Rebel Moon—Part Two: The Scargiver review: Zack Snyder's improved follow up is a messy but daring star war

To call Rebel Moon—Part Two: The Scargiver pastiche is to oversell it. As was the case in Part One—A Child Of Fire, The Scargiver is an unmistakable blend of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and George Lucas’ Star Wars, so obvious in its make that pointing out the origin of its parts is redundant. The Scargiver doesn’t just smash these classic works together; it repackages them into artful havoc, squeegeed of its blood and glory for the consumption of modern streaming audiences. This decision is a baffling move by Netflix, who negotiated edits for Rebel Moon, possibly in fear that it had just sold a fraction of its fortunes to Zack Snyder, the agile provocateur behind such divisive works as Sucker Punch.

Snyder’s inclination to shoot lusty bodies framed against overly composed violence appears to have scraped against Netflix’s ambitions to sell Rebel Moon as its own ongoing, broadly appealing space opera; both cuts of Moon have blunted the director’s edge with sanitized PG-13 versions that make Snyder’s action sequences look more chaotic than they were likely meant to be. Axes are put through chests, laser rifles blast holes through soldiers, and many a throat is opened, yet The Scargiver is just as bloodless and chaotically edited as the film that came before it, so careful is Netflix to avoid offending casual viewers. Despite this, there is an R-rated release of Moon on its way—at least that seems to be the plan—but therein lies another challenge for the streamer: convincing people to watch Snyder’s compromised movie twice. History is repeating itself.

Compromised though it may be, no one can say Snyder hasn’t made Rebel Moon with love, and his guilelessness remains as admirable as ever. A Child Of Fire was a Saturday morning tent revival of muscular heroes, improbable yet awesome cosmic backdrops, and molten weapons calibrated to evoke those lightsabers from a certain galaxy far, far away. It was an exercise in geeky kitbashing, where familiar childhood ephemera was retrofitted to appeal to older audiences disenchanted by their lifelong fandoms.

Snyder’s recycled efforts were most apparent during that movie’s space-cantina recruitment scene in which we met Charlie Hunnam’s traitorous Han Solo surrogate, a sequence pulled whole-cloth from A New Hope. Indeed, Rebel Moon was Episode IV all over again, grungier, angrier, and imbued with the director’s violent opulence. Its rebel lead, Kora (Sofia Boutella), wasn’t called Skywalker but Scargiver, a lonely farmer with ties to a galactic empire who looked to the sky with eyes filled not with hope but dread.

Other characters filled out Snyder’s neo-Rebellion, too, and most survived to see this second installment play out: there’s the hard-drinking gladiator Titus (Djimon Hounsou), the cybernetic Nemesis (Doona Bae), Tarak (Staz Nair), a nobleman turned exile (whose animal-bonding abilities have been sadly discarded), and Gunnar (Michiel Huisman), Kora’s main squeeze, who is given a slightly elevated profile to lend Rebel Moon a flimsy romantic sweep. Their union made up most of Child Of Fire’s runtime, often making the movie feel like we were collecting action figures instead of thrilling to a raucous space adventure.

This time, their function is to fill out the ranks of Snyder’s play on Seven Samurai, and the plot of Kurosawa’s film informs most of what transpires in The Scargiver. It begins where A Child Of Fire left us, with the Imperium admiral Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein) revived after his violent clash with Kora through technological means inspired by Heavy Metal comic strips. Filled with renewed vengeance, Noble sets his Imperium Dreadnaught on course to Veldt—the remote farming outpost in which the tyrannical Regent Balisarius (Fra Fee) collects much of the Imperium’s grain—where he knows Kora and her team will be preparing for his arrival.

If nothing else, The Scargiver has a clearer direction than its prior installment, which allows us to spend more downtime with this over-large group of archetypes. Themes of generosity and sacrifice are planted during these beats, and even if they never fully take root, they at least lend some dramatic oomph to the perfunctory G.I. Joe-styled hostilities to come. Snyder, who co-wrote Rebel Moon with Kurt Johnstad (300) and Shay Hatten (Army Of The Dead), works in a surprising sense of sincerity, particularly when Veldt shows their gratitude to Kora and company and Boutella (and her cast mates) can display glimmers of humanity that briefly make The Scargiver feel like a much more impactful, emotionally resonant movie. (However, a later scene in which Kora, Titus, and the rest share tragic backstories as though they were reading stats from their character trading cards fumbles this goodwill.)

Perilously crowded though the cast may be, these quieter moments are a suitable showcase for each of their talents. To single out one among many, Hounsou brings a vivid energy to the film that speaks to his long-overlooked strengths as an actor and a physical performer; in fact, his vigor is so potent that it underscores the lack of charisma coming from most of the hated Imperium, especially Balisarius, who remains in the saga’s periphery for presumably franchise-building reasons. It’s an imbalance of energies that’s sated by Skrein’s Admiral Noble, whose sinewy presence recalls the raw physicality Snyder has shot so memorably in films like Man Of Steel and 300. Skrein is a worthy adversary, a collection of raw nerves and bile, a Vader of a different stripe.

One thing can be said about Zack Snyder that shouldn’t inspire debate: he’s devoted to his craft and his influences. Snyder has long been touted as a camera-toting über-nerd, the quintessential cinema Chad, a hero to his online defenders and enfant terrible to knife-sharpening critics who sneer at his slo-mo pop-artist sensibilities. Who else would so shamelessly contrive a movie like Batman V. Superman: Dawn Of Justice by painting a grotesque tapestry from Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns with the brush of John Boorman’s Excalibur? Who else would think to?

Who else but Zack Snyder would bother drawing from a well as frequently tapped as Star Wars just to put their own authorial spin on it? Well, quite a few people, as it happens, but few would, or even could, wind up with a Star Wars riff as earnest, messy, and (brace yourselves) daring as Rebel Moon. Through this ambitious two-part series (which reportedly has three or possibly six more installments in the offing), Snyder has labored over his influences to the degree that watching it will be a riot for the devoted and feel like work for everyone else. Either way, Snyder’s passion remains his strength.