Mladen and Del review ‘Rebel Moon Part Two: The Scargiver’
“Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver” Starring Sofia Boutella as flabbergasting Kora; Djimon Hounsou as uninspiring Titus; Bae Doona as almost likeable Nemesis; Michiel Huisman as meek Gunnar; Staz Nair as the soppy prince Tarak, Ed Skrein as the only-good-enough-character-in-the-film Atticus Noble; and others. Directed by Zack Snyder. Two hours, 2 minutes. Rated PG-13. Streaming on Netflix.
Plot summary: More of mediocre and trope-filled “Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire” but 17 minutes longer. Rednecks fight an evil empire that can’t feed the soldiers it sallies to subdue rednecks.
Mladen’s grade: C+
Dels grade: D
Mladen’s take
This is an unauthorized review. That means it wasn’t approved by Del. He wanted me to review (and, someday, I will) a movie titled “This Is Not a Test.” Sheesh, Del, are you still afflicted by your memory of the Cuban Missile Crisis? Is that why I’m supposed the review “This Is Not a Test?” Because it’s a nuclear warhead Armageddon film and you’re worried that the Small Man in Moscow will trigger World War III via Ukraine that plunges all of us into Hobbes’s state of nature.
Anyway, let’s talk “Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver” recently launched on Netflix. Two is no better than One, which is to say all the principal characters, barring one, are bland at best and unlikeable at worst. Don’t care about Kora’s faux internal conflict. Don’t care about Titus’s guilt. Don’t care that Tarak is a nepo baby trying to redeem himself. Just. Don’t. Care. That’s a problem because Rebel Moon offers nothing by way of an original story or grand ideas.
Ready for some alien invasion action? Check out Mladen’s and Del’s review of “The Tomorrow War.”
If there’s nothing pathbreaking in a film, the only factor that can save it is a good script. Neither Rebel Moons have good scripts. Two is packed with the banal such as near-immortality to keep the bad guy going, i.e., resurrecting someone from the half-cell that was saved after they’ve been incinerated, blasted apart, depressurized, I don’t know, take your pick of demises. Other banalities abound, too. Stuff like peasants fighting to keep their simple lives, peasants organizing an effective armed resistance against the system’s behemoth power, Motherworld, with two days of combat training, and peasants harvesting a massive wheat fields in three days using scythes so that they have two days to get military training before the Man arrives with a dreadnought the size of a city and thousands of troops. And, how the hell is the Rebel Moon able to produce an atmosphere, lithosphere, and hydrosphere that sustains carbon-based life when, on the horizon, is a gas giant that should be either emitting extreme magnetic radiation from its core that sterilizes everything on the moon, or locks the moon tidally so that all you get is extreme heat without darkness on one half and extreme cold without light on the other.
The secret to enjoying Two for what it is, a second-rate “Star Wars” or “Starship Troopers,” is to pay attention to the film’s few merits.
There’s the sublime evilness of Atticus Noble, the soulless admiral in charge of the Motherland force trying to sack Rebel Moon and capture Kora, who has an alias that, when revealed, surprises or shocks no one in the village. Noble is fit. Noble has a good vocabulary. Noble, who is the opposite of the meaning of his surname, keeps his uniform tidy and his composure intact as he whacks peasants and beats the crap out of Kora. Hated to see him die.
Also noteworthy is the film’s score. The music is particularly effective during Two’s last 50 minutes. In fact, just skip to the last 50 minutes of the film to immerse yourself in the spectacular visual effects. The battle scenes are terrific. Watching automatic plasma fire in slow motion fracturing and melting structures again and again never became boring. The sound is top tier, too. Everything from the zip-bang of rifles to the blast of the big gun on the dreadnought enhanced the VFX.
If you watched One, you may as well watch Two. And, yes, prepare yourself to watch Three, which is on the way. Three promises to be the all-or-nothing showdown between the Dark Side of the For … ah, between the Saviors of the Peasants and the top Motherworld Bad Guy, whose name sounds like it was ripped off from the name of a genus of dinosaur.
Del’s take
After watching “Rebel Moon Part Two: The Scargiver,” I’d like to ask, who’s the more scarred – the movie’s viewpoint character or ME, after Mladen dragged my sorry ass back into that steaming pile of wookie poop. I’ll say this about Part Two – it earned an even lower score than Part One’s dreadful Rotten Tomatoes rating of 23, clocking in at a mere 15 percent. That’s almost as shitty as Truth Social’s stock price.
Check out Del’s review of “Avatar: The Way of the Water.”
Mladen and I reviewed Part One last December and what can I say? Part Two is just as awful. OK, let me back up. It’s maybe a smidge less awful because the audience isn’t forced to suffer through the painful backstory infodump that took place in Part One. See? There is a God.
Here’s what I wrote in my review of Part One. These observations remain painfully true of Part Two:
“Rebel Moon” is Star Wars Lite, if such a thing is possible. When I saw director Snyder’s remake of “Dawn of the Dead” I told myself, “Now here’s a guy who knows how to make a movie.” Unfortunately, Snyder is a guy who knows how to make one movie. “Rebel Moon” looks just like “Sucker Punch,” “300” and “Watchmen,” and despite the lofty ambitions, it’s surprisingly bereft of depth.
Let’s not even talk about things like tropes or archetypes – “Rebel Moon” is a bad copy of a bad copy, like that photocopy of the mysterious night shift worker’s ass that turned up on the Xerox machine one morning and now everybody’s passing it around the office.
Dialogue is, well, corny. And not just corny corny, but fanboy at the science fiction convention Dungeons & Dragons icebreaker corny. Characterization is practically non-existent – you’ve seen these people in dozens of movies over the years, starting with Akira Kurosawa’s “The Seven Samurai,” the same place Snyder got the plot. It would have been hilarious if he’d ripped off J.J. Abrams. Alas, the universe doesn’t have that ironic a sense of humor. FX are not great, either. I should think $166 million would buy you a more realistic-looking spaceship or future city.
It’s all a gussied-up, overhyped pile of same-old, same-old, and I’ll be honest – it actually offends me. The science fiction genre – at least the printed-on-paper part of the genre – has thousands of really terrific stories waiting to be told. Why waste $166 million on this retread?
Are you getting the idea I really hated this movie?
I did embrace one aspect of the Rebel Moon universe – I bought two bags of Rebel Moon popcorn, but only because Walmart had them marked down to $2 apiece. And let me say, even the popcorn was crappy – chewy and stale, with lots of tooth-breaking unpopped kernels. If you want a really good bag of movie-style popcorn I recommend the AMC brand. It’s awesome. Just be sure to heat it up in the microwave for 30 seconds.
As Mladen, in a rare moment of cognitive awareness, pointed out, there actually may be a Rebel Moon Part 3. I’m telling you right now if he tries to make me watch that crap I’ll retaliate with lots of gay romance movies and a doc about the continuing evolution of the band Duran Duran. By the way, did you know they got that name from an old Jane Fonda movie, “Barbarella”? Yeah. I saw “Barbarella” at a drive-in in the early ’70s. Drunk, of course, because that’s the only way you can sit through a showing of “Barbarella.”
I give Part Two a D. It’s a goulash of clichés and horrible dialogue, and I’m angry Hollywood thinks I’m stupid enough to want that.
Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and technical writer. Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and writer.
Image courtesy of Raw Pixel by way of a Creative Commons license.
Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”
Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.
As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.
Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, Ello and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .
This photo has been largely agreed upon as having been taken at the Palm Theater in Fort Walton Beach, although some doubt remains. I was unable to find the name of the photographer. If anybody knows the identity of the photographer, please let me know. I'll be happy to include a credit or remove the photo, if the photographer would prefer. I found it under a Creative Commons license and it appears to be available for use.
First they closed the Stardust. Now, the old Palm Theater has burned to the ground.
Ashes to dust.
For me, the Palm, called The Picture Show these past few years, had assumed a warm and comfortable place in memory, like a favorite song, that first love or one of life’s essential awakenings.
The Palm was the venue for my first “date.” I was 12 and she was 11. My mother dropped us off; her mother picked us up. The feature was Disney’s “Snow White.” I accidentally kicked over the bottle of Coke I’d smuggled into the theater. It clanked loudly all the way to the front of the auditorium.
And – ahem – there was no kissing (Yuck).
That first date notwithstanding, the Palm is where I traveled from childhood to adolescence. The occasion was “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” a James Bond movie, which for years my parents had forbidden me to see, the reason being sex, not violence. I knew that when James Bond became OK, something important about me had changed. I was growing up.
It is also where a friend and I sat through all five “Planet of the Apes” movies. We began this marathon by crouching on the floor in front of the screen, as every mother in town had spotted this rare opportunity to get rid of the kids for a day and the theater was overrun with fidgety 8-year-olds. Luckily, we found an empty seat next to a boy who was willing to let his little brother sit in his lap, so we moved back a few rows, preventing permanent damage to our necks, eyes and spines.
The Palm had a balcony – prime real estate for vandalous little boys with half foot-long gherkins ripe with bright green juice to be squirted onto an unsuspecting audience.
And the staff did not roust you from the theater after each movie showing. You could stay as long as you wanted. I watched “You Only Live Twice” three times in a row.
The Palm had terrific air-conditioning, and on a hot summer afternoon a bratty little kid could lie about his age, get in for 50 cents, and spend two wonderful hours ensconced within the balm of dry, cool, delicious darkness, mesmerized by what have become genre classics: “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “The Other” and “Omega Man.”
Alas, the Palm fell victim to the multiplexes – a shame because moviegoers today are deprived of a unique experience: sitting in a spacious theater, where curtains roll back to reveal a screen as wide as a prairie, and where the synergy of picture and audience reaches a critical mass that cannot be duplicated in the sticky little boxes that pass for theaters these days.
I miss the Palm. It didn’t have fancy sound systems or cup holders in the seats, but it did have grandeur and a sense of excitement that made going to the movies a big deal in a little kid’s life.
Maybe one day theaters will go back to what the Palm was. I think we could all use that small touch of class.
This column was published in the October 1998 edition of the Northwest Florida Daily News and is used with permission.
About the author:
Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”
Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.
As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.
Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, Ello and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .
Image courtesy of Flickr user Lance H. Bates under the auspices of a Creative Commons license. https://www.flickr.com/photos/7977365@N08/5709021472/
A number of people called, e-mailed, faxed, or contacted me via the Intergalactic Council to let me know what a rube I am for suggesting flying saucers are a figment of the collective unconscious.
One person even admonished me to put away my Bible (I nearly choked with laughter over that!) and asserted people like me actually hinder the exploration of space by dissing poor little E.T.
I’m not sure what to think about all this. It’s a comfort knowing that skepticism lives in this day of McDonaldized Mass Mind thinking. But at the same time, how spooky to see that this skepticism is fueled by utter nonsense.
Tell you what: I’ll eat my words if somebody can produce a real, live flying saucer, demonstrably from outer space. Until then, you guys keep shaking your hoodoo sticks and baying at the moon.
I’ll wait for the real scientists to give us our answers.
Look for their names on the silver screen! It was bad enough that I nearly sprained my back and gave myself leg cramps trying to help Harrison Ford crawl back into the airplane in “Air Force One.” But then I had to wait in agony until the end of the credits to see the acknowledgments for Eglin and Hurlburt.
But it was time well spent for about 20 of us who remained in the theater as the movie ended Sunday afternoon. When the names of our local bases rolled across the screen, everybody clapped and cheered.
“Air Force One” is one darned exciting movie – probably the best of the action-movie crop this summer. Check it out – and watch those credits roll.
Let it rain: Saturday’s deluge prompted a very strange reaction among some of us around town.
It was such a thunderous downpour – typical for Florida – that people I talked to didn’t even try to go out and about. They stayed at home and watched NASCAR, the Brickyard 400.
I’m not a big NASCAR fan, but like those other people, I was glued to the TV, rooting for all the old-timers, drivers like Bill Elliot (who is the husband of former Daily News photographer Cindy Poole) and casting hexes on young showoffs like Jeff Gordon.
Next thing you know we’ll be packing up the Winnebago and caravanning to Talladega.
Who won the race?
Somebody named Tide.
This week’s wire weirdness: DAKAR, Senegal (AP) – Vigilante mobs convinced that foreign sorcerers can shrink a man’s genitals with a mere handshake have killed eight people in Senegal in the past week.
Attackers killed five people at Ziguinghor in southern Senegal after a man accused one of them of making his penis shrink, newspapers reported Friday. At least three other people were killed in the West African nation’s capital, Dakar.
Headlines that didn’t work: Miners Refuse to Work after Death.
Strange but true: A man in Johannesburg, South Africa, shot his 49-year-old friend in the face, seriously wounding him, while the two practiced shooting beer cans off each other’s heads.
About the author:
Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”
Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.
As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.
Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, Ello and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .