The Snyderian Snare Part 2: Directors Cut

A Fallen Walker by any other name is still a Fallen Walker.

Contractually, I fear I have to talk about Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver.

I ended my review of Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire (and yes, these titles do feel as long as the movies) on a note of cautious optimism. Not because I liked the film, but because — and I hate to admit it — I have a soft spot for Zachary Edward Snyder. I love his adaptation of Frank Miller’s 300 — it is a gaudy palimpsestuous delight, Sabaton-gone-cinematic, a perfect marriage of the minds of two men who just want to see historically-inaccurate, jacked-up dudebros fight for 117 minutes…

Hell, I even admire his adaptation of Watchmen.

But Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver was abysmal. Part One’s problems are only amplified here: it takes two hours to slog through the second half of a better film — The Magnificent Seven/Seven Samurai — and even though it has had a whole film to establish its cast of characters, it is difficult to care about any of them. It attempts to compensate for the legwork Part One should have done by force-feeding you back-to-back slow-motion flashback introductions painfully reminiscent of your first D&D campaign and even then I had to consult Wikipedia to remind myself of everyone’s names. The Scargiver is clumsily-paced and brimming with enough Snyderian Jesus imagery to make you feel like you are being hit over the head with a children’s illustrated bible and enough stolen nomenclature to make you wonder why Games Workshop’s cease and desist orders haven’t made it to Snyder’s desk yet.

It is brain-cell-pulverisingly bad.

However, as my grey matter fought to stave off obliteration, I saw a glimmer of hope in the amassing dust and smoke of the third-act final battle. A mechanical, six-legged saviour that might deliver me from boredom:

A Spider Tank.

It was a brilliant piece of mechanical design, engaging with a rich trope history of spider-inspired and spider-adjacent multi-legged mechs in SF — from the the Fuchi- Tachi- and Uchikomas of Ghost in the Shell to, more recently, the aquatic Crab Suits of James Cameron’s Avatar. Even if Warhammer’s Adeptus Mechanicus — from which Snyder’s Mechanicus Militarum seem to take everything from their name to their colour scheme — have their own multi-legged combat walkers, I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, for in that moment it was revelatory.

Praise be! I thought, all hail the Spider Tank! Finally, there was something in this film (and franchise) which felt like a love-letter to its inspirations rather than a blatant copy changed just enough to avoid legal action.

I held onto this moment for the rest of the runtime, buoyed by the knowledge that even if the rest of the film was god-awful (which it was) I would be able to look back on it and say “hey, at least the Spider Tank was cool!”

How could I have been so naïve.

A few weeks later I was doing some online window shopping, looking at model kits, when I stumbled across Dark Horse’s replica of the dropship used by the empire in the first film. That’s fun, I thought to myself, I wonder if they made a model of that cool Spider Tank from the second movie.

A quick google search indicated that they had not — probably because the few model kits and statues they made for Part One didn’t sell very well — but it turned up something else as well…

3D print files of a spider tank from a video game that was almost identical to a certain spider tank from a certain Zach Snyder film.

Mega Bloks had even made a playset of it...

Eight years ago…

I felt betrayed (and old… scarily old…)

The Spider Tank is a microcosm of the whole experience really: if any of Rebel Moon’s ideas feel novel or original, you simply haven’t encountered the piece of media they were lifted from yet.

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After I wrote this review of Zach Snyder’s Rebel Moon — Part Two: a Something of Something, I squirrelled it away, figuring that the interest in the film just was not there. Who watched the second, or even the first part of Rebel Moon anyway? And who wanted to read about it when critics seemed united in trashing it? Hell, some critics simply played and took the mick out of the Blade-Runner-Theatrical-Cut-esque opening monologue. A monologue read by an uninterested Sir Anthony Hopkins who, like Jaws 4 star Michael Caine, will probably remember these movies solely as the means of providing the down payment for a new house.

Essentially, I figured nobody cared, least of all myself.

That is, until Netflix dropped the non-awaited directors cuts — no marketing, no fanfare, they just seemed to appear — which I then proceeded to watch one and a half of…

So, instead of writing another review, true to the Snyderian spirit of these two new cuts, I give you my review of Rebel Moon — Part Two, retitled with this spiel tacked on the end. Even though I do this for fun, I felt and still feel contractually obliged to publish this review and finish the job, and as Netflix well knows and has demonstrated time and time again: content is content is content is content.