‘Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver’ Review: Zack, buddy… what’s going on?

A review of the new sci-fi film, on Netflix now

A couple of months ago, I reviewed Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire. I didn’t much like it. It seems to want to be a grand sci-fi epic in the tradition of Star Wars, and so director Zack Snyder seems to have tried to achieve this by cobbling together stolen bits of Star Wars. There are lightsaber-looking weapons, robots with consciences, a spaceport that turns out to be a wretched hive of scum and villainy, and so on. That whole movie is basically setup, too, a “getting the band together” series of vignettes that leave their characters mostly unexplored, even while ostensibly doing nothing but collecting characters.

In short, I said it was bad, but I was interested in a sequel; now that the world has been set up, would Snyder be able to deliver on the promise of the premise, to create a new sci-fi universe that would have fans clamoring for more adventures?

Short answer: no.

Somehow, Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver is even worse than the first one. It’s even more structurally-suspect, even more perfunctory in how it deals with its characters. It also looks considerably worse, and the first movie was no grand vision either. Once upon a time, Zack…