REVIEW: Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver  (2024) dir. Zack Snyder

Early on in Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver, Sofia Boutella’s Kora confides in her lover, Gunnar (Michiel Huisman), the truth of her past life as Arthelais, the former Imperium soldier and adopted daughter to Regent Balisarius, in between snapshots of sexual intimacy and a post-coitus cuddle. The PG-13 version currently on Netflix leaves the details of their physical intimacy to the imagination and the R-version coming later this summer will likely indulge more. Regardless, the interweaving of sex and death — an image of the good and the walking Platonic ideal of evil — is Zack Snyder playing with his most basic elements, nothing less than the kernel of the filmmaker.

Snyder doesn’t hide the influence of Seven Samurai on his Rebel Moon franchise– and that’s for the better, because it’s impossible to hide. The first film, Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire, cuts off shortly after the ragtag team of “samurai” assemble with the defined goal of defending the small farming village from the oppressive invaders coming to steal their crop. The Scargiver resumes with the defense of Veldt against the Motherworld. As the team instructed the villagers on military strategy and trained them in how to fight, I found myself reminded of the words of the El Salvadoran martyr Saint Oscar Romero, whose life was lost standing up for the voiceless poor in the face of a tyrant dictatorship. He spoke of the “violence of love” where “the violence that wills to beat weapons into sickles for work.” The villagers do this by doing exactly the opposite by turning their wheat, a crop needed desperately by the Motherworld, into a weapon (or a deterrent to the Motherworld’s use of certain larger weapons) and by picking up knives and blaster guns when fate calls. Love sometimes demands such a heavy burden of self-sacrifice that one can even call the outpouring of that love violent.

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