{"id":62,"date":"2024-04-22T16:09:48","date_gmt":"2024-04-22T15:09:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/joshtest04.wordpress.com\/2024\/04\/22\/rebel-moon-part-2-the-scargiver\/"},"modified":"2025-05-05T20:21:42","modified_gmt":"2025-05-05T19:21:42","slug":"rebel-moon-part-2-the-scargiver","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/2024\/04\/22\/rebel-moon-part-2-the-scargiver\/","title":{"rendered":"Rebel Moon Part 2: The Scargiver"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Mild spoilers for Rebel Moon and The Tortured Poets Department.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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That\u2019s Jimmy.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In Dave Moore\u2019s multipart essay on Taylor Swift, \u2018How You Get the World\u2019<\/a>, he speculates that the media conditions of the late 2000s produced a generation of ultimate media: acts and brands and series that came from the era of universal appeal but which persisted into the era of Spotify and Netflix, where we are all so micro-served in our wants and desires that the sun has set on fame or success at that level. There may be more acts as talented as the Beatles, but their success will be diffuse, celebrity arriving in dribs and drabs instead of a supernova explosion of fame. Taylor Swift, as you might expect, is Moore\u2019s primary example of this in modern music. For cinema, Moore cites the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For over ten years the MCU was inescapable in pop cinema, an Imperial march through the box office the successes of which were only accentuated by the tragicomic failure of every attempt to replicate it. Warner Bros sank their own battleship trying to \u2018fix\u2019 Justice League<\/em> to the Marvel formula; the less said about Universal\u2019s \u2018Dark Universe\u2019 the better. Even Disney\u200a\u2014\u200awho bought Marvel wholesale\u200a\u2014\u200acouldn\u2019t keep Star Wars<\/em> going for more than a handful of films.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Getting the pictures of grain in early so I can fit them all.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Now it seems likely that we are in the twilight of the MCU, with tepid entries like the sequel to 2019\u2019s billion-selling Captain Marvel<\/em> failing to make back its budget and upcoming fare like Deadpool 3 <\/em>leaning on the ageing, uncertain legacy of the Fox X-men <\/em>films <\/em>for appeal. The Achilles\u2019 heel of the MCU was always the unbroken chain of continuity; the fear of missing an essential entry and slipping from the zeitgeist. In this Disney have prepared the MCU a shallow grave, the integration of streaming service TV shows into the core narrative turning an occasional pleasant visit to the cinema into something you need to devote hours of downtime to keeping up with. Even a smart director like Sam Raimi can\u2019t make an attachment to the six hours of 2021\u2019s WandaVision<\/em> completely optional.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Taylor Swift by contrast has retained her throne, for now, as a new round of reviewers tangle with the fear that her popularity might be driving their positive coverage rather than vice-versa. The roles of critic, taste-maker and customer advocate are never as intertwined as they seem and fresh off her enormous stadium tour and movie Swift seems likely to shrug off any negative reviews for her new album The Tortured Poets Department, <\/em>released April 19th (Paste\u2019s review was posted anonymously<\/a> for fear of fan reprisals). A double album is one of the traditional marks of an act falling to hubris, and Swift\u2019s detractors might be hoping that 31 songs with lyrics like \u201cWhat if I can\u2019t have us\/I might just not get up\u201d <\/em>will be enough to bring her down to earth again. Personally I wouldn\u2019t take that bet. This kind of uncomfortably proximate emoting is Swift\u2019s trade, her authenticity, and what might appear cringeworthy to outsiders is the beating heart of her appeal to fans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Rebel Moon title cards are an absolute joy.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

A world away from all this but on the same day, Zack Snyder finalises his own double album with the release of Rebel Moon Part 2: The Scargiver<\/em>. The journey of this one seems to have taxed whoever is in charge of managing releases at Netflix to a point beyond all comprehension; it\u2019s hard to imagine a more unhinged market strategy than \u201ctwo films, each with two cuts, but not at the same time, and they\u2019re each about five months apart\u201d. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and five months is not long enough to forget that the first part suffered deeply from being cleft in two like this. Arriving too soon to demand a rewatch of the first part, and effortlessly defeated in epic stakes by the recent blockbuster success of Villeneuve\u2019s Dune, <\/em>this latter half has not been set up for success. As with Ms Swift though, Snyder has a habit of beating the odds and confounding the critics\u200a\u2014\u200awho may never forgive him for the trump card he pulled on all the nay-sayers and industry insiders by seeing his Justice League <\/em>through to completion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my review of Rebel Moon Part 1: A Child of Fire <\/em>I speculated that Snyder was returning to his roots in doling out crowd-pleasing action with simple moral messages, with the risk being that Star Wars<\/em> was yet another revered cultural artifact he might be perceived as mistreating. Star Wars <\/em>is serious business, even now, and there\u2019s something typically audacious in Rebel Moon<\/em>\u2019s refusal to emulate it too closely. There\u2019s no force, no monks, no robot peasants. In this second part there isn\u2019t even any planet hopping save for flashbacks and recaps. Snyder is mythopoetic where Lucas is spiritual\u200a\u2014\u200awhat unites his band of adventurers is life, living and working, and much of the first half of Part 2 <\/em>is given over to seeing the protagonists of Rebel Moon <\/em>working the land in common with the villagers they have come to save, sharing food and drink and dance. It\u2019s an earnest message that casts into relief the difficulty of such human connection even in Snyder\u2019s own superhero efforts\u200a\u2014\u200aBatman v Superman <\/em>in particular hinging on the distance Superman\u2019s existence puts him and the people he aids. The MCU often inelegantly sidestepped this by having the heroes defend property in the quickly achieved absence of people; cars and buildings and other totems, Thanos meeting his final defeat when he knocks over the campus building. The lack of humanity can become distracting\u200a\u2014\u200athe Avengers famously share a shawarma, but they don\u2019t share it with Happy Hogan. Rebel Moon <\/em>is deeply concerned with human behaviours\u200a\u2014\u200alove, work, sex, violence\u200a\u2014\u200ain a way that is often absent in modern films.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It was a shame to watch this one on the small screen\u200a\u2014\u200athere apparently were screenings in London this time but I wasn\u2019t aware of them.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Being in essence a two-hour final act, there\u2019s not much room for structural game-playing here. We get an hour or so of beautifully shot grain harvesting with the expected nods to Magnificent Seven <\/em>where they should be, and the brief story of how Admiral Noble got his groove back\u200a\u2014\u200ain a joke that\u2019s just a bit too arch for this movie, we\u2019re repeatedly told that the resurrection process (a visual reference to The Matrix<\/em>) may have turned him into a deranged psychopath. Naturally, his behaviour doesn\u2019t change at all. Following this we get the scene which most resembles the first movie, as the members of the troupe who didn\u2019t get to show off their deal in that movie fill in the gaps here in a series of vignettes. This includes a delightfully theatrical recounting of Kora\u2019s killing of the magic princess, beginning with the King deciding to call his biggest, ugliest ship the \u2018Peacemaker\u2019 and ends with the string quartet playing a gun-toting Kora out of the room. It\u2019s playful and stagey without being ridiculous or self-indulgent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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More so than Part 1<\/em>, the new film does flaunt some significant references to Lucas\u2019 work. The invasion of the village, with walker tanks being airdropped in alongside ground troops as dust flies past the camera is a loving reproduction of the final battle from Attack of the Clones, <\/em>and the topsy-turvy swordfight between Kora and the resurrected Admiral Noble at the climax has a similar sense of outlandish fun as the Obi-wan\/Anakin duel in Revenge of the Sith<\/em>, along with the spectacle of a great flagship crashing through the atmosphere. Closing the film out on a funeral pyre also highlights the affection this film has for that series. The comparison does throw up some areas where Rebel Moon<\/em>\u2019s reach exceeds its grasp, with the personal enmity between Noble and Kora always seeming more like pathetic competition than ideological clash. It\u2019s not just that Vader is Luke\u2019s father, it\u2019s also that he\u2019s a symbol of paternal authoritarianism to Luke\u2019s hippy freewheeling. Kora on the other hand, though we\u2019re shown that she has instinctually picked up the communitarian values of the village, is herself a product of the same Empire that Noble serves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Notably, there\u2019s no contrivance to give them different coloured blades\u200a\u2014\u200ain the end, they\u2019re fighting over just one.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

What the interpersonal conflict doesn\u2019t show though, the incidental details are happy to express\u200a\u2014\u200athe extended sequence of communal labour is contrasted with what we see of the inner workings of the enemy dreadnought, with a clear reference to the class strata of Titanic whereby workers in the engine room shovel coal into great raging furnaces. Above this is some kind of spectral angelic computer, evoking Evangelion among other things, bound in a position of sedate submission as Kora installs explosives across its broad forehead, eyes flickering to light with the interaction. In the flashback, the senators of this Empire are aged and grotesque, the old stereotype of the Prussian noble, as they endorse Balisarius\u2019s antiquity-themed coup. Old men of the future, in command as ever. There\u2019s something pathetic in Noble\u2019s repeated assertion that capturing Kora will win him a place on the senate\u200a\u2014\u200afor all his love of the society he represents he is extremely blinkered about how it loves him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Notable by their absence, not compared to Star Wars but compared to the mode of nearly all modern genre films, are the quips. None of the characters of Rebel Moon <\/em>are a Chris Pratt type and thank the heavens for it. There\u2019s a confidence in the world of the film and the actions of the characters within it that liberates them from having to do the ritual ironic disavowal that pervades modern films. The villagers do not proclaim \u201coh damn!\u201d on seeing the second wave of troops marching towards them because the villagers are in fear for their lives. The setting is taken seriously, and not just as a sort of pastiche the people within it are performing\u200a\u2014\u200athe most obvious example of which being the world of The Marvels<\/em>, where the planet of the sad refugee people is but a hop from the planet of people who just have to sing and dance all the time and so on. Rebel Moon<\/em> is refreshingly straightforward: the soliders are competent and well-disciplined, the officers obey orders even if they disagree with them, and sensible decisions are made about tactics throughout. It\u2019s a small thing, but it means when we then see Noble personally go on a trench warfare murder spree it\u2019s exceptional rather than ludicrous. George Lucas always insisted that Star Wars <\/em>was for children, and the comedic incompetence of the Stormtroopers was a reflection of that. Rebel Moon<\/em>, with its R-rated director\u2019s cuts hanging like phantasms in the distance, does not have such a commitment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Special mention to Ed Skrein\u2019s face, even more of a skull mask here than in the first one.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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With hindsight it may turn out that Snyder\u2019s peak of creativity and collaboration was his trilogy for DC, and he won\u2019t seek out such intimate, introspective work on the grand canvas again. It may be that among fans there is much handwringing and disappointment over his experiments with cinematography and writing and the other elements he has, until now, sought out talented partnerships for. It may even be that unlike stablemate Michael Bay, Snyder never sees a broader reappraisal among critics as an auteur (with the concept more out of fashion than ever). Rebel Moon Part 2 <\/em>currently has 18%<\/a> on popular review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. Love and Thunder<\/em>, a movie without a shred of the craftsmanship or soul that is present here, has 63%<\/a> and is certified \u2018Fresh\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Believing as many people have that critical consensus will build a universal (American) canon liberates a person from the tyranny of choice. There is no risk of feeling your taste to be inadequate when there is an objective numerical measure of its accuracy. But if the numbers are a fantasy, and the consensus was only ever a reflection of contingent aspects of production and not a guiding factor at all\u200a\u2014\u200aif The Shawshank Redemption<\/em> or Citizen Kane <\/em>or Everything Everywhere All At Once<\/em> is not in fact the greatest film of all time, certified as top of the list\u2014 then every person is in danger of being a philistine. This is a troubling thought. But more troubling is the idea that, captured by engines that only feed back to us what we already like, we end up with nothing but attempts to recreate the MCU. For as much as I don\u2019t hate <\/em>these films, we end up with The Marvels <\/em>or Madame Web <\/em>or Wonder Woman 1984 <\/em>or Thor: Love and Thunder. <\/em>Films made by committee, with artistic endeavour a secondary concern. As Snyder himself put it in a recent interview, we end up with the Happy Meal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The shot composition is showy all the way through, but they really have fun with Jimmy.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Snyder\u2019s work is unique and particular, and fervent in its earnestness. Despite all the homage and pastiche and the readily apparent melting pot of influences, Rebel Moon <\/em>is an original sci-fi universe in an age of adaptations and sequels. Snyder, who once helmed the major competition to the MCU, knows the folly of trying to reproduce it. Even the clumsy sequel hook here is only that, a sequel hook. It\u2019s not the work that destroys all the critics and haters\u200a\u2014\u200abut then we had that one in 2021 and it didn\u2019t last anyway. It\u2019s just another decent movie by Zack Snyder. Perhaps for his next one he will take a leaf from erstwhile creative partner Christopher Nolan and leave genre behind entirely. Oppenheimer <\/em>brought the intensity of a Batman film to historical biography. Perhaps Snyder could bring the rich visuals of Rebel Moon <\/em>to philosophical fiction<\/a>. Or perhaps he will keep producing these grandiose micro-epics for as long as Netflix will pay him. All things are possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would be sad to never see another film like Rebel Moon <\/em>and I don\u2019t know if another director is likely to make one. Everything\u2019s filthy, the lens is constantly trained on the narrowest plane of interest and there\u2019s a healthy, satisfying thunk<\/em> to every noise and interaction. It\u2019s not a new Star Wars<\/em>\u200a\u2014\u200ait may be that nothing can be a new Star Wars<\/em>, nothing can be a new MCU, nothing can be a new Taylor Swift. But it\u2019s an enjoyable movie by a director who is always pushing his own limits. The lousy division into two parts, the held-off pair of Director\u2019s cut, the fancy lenses and lingering shots of grain and such may not be to everyone\u2019s taste. Few things are. Cynics will sneer at the simple truisms like \u201cconnecting with people will help you break an addicition\u201d or \u201cmutual respect can bring people from different backgrounds together\u201d. But Rebel Moon<\/em> is authentic and honest in a way that will overcome all cynicism to those who care\u200a\u2014\u200aan inimitable talent for reaching people that Zack Snyder shares with Swift\u200a\u2014\u200aand that alone is more than enough to save it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Kora and the engineer share some kind of moment here. The scene I\u2019m most looking to see extended.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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If you appreciate my writing, watch my video essay Sixteen Attempts to Talk to You About Suicide Squad<\/em><\/strong><\/a>. Then watch my video essay The Fanatic<\/em><\/strong><\/a>. If you\u2019re after more text, please follow me on Medium<\/em><\/a> <\/em>or subscribe to my Letterboxd<\/em><\/a> reviews. Thanks to Jimbot<\/a> and Jamie Faith<\/a> for feedback.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mild spoilers for Rebel Moon and The Tortured Poets Department. In Dave Moore\u2019s multipart essay on Taylor Swift, \u2018How You Get the World\u2019, he speculates that the media conditions of the late 2000s produced a generation of ultimate media: acts and brands and series that came from the era of universal appeal but which persisted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":2,"footnotes":""},"categories":[94,96],"tags":[45,78,79,80,22],"class_list":["post-62","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article","category-media-criticism","tag-media-criticism","tag-rebel-moon","tag-rebel-moon-part-2","tag-taylor-swift","tag-zack-snyder"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":100,"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions\/100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}