Kora (Sofia Boutella), Gunnar (Michiel Huisman), and their crew return to Velt after their showdown with Admiral Noble (Ed Skrein), and the poor farming community gives them what they can of a hero’s welcome.  The celebration is cut short, however, when Aris (Sky Yang), a mole working both for Velt and the Imperium Army, leaks intel that Noble’s body was recovered from the battlefield and he was nursed back to health from his wounds.  With an onslaught imminent, the crew begins to train the people of Velt in battle and hatch a plan to force the Imperium Army out of their dreadnaughts so that they must fight on the ground where the inexperienced peasant army at least stands a chance at survival. 

Writer/Director Zack Snyder opens Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver right where his similarly Netflix Exclusive A Child of Fire (2023) ended.  After a rather lackluster debut across the holiday frame, Netflix was stuck with what is surely an expensive property and a contractual obligation to release it, but they seemingly did not have much faith in the title as there was hardly any marketing push behind it.  The conclusion – or is it? – runs a leaner 122 minutes, but it honestly feels longer than the first as co-writers Kurt Johnstad and Shay Hatten tread narrative water at this crossroads between medieval fantasy and sci-fi epic, stumbling over exposition and then dumping us into a stagnant battle.  Even Snyder’s fan base seems a bit scorned by the title and it really is a wonder now, not how Snyder keeps securing so many blank checks but how much longer will he be able to keep working as creative tzar on set?  Director, screenwriter, and cinematographer; simply put, one should not do it all and Snyder certainly is no exception to the rule. 

There is no use begrudging the returning cast who all received the same direction to simply ask like the A-lister who had enough sense to decline the up-front back-end deal offered to them so they were cast to be the stand-in for.  It would be similarly no use to begrudge the film’s trademarked slow-mo action style, but in a glimmer of grace, Dody Dorn was able to talk Snyder into practicing some restraint in the edit.  It is hardly enough to save the film, but the effort is appreciated.  Simply put, The Scargiver suffers from a severe case of Part 2 syndrome, opening with a bit of catchup narration from Jimmy (Anthony Hopkins), a robot that has taken to the rural way of life and wears an antler crown, and then just an excessive amount of exposition.  The rest of the first 45 minutes or so is then backstory, thankfully conveyed through flashbacks instead of straight narration, but it really leaves us wondering why is this important, why were we not told in Part 1, and further, why was this not just a single, long run-time title.  We are treading in murky narrative water for almost half of the film’s runtime, and when it finally breaks and begins to work in the moment, it is a back-half encompassing battle full of characters that we, at best, only half care about so it reads just like empty, emotionless effects. 

The Scargiver is a frustrating experience because there are slivers of merit nestled under the layers and layers of digital muck that bog down every frame.  So little of the lore is coherently explained, Stephanie Portnoy Porter certainly worked hard in dressing the cast in elegant and inspired costumes, but the work of Claudia Bonfe on decorating the sets is largely obscured by the color grading and lighting that make much of the film look like a hyper-realistic animation.  If it were a video game it would be impressive, but as a film, audiences are left bewildered at what they are seeing because even the most human characters in the film fall into the uncanny valley.  Snyder just gets in his own way.  There are some interesting images, and interesting ideas, but because he is so obsessed with being the sole font from which all inspiration and creativity flows in his projects, he is overextended and cannot focus on any element so it all comes together in a rapidly passing motion blur with no definition.  It is an amalgamation, not in the way that a social drama or satire allows individual audiences to graft their own experience onto that of what they just witnessed, but in that everything on screen runs together in such a way, like the water used to rinse a paint brush, it becomes cloudy, grey, and incomprehensible.  Sure, there is a beauty to how it all blends and swirls around in the glass before it settles and crusts to sediment, but that poetry is more for sad songwriters than it is for audiences looking for a good time. 

The Scargiver is just more of the same, not only of the Rebel Moon franchise but just more of the same one-pony show that we have come to expect from Snyder. Even his acolytes may begin realizing that their emperor is not wearing any clothes because The Scargiver did not benefit from the inflated review boosting of his most fervent fans as A Child of Fire did. We have grown weary of this digital onslaught. We have grown weary of this derivative storytelling. This is a director who cut his teeth on music videos, made his first foray into feature filmmaking with a bloody, zombie action thriller with Dawn of the Dead (2004), was heralded as a new voice in action filmmaking with his Spartan-set 300 (2006), and then just absolutely stalled out when handed the reigns to Superman with Man of Steel (2013); ironically one of his more meditative and thoughtful works.  Snyder is an idea man and is surely at his best in preproduction when the groundwork is being laid out, but seldom can he create, balance, and maintain a tone throughout his work because of his insistence on doing it all. We may never know fully if he communicated what he saw in his mind accurately to the screen on this pruported passion project, but we do know with certainty that at this point – two decades into his career – he is in desperate need of a reinvention.