I will be rather blunt here and say that “Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver’s biggest accomplishment is that it manages to be worse than the rather awful Rebel Moon: Part One – A Child Of Fire.

What follows is probably less a review and more of a diatribe. But this is not a paying job and is just my personal side project so I hope that you will forgive me for letting my ire spill out into this article. But I am going to spoil most of the utterly awful “plot” just so I can properly explain why this film is offensive to my sensibilities. Let’s face it, at this point you are just staying for me to sling some mud so you can laugh or riotously disagree with me anyway! 

Zack Snyder is a talented visual director but working from his own “original” scripts with no one to rein him in he is his own worst enemy. Please note I had to put the word original in inverted commas due to the fact this is essentially part two of a remake and there is little original about it. 

In Part One our hero Kora (Sofia Boutella) collected her heroes for the defence of her adopted home world of The Veldt. In Part Two the plot goes something like this…

Anthony Hopkins voiced robot gives a recap which is a word salad of all the crazy character names. Remember he is a robot sworn to protecting the King who for some reason lives on this far away planet and will not help because the King is dead. The heroes arrive on The Veldt and proclaim the job is done. They are instantly told it is not done. Ed Skrein’s villain is resurrected and to prove he is really evil he kills the doctor who resurrected him. This is what evil people do. Kora does a plot exposition dump to Gunnar (Michael Huisman) where she explains how she became an outlaw. This scene is possibly the most outlandishly dumb thing in the entire movie as it features its own string quartet for the assassination of the King and an utterly insane over the top performance from Fra Fee as the evil Balisarius. The village brings in the harvest far quicker than apparently they ever could before but still have time to make some tapestries for their heroes. This also is bonkers, they have an anti gravity floating trailer but apparently no other mechanisation despite them being a farming community. Apparently they normally take “half a cycle” to get the harvest in but with a bit of extra help do it in three days. But heck, maybe half a cycle is four days? We then have a training montage where everyone in the village is already completely capable of shooting a gun and swinging a sword. And then we have what actually may be the most outlandishly dumb sequence in the entire film as Snyder decides to one up the assassination scene. Djimon Hounsou’s General Titus says that as they are all going to fight together tomorrow they must all “confess” so they know each other better. Each hero then takes a turn to tell their backstory and why they are there! It is totally inane. These are characters who were introduced in the first film and because we know nothing about them and have no care for them they literally take turns telling a story. And at the end of it you still do not care! Poor Djimon Hounsou has the absolute worst lines to utter in this film and to paraphrase Harrison Ford, “Zack, you can type this shit, but you can’t say it”. Then there is an hour of fighting. 

You would hope that the hour of fighting might save the film. Remember Zack Snyder is a visual director. But and it’s a huge BUT, the super battle plan they have come up with to beat this behemoth of an enemy is basically run at them and shoot. Unless of course you are Thunder from Killer Instinct…sorry I mean Tarak (Staz Nair) and you run at a bunch of people shooting lasers with two tomahawks in hand whilst wearing no body armour. The Three Amigos (1986) had a better plan than that! 

Throughout all of this you have to also remember literally everything is in slow motion and told in a grandiose Greek tragedy self important style with lens flare everywhere. For heavens sake it’s like watching harvesting corn porn at one point. 

The fact that this four hour two part film apparently needs longer director cuts is beyond me. But the fact that the film ends with the promise of more adventures utterly confounds me. The scripts have been so bad that I can see no way in which extra time with these characters could make us care. No amount of slow motion and lensflare and forced grandiose speeches can save what is essentially a big budget smorgasbord of Zack Snyder’s idea of every science fiction epic smashed together and vomited onto the screen. 

At least part one had Poundland Han Solo.