumes command of the village and convinces them all to come together with the warriors to fight to protect their home, first by harvesting their grain supply in three days and secondly by training and fortifying their homes for the coming battle. I could get behind the notion to use the grain as leverage as that was a smart decision to line their homes with the flour for the Motherworld army wouldn't just bomb them to oblivion from orbit. At the same time, this highlights the first of Zack Snyder's MANY narrative blunders.

Snyder has overlooked that Veldt is more than just one village. It's an ENTIRE planet so why is Noble's Motherworld forces focusing on a mere single village? It comes off as silly once you think about it when they could have nuked Kora's entire village off the map and hustle the other villages across that planet to give them the goods or suffer the same fate. I'm sure a lot of people are willing to overlook that, but thinking about it in-depth pretty much kills the whole urgency and dilemma of this whole conflict the more you think about the logistics of it all.

After Gunnar's confession of his feelings toward Kora in the climax of Part One, we see them become lovers in this film. It felt like deja vu with Kora revealing more of her shady past to him via flashbacks in this film and I found myself asking, "Didn't we already see this already?" during these sequences. Nevertheless, we see a flashback play out where Kora is revealed to be involved in the assassinations of Motherworld's king, queen, and young Princess Issa (of whom she was assigned as her bodyguard in the past). Kora personally shoots the princess and is framed for their murder and the coup as a whole by Regent Balisarius. For some bizarre reason everyone witnessing this scene play out buy into this and allow her to escape without much resistance when Balisarius could have killed her where she stood himself. If this guy is so cold, ruthless and calculating as Kora as described from her recollections and the reactions to other characters, then the whole adopted daughter bond between them would have been meaningless. I can't see this type of villain being so sentimental about his adopted daughter that he would hesitate to kill her to fulfill his goals. Thanos didn't hesitate to throw Gamora off that cliff to obtain the Infinity Stone then Balisarius shouldn't and wouldn't have to hesitate to kill Kora if that means that he could spin this whole coup into a means to assume the throne with the sympathy of the people behind him given the fact that he had to kill his "beloved" daughter for her bout of insanity.

Instead we don't get any of this and Kora is allowed to walk away and allowed to escape to Veldt as a fugitive of Motherworld's law. Maybe I'm thinking FAR too deep into this and giving Snyder's writing far too much more credit than it deserves, but a theory I have is that Balisarius intentionally allowed Kora to escape merely to make her into a martyr to maximize his own goals, thinking that he would assume even greater power and gain even more supporters if he was able to apprehend the murderer of the royal family.

We get a whole training montage of sorts where the warriors are aiding the villagers prepare and train for the coming battle, ending with Titus, Nemesis, Tarak, Milius, and Kora sharing a scene together where they reveal their pasts to each other. This comes across as extremely lazy editing and storytelling when these people have been working together and fighting together all of this time and didn't bother to share this vital information to each other. Isn't that how they wind up with a traitor in their ranks the last time? You would think it would be more important to know who is among this band of strangers and hired assassins and killers that you are banding together. Plus one would think that Kora's identity would be pretty recognizable given her reputation as the one who murdered the Motherworld's royal family and their most wanted fugitive. That doesn't seem like something the rest of the galaxy wouldn't be privy of given how much power the Motherworld has.

Doona Bae's Nemesis enlightens viewers with her backstory by revealing that she was forced to maim herself by cutting off her own limbs before being able to apply the cybernetic limbs to her body that allow her to weild her super-heated energy blades. She adds that she never killed before then, allowing her hatred for the Motherworld to be the fuel for her fire.

I'm thoroughly annoyed that Snyder had to kill off my favorite character and arguably the best character in these two films in this second entry. Nemesis' death was poetic in a sense as she got to bond with one of the children of the village while protecting his life and ensuring his safety in her final moments, but by no means I thought it was the right choice to kill her outright. My heart broke for her when she was rendered to tears by the villagers' gifts at the halfway point of the film. I thought she would power through her handicap in this pivotal battle and come out as the protector of the women and children in a bloody, violent display by the end of this battle. Instead, we see her give a lackluster effort against the Motherworld's soldiers before she's overwhelmed without any display that would live up to this character's reputation as uttered by other characters. She had to be saved by the young villager boy before she was able to land the finishing blow to the soldier(s) after getting one of her cybernetic arms cut off.

I think one of my best friends who I discussed this film with said it best, "They (Snyder and his team) couldn't let Nemesis outshine that main actress (Sofia Boutella) who is about as dry as a cat litter box." He had that spot on the nose as Nemesis' death forces her fans to look back at and focus on Sofia Boutella's Kora as the de facto femme fatale in this film.

Staz Nair's Tarak reveals that he was a nobleman before turning to the life of a blacksmith. His backstory was the most confusing of the cast as it didn't make much sense of why his skills would be so highly sought after when he doesn't even tame any wildlife to aid in this battle, so what was the point? I'm not even going to lie, but I was mildly annoyed by the fact that he was rushing head-first into every firefight armed with a knife and wearing nothing but a lioncloth while everyone else is suited up in some sort of protective gear or body armor against these military-trained futuristic soldiers. Like come the fuck on. This was the dude that survived yet Nemesis - i.e. the coolest character in these films thus far - was the one who had to die? Get the fuck out of here.

A part of me is split about whether or not they are wasting the talents of Anthony Hopkins in his golden years. Then again he is merely voicing Jimmy, the last member of the race of mechanical knights. Jimmy has one of the coolest moments of this entire film when he single handedly disposes of and destroys one of the Motherworld's many tanks.

Logically speaking, I'm surprised that Jimmy doesn't automatically target Kora since she's the wanted fugitive for assassinating the royal family that he was programmed and sworn to protect.

While we're on the subject of the Motherworld's tanks, can we talk about how silly (read: stupid) Titus and the villagers' strategy to take them out was? They started the battle off by gaining the upper hand with a surprise attack where one villager blew up one with a rocket launcher, only to attempt to attack the others one-by-one. Why wouldn't they just couldn't attack those tanks all at once if they had the element of surprise? The soldiers were made privy of their location after the first rocket made contact, so why were they continuing to attack in single-file? That strategy left them ripe for the picking for Noble's personal counterattack in the trenches. To say that Titus was supposed to be some sort of renowned military tactical genius, he wasn't showing any evidence of that here if we want to be perfectly honest about it. Snyder's writing did him and the villagers absolutely no favors in that regard.

Speaking of Djimon Hounsou's Titus, I can't fault him too much as previously mentioned, he's one of many casualties of Snyder's writing. I get what he was shooting for but it was poorly executed. I have to wonder if I was the only person of color watching this film and thinking those scenes of him working in the fields and gathering the grain were in poor taste, especially when he was the only person of color in those scenes despite he was in a position of authority over the villagers. This film took great strives to humanize his character before the fighting started, only to rip that band-aid off as soon as he and the villagers had to start slaughtering the Motherworld soldiers. It felt like this film was trying to juggle humanizing multiple characters, especially when it came to Nemesis and Titus, only for neither character to be presented better than the other. I felt that Titus should have been written in a manner where he was stressing the importance of the coming battle while Nemesis was reminded of and found her heart again after being surrounded so many innocent women and children being cast into the hells of war.

Elise Duffy's Milius has to have the most convoluted, contradictory backstory out of any of the warriors recruited by Kora to join the fight on Veldt. She was the only rebel from Darrian Bloodaxe's band of insurgents to join Kora without hesitation in the first film, but here she informs her comrades that she had never experienced war before. I'm hearing this and going then what the hell was she doing as part of Bloodaxe's rebellion? Was she regulated to washing dishes and/or doing laundry until now? One look at her and her Furiosa-inspired warpaint and you would think that she's seen more than her share of wars. She, along with Tarak, are two of the least experienced and/or poorly equipped warriors in this fight but they come out of this battle without a scratch. What the actual fuck.

The second major death in this film comes in the form of Michiel Huisman's Gunnar. He dies in Kora's arms after they escape from Noble's Motherworld dreadnought from the injuries he suffered in the conflict. I should note that he saves Kora's ass from being killed by Atticus Noble and lends a hand in delivering the finishing blow to make sure he's dead for good this time around. I guess it would be seen as poetic but his final vision is seeing that he and Kora had saved Veldt from Motherworld's forces as Devra Bloodaxe and her rebel forces come to their aid at the last second.

This was another moment that came off as lazy writing when it was obvious that Snyder wanted that typical Star Wars rebellion moment (think like Rogue One or Return of the Jedi) where the rebels show up in their ships and lay waste to the bad guys when all hope is lost, but here it was a lackluster effort when Kora and Gunnar had already blown up the main dreadnought so Devra's team were merely on clean-up duty. One would think that they would have arrived sooner after her brother was killed in battle by Noble's forces in the last film.

Aesthetically, I don't mind Ed Skrein's Atticus Noble returning to haunt Kora and her companions as the major antagonist for Part II. Narratively, I was among the opinion that they shouldn't have "killed" him off in the first place as it dulled his impact when Motherworld can easily bring this guy (or anyone for that matter) back to life with some sort of unexplained science and/or black magic. Noble still has a chilling presence to his scenes as you're on the edge of your seat anticipating what horrible thing that he is going to do next. Not to mention that Skrein has this striking delivery to his dialogue to add as the icing on the cake.

Seeing him die again at the hands of Kora comes off as repeat of what happened in Part I - with a drastically less impact nonetheless - as we still don't have any idea of how bad is Regent Balisarius, despite him being the final boss of this story - at least that's what he's being sized up as given the reputation he has in this universe.

One thing I don't get about Noble's actions is that he and Kora are in these heated skirmishes at the end of both of these films thus far, but didn't Balisarius instruct him to bring Kora back to him ALIVE for he could execute her himself? The second Kora and Gunnar were discovered on the dreadnought he should have issued the order to obliterate the villagers on Veldt instantly. Kora and Gunnar had dumb luck and timing on their side (not to mention plot armor in Kora's case), so the time bombs that Kora planted specifically were timed to explode at that very moment, crippling the ship from within. Once again, Titus' planning seems to come off even worse as they didn't even take the dreadnought into consideration from their planning prior to Noble's arrival. If the plan with Kora's crashed starship didn't work they had absolutely no means or countermeasures in place to deal with the dreadnought head on.

Watch It or Don't Bother?

Much like Rebel Moon - Part One: The Child of Fire, the final act and ending are very clunky and a narrative mess. There's even less meaning and impact behind Noble's death this time around, even though Zack Snyder has confirmed that he's staying death this time around via an interview following the release of the film on Netflix.

I am satisfied with the much-needed backstories and additional context for Kora and the warriors that she recruited to defend Veldt. I still firmly believe that this film would have benefited from being released as a 3+ hour cut of this originally or merely stretched this out as a miniseries instead. This film trilogy format isn't doing it any favors and the reception is reminding me a lot of Marvel Studios' failures with both The Eternals and Inhumans. The irony there being that the latter of those two projects was a TV miniseries (despite having a limited premiere in theaters of the first few episodes) and it still was roasted over the coals by critics and fans alike. Snyder obviously has his heart out into this this being his passion project of sorts and will continue cranking it out as long as he has a platform to share it to as long as Netflix is going to continue allowing him to do so no matter how it performs. The sad fact of the matter is Netflix is desperate for original content in the landscape of all of these streaming platforms since they aren't the only business in town anymore. So I think it's safe to say that Snyder will be able to comfortably keep cranking these out without worry.

I still love Snyder's camera angles and overall cinematography when it comes to how he frames his shots here, but I have to add that I'm the happiest to see that he dropped whatever filter he was using in Part One. Snyder's storytelling will never be his strong point, I'm afraid. That's something that is increasingly apparent with each additional entry of this trilogy. Regardless, I don't feel like this was the worst thing that I have ever laid eyes onto, so there's that much to keep in mind.

It cannot be avoided nor ignored that this is blatant Star Wars ripoff without any apology of being anything but that and that's perfectly fine. The problem lies with the fact that this is a mess narratively with a questionable cast of characters that anyone will struggle to get behind and care about outside of few standouts. As with any creative outlet, talent can't overcome bad writing and an unfavorable situation and that's the tragic picture that this trilogy is painting for the talents involved. I'll say this much. Snyder's work is beautiful here without a doubt, but that's the problem that I mentioned back in Part One - all style and no substance.

To make a long story short, if you watched Part One and didn't care for it, then you're not missing much here by skipping this entry (and its upcoming sequel to round out this trilogy). For everyone else, you might as well see where the story goes next since you already put the time in starting this acid trip (laughs). In all seriousness, this isn't a horrible film if you want something to lose yourself into once the fighting and action starts up, but if you're looking for anything deeper than that, then you're going to be painfully disappointed.

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