Rebel Moon Part 1 was a big, disjointed mess. It had pretty bad pacing and most of all it had zero connective tissue between scenes; constantly, characters would just appear in new places with no transition or introduction, because that was the next scene that Zack Snyder had envisioned, and he didn't really care about how to get there. Everything resulted in total incoherence, as nothing seemed to follow from anything else, and no characters got any time to even do anything (other than, I suppose, Main Girl).
Well, I'm pleased to report that Zack took these criticisms to heart with a much slower paced movie in which things do, broadly speaking, make sense! Sure, the scale of time may make zero sense whatsoever still, and the entire concept of a galactic empire losing to a tiny handful of people is utter nonsense, but the movie is arranged in a way that what happens is actually the result of what happened before it, and will impact what happened after it. You might think "this is a baseline requirement for a functional movie" rather than "wow, a big step up!" and, well, you'd be right. I am less pleased to report that this change did nothing to make Rebel Moon Part 2 a good movie; in fact, I'm pretty sure it's even worse. At least the first one made you marvel at the sheer inexplicability of it all and laugh at how dumb it was; this movie was simply very boring.
Of all its many problems, the main one is just how utterly contrived and fake everything seems. The stakes are so low, and everything feels so pointless. They gathered the gang in the first movie so that the gang could do basically nothing, again, in this one. Instead of a new escalating villain, they fought just literally the exact same guy as before, except this time he's dumber and weaker. They're fighting the same battle, in the same place; at any moment, anyone on the Imperial side could just end the conflict by making a single sensible choice.
Every little miniature battle scene has to be carefully carved out, with soldiers only flowing in at the appropriate pace and in the appropriate numbers and with the appropriate weapons for each little conflict; when one is over, more soldiers simply materialize out of the ether, to perform their next task. The good guys just disappear for long periods, waiting for their appointed scene to do their one thing. Everyone has to behave so stupidly and nonsensically to make the entire setup work that it's a little bit sad. Don't even get me started on the Storm Trooper style fighting, in which everyone just runs out into the open and fires blasters aimlessly at nothing, never hitting a single thing no matter what because that might imply stakes of some kind in the action. The scale of every encounter is, like the scale of the whole movie, so obviously contrived that it just feels too Fake to bear even thinking about.
I genuinely feel a little bit sad for Zack because between these two movies, he very obviously wanted to make Space Seven Samurai, and it's clear that it's just not in him. I thought it after the first movie and it was reconfirmed here; so much of the setup is exactly the same. But everything about that movie (which is a masterpiece) DOES make sense, and the stakes are real; there are real people suffering, there are real people dying, and the encounters they have work with the technology and tactics available to them. Every member of that squad is developed and has a distinct personality and purpose, the exact opposite of this, where (in another correction from the first movie) they do try to give them little individual backstories, but they're all basically the same one, and their one trait always ends up being "Snyder thinks this person Seems Cool." But no one cares! Their stories are dumb, their motivations seem bad, and the entire setup just doesn't WORK when the bandits can blow up the peasants from orbit without a second thought. You cannot have the psychological war of siege when the bandits would obviously just send their next galactic battlecruiser and raze the village at will. It certainly doesn't work when the bandits have autonomous combat drones with blasters and the peasants still just have harvesting tools and a guy with abs and tomahawks.
At the end of Seven Samurai, the old veteran laments that while the peasants have won, they, the samurai, have lost, as their youthful friends have sacrificed their lives for a victory they can never see, and it is a reminder of the tragedy of it all. In this movie, we're just supposed to pretend that the Local Farmer Samurai (who does see his side win) is the real tragedy because of a totally unearned romantic relationship with the lead? Most of them live (because they have to, for Sequel Bait, because Cinematic Universe, sigh), and most of them are actually quite pleased with the outcome, and there is none of the melancholy and philosophical consideration of the movie it is desperately trying to emulate. It may think it has the pacing of a "slower" movie (by ZS standards, anyway) but it certainly has none of the thoughtfulness and none of the intentionality.
Score: 2/10
IMDb: Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver
PS: You can also read my guest reviewer's overly long Rebel Moon Part 1 review if you just can't get enough of the Rebel Mooniverse.
PPS: When this movie started we couldn't remember a single name of a character from the first movie, which made me laugh out loud when at some point in this film, they insisted they would honor everyone by Remembering their Names.
PPPS: Seriously though, the sense of scale in this movie is so fucked up. They dig an elaborate tunnel system, harvest an entire grain crop, and train some farmers who have never held a gun to be Soldiers in 5 total days? A Dreadnought class space battleship needs the grain from one tiny little farm that can barely feed itself? The Galactic Empire, again, loses to a tiny team of individually identifiable guys, in mostly hand-to-hand combat? What is going on here?
