Rebel Moon - Part 2

Almost a year ago I watched a new film known as Rebel Moon and it was a pretty bad movie with some cool special effects and giant ships.

When a peaceful settlement on the edge of a distant moon finds itself threatened by the armies of a tyrannical ruling force, a mysterious stranger living among its villagers becomes their best hope for survival.
Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire

Kora and surviving warriors prepare to defend Veldt, their new home, alongside its people against the Realm. The warriors face their pasts, revealing their motivations before the Realm's forces arrive to crush the growing rebellion.
Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver

The 2nd movie was just released and I decided to give it a watch. This has to be one of the most expensive absolutely garbage movies I've ever seen.

The film begins at such a point that you have to finish Part 1 and then watch this movie to remember any of the characters. I had to stop the movie, go back to Part 1 and fast forward to skim the final 15 minutes to remember anybody.

We get to see the main villain from the first film has apparently survived and is being repaired in some futuristic capsule. As he emerges he has a visual scar in the center of his stomach to which a staff member asks if he would like it removed.

Immediately the movie does the dumbest monologue ever where the main villain decides to keep the scar as a mark from the "scargiver". Not only that, but he pledges to show his chest in the senate to show the mark inflicted as he captured the scargiver.

They show the scar and I laugh - it looks like a burn or sunburn in the wrong light. Enough about the main recycled villain though our troop of protagonists have arrived back home to the village.

These are the individuals the first movie discovered one by one to prepare a small group against the Realm. When these folks return it was just odd.

• General Titus is instructing a group of children and farmers to bring in all the crop in 3 days when they claim its not possible.
• Kora enters some romantic affair with Gunnar with the most cheesy line ever.
• This girl presents thoughtful gifts for the protagonists, but they literally arrived a day prior.

It makes no sense watching this girl give a monologue of all these characters who literally have not been in this village until this movie minutes prior.

We then as the audience have to watch slow motion harvesting of grain. Its exhausting and boring - I head to the bathroom and come back and the characters are still harvesting grain in slow motion.

Roughly at the 40 minute mark we finally see the robot rocking a cape, antlers and more. The more interesting thing of the movie, but we won't learn anything what occurred that led to this robot's appearance. I was actually interested in learning more about the robots and their interactions with the people.

The main characters are now eating together after hard days of harvesting and training the village. Titus recommends they share the truth about themselves and what begins is a one by one backstory monologue by each character.

It's laughable at this point as it detracts from the story of each character. I can't think of any other movie in recent times that has just done flashbacks of all main characters in order at once. Even to the extreme point that one character says - "What about you? You haven't told your story."

At the 1 hour mark the enemy fleet arrives at the home planet of Veldt and decides to drop most of their army miles away from the village. For a large army raiding planets for materials it seems quite odd to deploy a massive fleet and then not utilize them immediately to overwhelm the opposition.

We are left with an interesting dialog between villain and protagonist and I have to call out one spoken line. Kora (Protagonist) says "No more and no less." when referring to amount of grain the villain could take to leave with no bloodshed.

Does "no less" mean if the villain wants less grain than being offered Kora would say - "No - you need to take the minimum"?

Ignoring that - the battle starts with Gunnar stealing the weapon from Kora and discharging it into the bell. At this moment with nearly 100 guards aiming weapons at Gunnar - I'm not sure why not a single guard decided not to fire at the enemy when a weapon was utilized.

The battle takes place and we watch all our protagonists in their various points of war.

• Tutis & Axe Wielding Guy fight near shirtless in front of 50 guards without taking a single bullet.
• The sword lady falls but only after forming a bond with a child she's known for 15 minutes.
• The rifle girl hides in a building and only pops out to fight when the 2nd wave of enemies occur letting village bloodshed occur for the entire duration of first wave.
• Premature celebration from all when they believe they've won - meanwhile the next 1,000 troops are walking up.
• The robot shows up at a crucial moment to eliminate a tank and kill some enemies.

While all of this is occurring Kora has boarded the massive enemy ship in the air. She somehow maneuvers the ship and places many bombs on the core "brain" of the ship without much trouble at all.

At one scene they identify her in the elevator and stop it to intercept her. They know shes in there, but instead they don't fire and allow her to kick over a line of 20 troops domino style. She then proceeds in some side scrolling fight much like Oldboy to eliminate every guard in her path.

Meanwhile the villain has decided that the conquest for grain is no longer worth it. The coveted prize of the Scargiver is now on the ship for capture. He instructs the ship to fire the massive cannon mounted at the village to kill all troops, villagers and grain in place.

This doesn't go over well with our enemy fleet when their entire purpose thus far has to been to acquire grain, so giving that up and killing your own army does not seem like the best move.

Of course timing is excellent here and when the cannon is about to fire - the bombs go off that Kora planted. This offsets the cannon to miss the village and leads to the massive enemy ship to collapse and fall towards Veldt.

Our two main folks (good and evil) are now fighting together down an incline which is near exactly how the last movie ended. We just have more swords, more action and more explosions this time around.

Long story short - we are to believe the villain has actually died this time, but Gunnar has also fallen in the process. The village celebrates and honors their fallen in the success of this battle.

Kora interjects to say "don't use my name" and I laugh. Is she aware this is a ceremony for those who've died? Normally if you are still alive and survived the fight you aren't honored in this type of ceremony.

The characters are now gearing up for a future battle and this must sadly mean a Part 3 movie.

It seems Zack Snyder has this repeating pattern that goes roughly like this:

• Release pretty bad to okay to alright movie.
• Zack says something like - "studio made me cut - here is my longer director cut and/or R rated version"
• Re-release is slightly better.

In this case we can see the movie was written, directed, produced and shot by Zack. I'd argue that no one was around to say "No Zack - that is stupid", because some of these scenes, dialogue and pacing is terrible.

I don't think I'll watch Part 3.