2024-04-21 08:05:04
Only the second part of the adventure sci-fi saga Rebel Moon, which can be seen on Czech Netflix from Friday, fulfills the vision with which this world was created by the American director Zack Snyder. “It was clear from the beginning that it would be like half a movie. The goal was to get both parts to the audience so that they could play them together and experience the whole story,” he says.
The film Rebel Moon: The Second Part – The Little Bit is on Netflix with Czech dubbing and subtitles. | Video: Netflix
The first episode premiered on Netflix in December. In the current sequel, the heroine Kora, played by Sofia Boutella, and her band of rebel warriors join forces with the inhabitants of the peaceful farming moon of Veldt to fight off an attack by a tyrannical empire called the Motherworld. This is led by the ruthless, return-from-the-grave Atticus Noble, played by Ed Skrein.
Also in the second part, Djimon Hounsou again acts as the former general of the empire Titus or Doona Bae in the role of the space swordsman Nemesis, while the voice of the robot Jimmy was once again lent by Anthony Hopkins. However, the new one goes deeper into the past to explain to the audience why the protagonists decided to take part in the rebellion. “There’s a lot more action and we go into a lot more depth to understand what the characters are going through and why they’re fighting,” Sofia Boutella summed up at the premiere.
The 58-year-old Snyder is known as the author of the films 300: Battle of Thermopylae, Watchmen or Man of Steel. He wrote, directed, produced, and was still behind the camera on the two-parter Rebel Moon. He is already announcing that he will publish his director’s cut in August. And it suggests that in this way screenwriters Kurt Johnstad and Shay Hatten will develop the story even further.
“Normally, I make director’s cuts in response to the version I was forced to send to theaters. But we intended these two director’s cuts as a separate project from the beginning,” he explains. “We shot a bunch of other scenes for them and we really enjoyed it. Besides, it was a job involving not two, but four films,” concludes Zack Snyder.
According to Variety.com magazine, unfortunately, the news also feels as derivative as the first part, which was inspired by Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Seven Samurai, Mad Max or Guardians of the Galaxy. If the viewer didn’t take it seriously and consumed it like a fast food meal, they could enjoy it.
According to the website, the same cannot be said about the second part. Most of the scenes only delay the inevitable big action finale, and even an attempt to introduce the characters more does not change the fact that they continue to resemble action figures to play with rather than flesh and blood people. Altogether, the story lasts four hours, but it could have been half as long, and there is not much epic about it.
On the other hand, the final 45 minutes of action scenes, which take place alternately aboard the empire’s mothership and alternately on land, are dazzling, according to the website. Snyder’s direction in these passages is reminiscent of James Cameron’s performances in the 1980s when he made films like The Terminator or Aliens, according to Variety.com.
Also according to the New York Times, the script is terrible and the film does not contain a single dialogue that seems authentic, yet the final action scene is worth seeing and the pomp with which Snyder staged the spectacular clash deserves admiration. The British newspaper Guardian disappointedly adds that while in the first part at least the heroes traveled from one planet to another, here most of the action takes place in one place. Even the English paper, however, was captivated by the final battle, which it compares to the exuberant early digital films of the beginning of the millennium, like the second episode of Star Wars: Attack of the Clones or the climax of The Matrix Revolutions trilogy.