Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver

Rather than a full-blooded sequel, Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver is the previously unseen, feature-length third act for its predecessor, Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire. The films are two pieces of the same Games Workshop-does-Star Wars whole and, unfortunately, the hard split separating the twins invites strange, structural imbalances in the individual fragments rather than allow for the wriggle room required to stage two successive, complimentary conclusions. Experienced apart on release day(s) - rather than streamed later, when both parts can be viewed back-to-back - the disinclination to twist and reassess the pieces on the board between instalments is disappointing but understandable. Scargiver is not a sequel, in the traditional sense. Instead it is the other half of a science fiction saga focused on crawling movement and noisy portraiture. Ed Skrein's fascistic Admiral Noble is a case in point: bloodily vanquished in the previous chapter, he returns here in the exact same human body he died in, despite the glowing, biomechanical juices that had to be pumped into his chopped-up corpse to revive it. 

Writer-director-cinematographer Zack Snyder (co-writing with Kurt Johnstad and Shay Hatten) then deliberately foregoes his own grimdark approximation of Darth Vader to anchor this finale, preferring instead to shoot and frame the emaciated, Buccal drained Admiral as sacrilegious iconography: the diseased Christ that adorns the Isenheim Altarpiece returned, unnaturally, to life. As before, the subsistence stakes that powered Seven Samurai make very little sense when the aggressive party is an advancing, galaxy-spanning empire rather than a gang of starving noblemen who have turned to banditry. Although the assailed farmers pack their crop around key buildings, daring their invaders to incinerate their prize, Noble and his bovver boys are, as it happens, more than happy to detonate the grain. Once this idea of a battle between two armies running on empty stomachs is voided, all that remains is palace intrigue (both Noble and Sofia Boutella's Kora have been lieutenants in the orbit of Fra Fee's higher power) being played out, inconclusively, at the expense of Space Scandinavians. Wheat does remain important to Snyder though, specifically as an adored, photographic subject. The director's eye - which could, in short, be described as that of a muscle obsessed Malick - luxuriates in the slow motion wave of this grass and the straining, human hardship required to harvest it.