There is always a whiff of existential angst in the air as any intelligent person approaches a new Zack Snyder movie: what are we doing here? What, realistically, do we expect to get out of this experience? Is there really nothing else we could be doing instead? The odd thing is that it isn't as if Snyder has never made an enjoyable movie in the past – but it's been a while. For me Army of the Dead just about qualified, though I'm aware there may be variable mileage here.

'This film traumatised me on an existential level' wouldn't usually be the sort of quote you'd put on a poster, but hey, given some of Snyder's back catalogue, you never know – so it's yours if you want it, Zack. I can only say that I sat down with Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver out of a grim sense of completism: this isn't a sequel, as it's widely being advertised, it's just the second half of the film. I already had a very good idea how it was going to end, because in story terms it is almost totally unoriginal, but you never know – maybe the director could pull it off and turn things around. And if he didn't, well, a really bad film is not without obscure pleasures of its own.

So off we go. The film opens with a voice-over recap for anyone who hasn't seen the first one, or has successfully managed to expunge it from their memory, which is essentially that this is Star Wars Meets The Magnificent Seven (Badly). It's a decent reminder of the story and its tone (which is leadenly portentous and not at all fun). Sofia Boutella and her farmhand boyfriend have returned to the bucolic moon of Veldt with the four warriors they have managed to recruit (with an effective budget in the region of $80m, one wonders why they're a samurai short – maybe Anthony Hopkins' weird antlered robot knight, 'Jimmy', is making up the numbers), but the good news is that at the end of Part One she managed to kill evil admiral Ed Skrein, thus averting the threat they were originally trying to find a solution to. Everyone can go home! Nothing to see here!

Of course, they can't do that, so Skrein has conveniently been raised from the dead by the space doctors on his space battleship. The chief doc worries that they haven't been able to detect any brain function for a while, but this is a Zack Snyder movie, so what else would you expect. Soon enough the bad guys are cracking on with their plan as originally drawn up, which means Boutella and the gang are going to have to fight them off after all.

Now, not even Zack Snyder can do a two hour movie which is nothing but one big battle (though you have to suspect he'd quite like to) and so the first half of Part Two is basically set-up – there's a lot of slo-mo of ripped dudes scything wheat and toting bags of flour, for the peasants have to bring the harvest in before the bad guys arrive. Everyone is put to work on this except for a Strong Independent village girl, who apparently spends the whole time embroidering individualised tapestries for the space warriors to keep as mementoes. The rest of the time it's just backstory being articulated at great length.

Then we finally get to the battle. If you include Part One, it's taken us over three hours to get to this point, which is longer than Akira Kurosawa felt was necessary – but Kurosawa had the misfortune to die before ever seeing a Zack Snyder film, so you can't be too hard on the guy. Kurosawa (and John Sturges) also mucked about with multiple waves of attacks and changes in tactics by the defenders and the raiders, but naturally Zack Snyder finds a purer, better way, which is to resolve everything through one, long, increasingly loud, increasingly destructive battle. Watching it I was put in mind of that supposed quote from a Vietnam-era US army officer about it being 'necessary to destroy the town in order to save it', for it looks very much to me as if large parts of the place Boutella and her crew are supposed to be defending get levelled in the crossfire. Most of it is just noise; it gradually becomes clear that Snyder's not keen on killing off the majority of his heroes, presumably so they can appear in the (oh God) four further episodes currently percolating away in his brain, at which point it just becomes empty sound and fury.

Well, here's the thing: vicious mockery apart, Zack Snyder does have genuine talent, as a director if not a writer, but it operates within very limited boundaries – there's no-one better at putting together a special effects action sequence. Once the battle gets going it's highly impressive on a kinetic, superficial level, which is to say that stuff blows up and people fall over very convincingly. The problem is that he's done very little to make you care about anyone involved prior to this point – the characters are all dour, hackneyed cyphers and this scenario has been done almost to death in the past. When there isn't an action scene going on, the film is saddled by ridiculous cod-epic dialogue (people don't just leave a place, they 'go forth') with frequent moments that border on the unintentionally hilarious – at one point a fight breaks out at a musical recital, but the musicians obligingly carry on playing throughout, providing some diegetic action music.

All the stuff that was wrong with the first one is just as bad here. (Snyder himself has admitted he finds this version of the film is a bit dull, but Netflix insisted on releasing a PG-13 rated cut before the more extreme R version, which is the one he's enthusiastic about.) Possibly the only way in which it is an improvement over Part One is that the story is a lot simpler, which gives Snyder and his co-writers fewer opportunities to stuff up the script at critical points. Obviously it looks good, because Rebel Moon has had $160m spent on it in total, but so what? Art direction, production design and special effects are, with all due respect, easier to do well by throwing money at them than basic storytelling, and this where the film falls down. If you like films about mercenaries saving a small village – well, there are lots of those which are better than this. Big budget Ruritanian space opera? Yes, there's a few of those, too. Space opera about mercenaries saving a small village? Guess what, there's even one of those. Move along – nobody needs to be here.

Awix

27.05.24 Front Page

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