Four months after the release of the first opus in the Netflix franchise, Zack Snyder gives us a terribly long and tedious second film with Rebel Moon Part Two : The Scargiver

The first thing that jumps out at you when you watch the film is the extent to which Snyder fails to build any dramatic stakes for his characters on the foundations laid by his first film. After spending 2 hours recruiting the various participants in the fight against the General in the first film, we still know almost nothing about these characters. All we’re given in Rebel Moon Part Two is a series of flashbacks before the final battle to the origins of our fighters and their inner traumas. The chaining together of these flashbacks shows a real failure of character development, as we’re suddenly crammed with a few minutes’ worth of origin story sequences, in the hope that the viewer will empathize with them. This is never the case. Sequence follows sequence, and all we see are masses of muscle and dexterity. The lack of attention to writing is clearly noticeable, beyond the first film, and results in a film that seems far too empty.

While the structure of Rebel Moon Part Two is uncomplicated, the story speeds up as much as it can to bring the general back to life, and impose a countdown to his arrival on the village peasants. With a running time of 2 hours, the film devotes its entire second half to this final battle, and highlights the story’s pacing problem. The third act never seems to end. The situation is further exacerbated by Snyder’s cinematic style. While slow-motion and epic compositions are his trademark, they considerably slow down the continuity, with each fight taking some twenty minutes to unfold before our eyes, the editing constantly having to take us back to a different part of the fight. All this gives the impression that Snyder fills a lot with very little, and continually drags on. From an exciting, grandiose battle, Snyder turns it into a tedious, empty viewing experience, filled with slow-motion and editing that never finishes what it starts. Action and dialogue follow one another without any dramatic or narrative weight, while characters and camera move everywhere, everything seems so lifeless.

More alarming is Snyder’s willingness to continue the adventure with an open ending, announcing a new battle for Kora, joined by the rest of his team. It’s rather frustrating to see him capitalize on a new entry, when the second one already displays a cruel lack of narrative substance. The situation echoes the development of the DC Comics films with Warner a decade earlier. In a rush to compete with Marvel, Snyder skips the stages of construction of each superhero and presents them directly to us together. Snyder (and Netflix) is excited by the possibilities of his universe, that much is clear, but his writing is too cold to give us the slightest desire to follow them any further.