Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver (2024)

There is a moon called Veldt, and on it there are farmers, and the farmers have grain, and a dreadnought arrives to take the grain. This is the whole of the dramatic architecture, and Zack Snyder presents it with the solemnity of a man unveiling a monument. The first hour concerns harvesting, the second concerns training the villagers to fight, and the third concerns the fighting itself, which is loud and long and features a great deal of slow motion. Sofia Boutella's Kora broods handsomely. Djimon Hounsou stands near things. Anthony Hopkins voices a robot who has wandered in from a different and possibly better production.

The ensemble is genuinely varied, and this is worth a small nod of acknowledgment, though the film treats its diversity the way it treats its spaceships: as set dressing that requires no comment. Kora wields a blade and commands a room, which registers as capable rather than conscious, the ordinary inheritance of forty years of action cinema. The Imperium seizes a surplus and calls it tribute, a gesture toward imperial extraction that never quite becomes an argument about anything. There are no queer characters, no racial themes, no environmental anxieties, no bodies celebrated, no minds described as different, and no history to revise, because none of this happened and no one involved seems to have considered that it might mean something if it had. The film does pause occasionally for a rousing speech about standing together. These speeches are brief. We are grateful.

What we have, then, is a space opera that aspires to myth and settles for volume. The director's cut reportedly improves matters, which is a familiar arrangement: pay twice for the privilege of a coherent second act. It is not an insulting film. It is merely an unnecessary one, and there are so many of those now that the category has become its own genre, complete with its own moon.