In contrast with the ubiquitous fanfare surrounding the launch of Rebel Moon Part 1 last year, its sequel has come and gone almost unnoticed
Last year, Zack Snyder seemed pretty convinced that his space opera riff on Seven Samurai was going to become an instant classic. The intensity of the marketing reflected that expectation: it was made at a volume and intensity to match that of the movie itself. Such high hopes weren't rewarded: Rebel Moon Part 1 turned out to be an unbearable cacophony of hyperviolence in blurry sepia, exactly what could have been predicted of a project where Snyder had free rein to pull his favorite toys out of the box.
What would have been harder to predict was how much room there still remained for Snyder to out-Snyder himself in Rebel Moon Part 2. With even more gratuitous slow motion, misplaced flashbacks, confused politics, impossibly sculpted abs, unintentionally funny battle cries, and suffocating grandiosity, Part 2 dulls the senses via relentless overstimulation. I noticed, to my horror, that I was witnessing gory death after gory death after gory death—and yet I was feeling nothing. Mayhem erupted on my screen with the chaotic viscerality of putting a gremlin in a blender and it left no impression on me. This is the kind of ultra-derivative art that relies on borrowing the prestige of its influences and doesn't bother trying to appeal to the viewer on is own merits.
There was plenty of material in this story with which to make some powerful statement, if only Snyder had wanted to. Taking the plot of Seven Samurai and replacing the wandering bandits with a galactic dictatorship changes completely the dynamics of the conflict. This isn't a mercenary skirmish in a lawless land; it's now a peasant revolt against the official authorities. Is Snyder subtly equating a rigidly hierarchical government composed of space fascists with a loose band of outlaws? I'm kidding. Snyder doesn't do subtle. Rebel Moon doesn't have space fascists because it has something to say about fascism; it has them because it's what Star Wars did and Rebel Moon wants to be one of the cool kids. It doesn't burn entire minutes of runtime in loving close-ups of wheat harvesting because it's interested in the perspective of vulnerable farmers; it does it because it gives Snyder an excuse to point the camera at sweaty muscles. Rebel Moon takes no stance on its own themes. It's content to let you provide the missing message by remembering it from the movies it alludes to.
In terms of characterization, the team of heroes at the center of Rebel Moon don't get more than the quickest coat of paint to technically make them no longer two-dimensional. As if drawing from a D&D campaign, each of these characters' backgrounds can be summarized as "goons raided my village." To make the whole affair even more unimaginative, the two prominent women in the team, Kora and Nemesis, have a dead child in their respective tragic pasts, possibly revealing a limit to Snyder's ability to imagine women's motivations.
The figuratively moustache-twirling admiral who lands on Kora's village to steal the harvest is even less impactful this time. If in the first movie he was a blank slate whose function in the story was to look generically evil and serve as the vicarious target for the audience's frustrations with neofascism, now he's a bland rehash of his one-hit act. Whereas his first death was at least a satisfying punch-the-Nazi (with a laser gun) moment, the sequel's supposedly climactic showdown feels like a tedious formality before his mandatory second offing. A bloody fistfight in the lopsided deck of an exploding spaceship, with heavy machinery and discount lightsabers flying around, sounds like a set piece impossible to make look boring, but you shouldn't underestimate Snyder's talent for filling the screen with flashy blasts that carry no meaning.
The emotional beats that punctuate the third act repeat a few tropes Snyder can't seem to move on from: the last-minute ally who shows up to prevent someone's imminent death, the hero who deals the killing blow at the cost of his own life. Snyder has found his formula and is comfortable recycling it. He's so confident in the awesomeness of Rebel Moon that he ends Part 2 with the promise of a Part 3 that we can already bet will repeat the same filmmaking tics. But enough is enough. There are only so many ways you can make the screen explode while having nothing to say. Maybe Snyder needs to go back to filming established properties, or find collaborators less willing to go along with his obsessions, but this period of unrestrained self-indulgence needs to stop.
Nerd Coefficient: 2/10.
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
