Rebel Moon: A Zack Snyder Disaster

since my horrible audience expects me to cover things like this for their Amusement yeah that is you Premier chat you bunch of [ __ ] I take my Revenge by forcing them to sit through boring and pretentious literary Illusions and references education is Vengeance so I'm going to begin this review of Zack Snider's appalling Rebel moon with the poet and Scholar AE Housman houseman's always been one of my favorites and not only because his works are both lovely and simple to commit to memory yes obviously with this accent I can recite poems from memory it's why it's so horribly painful when people force me to read Josh Brolin's durge from the June set on B sub but no there are a couple of reasons besides in the first place he was resigned gracefully to the knowledge that most of what he had to write about was crap he actually chose as the subject of his magnum opus the Roman poet manilius who pretty much everybody including hman himself considered not only bad but fundamentally pointless in his own preface to the final Edition Housman said that he had produced the lot at much less than cost price but that and I quote this unscrupulous artifice did not overcome the natural disrelish of mankind for the combination of a tedious author with an odious editor of each volume there were printed 400 copies only the first is yet sold out and that took 23 years and the reason why it took no longer than that is that it found purchases amongst the unlearned who had heard that it contained a scarless preface and hoped to extract from it a low enjoyment this terrible subject matter had the effect of making making his reviewers feel sorry for him Edmund Wilson for instance was upset to witness and again I quote the spectacle of a mind of remarkable penetration and vigor of uncommon sensibility and intensity condemning itself to duties which prevent it from rising to its full height uh so yeah maybe you can see why he's come to mine now that I've realized I'm going to have to review Rebel moon for your low enjoyment you oh oh that'll be my sponsor my displayed sponsor goodies have arrived I wonder what cool metal posters they've sent me this plate makes these fancy stylish metal posters with a vast range of officially licensed designs from Star Wars to Marvel and DC your favorite sports teams to video games TV shows you name it their magnet mounting system makes them incredibly easy to put up take down and twitch around and their new 3D texture finish adds an extra special tactile touch to your favorite posters there's about 2 million to choose from but I wanted some that really spoke to me as a person you know yeah that's about right back to the video the other reason is that having resigned himself to dealing with pointless and often offensively bad subject matter he was a wonderfully catty [ __ ] about its creators his excuse being that he was indeed providing readers with those low enjoyments you really don't have to do much paraphrasing to apply houseman's insults to somebody like Zach Snider for example nature not content with denying to Mr Snider The Faculty of thought has endowed him with the ability to make films when Mr Snider has acquired a scrap of a a bad idea he cannot rest until he has filmed it Frailty of understanding is in itself no proper Target for scorn and mockery nil in AO oio dignum Misericordia digna molter or it is not that there is anything in him worth hating but rather that he is to be pied but the unintelligent forfeit their claim to compassion when they begin to indulge in self-complacent hes and when relying upon their numbers they pass from self-complacency to indolence and reprove their betters for using the brains which God has has not denied them they dry up the Fountain of pity all of which is a pretentious way of saying that Rebel moon is awful Zack Snider is a hack and if I am to be cursed to review this cultural vacuum of a film duet I intend to take some considerable pleasure in being very very very very mean about it all surprise it's it out again Dodge this I'm very cool because I have some of these displates if you want to be cool too you can borrow some of my cool get up to 42 2% off in display's biggest sale of the year so far by going to www.d displate.com little platoon and using Code little platoon that is displate.com platoon using Code ltle e e l a p n here we are then sometime later um the downside is it's made a complete mess with my room so um boo boo zero zero stars for the display people now I have to clean this all up and that I promise is the end the end there's no more surprise ad placements now we have really got oh no excuse yeah yeah okay back to the video so let's begin Rebel Moon part one a child of Ice and Fire hit it roll the roll a [ __ ] movie already my God in heaven let's just get it over with I've bur hemorrhoids more enjoyable than this [ __ ] piece of [ __ ] film now I L recall back when part one came out that I wanted to be as kind as possible to it in case anybody got the impression that my hatred for everything Zack Snider was clouding my judgment of his latest terrible movie I still have my notes from that Blissful naive time I was going to say for example that launching a completely new science fiction IP is fraud with trouble that it's an admirable risk in a world where reboots and sequels are the favorite money losing Past Times of pretty much every major Studio I was going to say that while Disney was digging up the corpses of pretty much every known Star Wars character and parading them about like some weird Victorian macab necro theater puppet performance quick someone stick your hand up you and McGregor's [ __ ] we need an Obi-Wan Kobi show stat Snider was at least giving us a new world with a new history with a new set of Heroes on a brand new adventure that he was betting big on this new Venture was a sign of confidence I was stupidly going to say sequels spin-offs Comics music videos and extended Universe look look at this long list of planned entries into of the Rebel Moon Universe you've got a VR experience prequel Comics there's official novelizations podcasts mobile games animation a music video called Jello say what you will about the guy but Zack Snider has a vision for this universe and his aspiration should be applauded yep that was uh that was definitely that was definitely back then but then I watched the movie and realized that absolutely none of this is actually true and most of the writing for the extended Rebel merse was going to take the form of unemployment letters and contract terminations because my God hunger Moon Catching Fire or whatever the [ __ ] this one is called is one of the most creatively bankrupt Endeavors ever put to film a random assortment of material stolen from other better science fiction franchises a hollow and redundant Adventure popping from empty world to empty World featuring a grand total of zero characters Rebel based Chariots of Fire begins with a distinctly old sounding Anthony Hopkins narrating our essential World setup while a phallic spaceship penetrates an interdimensional vagina there is a mother world he tells us where a thousand Kings ruled in succession without challenge but they used up all their resources and so they had to expand into space and they formed an Empire on the back of all the resources they've just run out of everything was absolutely fabulous until an assassin killed the king and the Queen and their young princess daughter and this we are told severed the Royal bloodline forever now just just for a minute for a minute just a second maybe if you can distract yourself from the giant space V Jizzle and the fact that Snider seems to think Space Battleship yam excuses his apping the unimaginative ship design your brain might already have detected a couple of problems with this world setup the biggest one which resonates throughout the entire movie is that the only way your distinctly human civilization defined by its blood lust and treachery can enjoy an unbroken chain of royal succession lasting a thousand Generations is if this world actually has no offscreen history to speak of in other words that one line of exposition reveals one of this franchise's greatest sins absolutely nothing existed before Zack Snyder noticed it he really has no interest at all in the backstory of his own creation except as it immediately intersects with the a plot where pretty much any other story you care to name in pretty much any genre will do at least something to create the impression of History Snider has here told us that nothing of Interest happened in his entire universe until pretty much exactly now and I say that this problem resonates throughout the entire film because as I'll have ample opportunity to [ __ ] about in pretty much every scene that follows every place Snider conjures and every person in it feels distinctly like they popped into existence mere seconds before the plot reached them which is an important part of the reason this whole Enterprise feels so soulless and generic and fundamentally unimportant I could compare it with the Lord of the Rings and The Way its thousands of years of pre-plotted the places and the people and the stories of its present day I could compare it with June and the way the past is essential in making sense of the future I could compare it with the original Star Wars which shows you can create the impression of a history Rich lived in Universe without recourse to thousands of words and pages of exposition but I I don't think any of these wonderful Creations deserve to be suied by association with Rebel Moon so yeah never mind hopkins's opening monologue then proceeds to contradict itself on an almost line by line basis having just been told of this thousand Generations of uninterrupted rule having been told that the Empire's spread LED people to believe that the glory of the mother world would never end we are then told that the assassination of the king and queen LED several planets to start considering Revolution while a senator named belisarius seized power and declared himself Regent he then sent out his most edgelord prick of a general into the far reaches of the Galaxy to hunt down and destroy the Rebel Alliance now it should be fairly obvious to any thinking person why almost none of this actually works but on the odd chance there is a Snider fan watching this video allow me to very briefly lay it out you cannot simultaneously have wonderful uninterrupted rule for a thousand generations and a culture of cutthroat CM minded politicians and it is very difficult to have both a gloriously all powerful Empire and a bunch of planets already on the brink of Revolution which you intend to Crush by only now sending military forces to meet them Cutthroat km minded politicians will at one point or another over the span of a thousand Generations find a way to make sure that your bloodline can cannot happily rule for a thousand Generations in the first place that's the hard contradiction in this world setup the slightly softer Roar we might say merely apparent contradiction is that revolutions don't simply spring up from The Ether when the plot finds it convenient they are almost invariably the result of long grievance married to new opportunity after all what are they reacting against our setup here is that these Rebels have decided to exploit internal political Strife in the Empire as though they have detected a new weakness and yet simultaneously with told that belisarius is only now sending a serious military force to oppress the rebels we never get the impression the political turmoil has actually led to any particular disarray in the Empire that wasn't already present at its far reaches in which case what was stopping them rebelling at any point during the Thousand generation reign of the royal family if that was what they were minded to do it can't be new found oppression because the oppressor hasn't arrived yet but it can't be long-standing grievance because there was no one there to keep them in check at any point when they could have rebelled in the past a more competent set up might be that the rebels are specifically reacting to the new and brutal methods adopted by belisarius a happy Empire made unhappy when the illegitimate Regent attempts to impose his own legitimacy the star systems slipping through tarkin's fingers as he tightens his grip kind of approach but that is not what Rebel moon is going to give us even these planets were conquered in a war to begin with and belisarius is only now tightening his grip TDR if the planets were going to Rebel the setup gives no reasons why they shouldn't already have done so this results from Snider's fundamentally confused and self-contradicting conception of the story at one and the same time he wishes to cast the mother world as an all-conquering force that spread through the Galaxy via military means and at the same time to portray the assassination of its rulers as a fall from grace event that initiates a conflict with evil it requires a much more skillful mind than Snider possesses to convincingly tell us why one totalitarian militarist regime was good when it had a monarch while the same totalitarian military regime is bad now that it has a regent and [ __ ] it while we're at it the senator making himself Regent implies the existence of other Senators some of whom might have their own agendas which begs the question was there no internal opposition to all of this did the people of the mother world all just clap did all the core World shrug and go along with it and that doesn't seem especially believable to me what about the other generals and the military leaders what about religious figures what about the financiers of the Empire you're telling me a beloved bloodline spanning a thousand Generations has been broken by an assassin and a random ass Senator has said all right fair enough throne's mine now and and absolutely everyone who matters in society said as one good for you my leash it really does feel like there's a much more interesting story to be told about all of this but Snider said nah [ __ ] that I just want the generic Star Wars clone so here we are at the title slate by the way there actually was a very famous belisarius in history he was a Byzantine General one of the last of the great Romans his story is fascinating and I encourage you to look it up not because it influences this movie in any way though oh no no no no Zach just thought the name sounded cool we pound down from some planets that are far far too close to actually exist in this plane of the Galaxy and we join our Bland heroin whose name is Kora cor no no Kora cor no no Rick [ __ ] Kora cor [ __ ] you Rick rmes cor's backstory is that she was pulled from the wreckage of a spaceship a few years back by some old guy she now lives in a rustic Village of space Vikings no the're too pacified to be space Vikings vaguely Norse space people Snider likes his vaguely Norse people he's basically lifted this Bunch straight from Justice League mercifully though in this movie they do not [Music] sing no [ __ ] it I said they don't sing stop it the one concession these vaguely nor space people make to the they are in a science fiction realm set in the future is that they have electricity where they get the electricity from given they otherwise completely shun technology to the point where their entire economy is grain and they plow it using horses I do not know likewise how these people got here given they shun technology I do not know I guess technology is like a space bus that you ride until it's time to get off Zach deploys the most cringe making cheap and corny set of tricks to establish that this place is Paradise [Music] you've got the nice warm soft music you've got the simple peasant lifestyle you've got K cor [ __ ] off Rick you've got K running her fingers through the dirt in slow mo motion no reason it's Zach Styer of course there's no [ __ ] reason and then sniffing the dirt because you know it's earthy and it's homely and we can establish this by literally huffing the dirt a generic man comes out of the village and he stares lovingly and longingly at Kora Zach wants to convey that he really likes her but this is his idea of beauty either that or he's thinking to himself oh God There She Goes Again sniffing that he's sniffing the dirt again why did she sniff the dirt so much it's weird it's creepy and I totally tap that but [ __ ] man she sniffs dirt and I don't I yeah would I no I would I would but should I no no probably not mean if she sniffs dirt what else is she going to be doing [ __ ] well now you mention that maybe the music swells Gora stares at the planet that's about to smash into her home and wipe everybody out he stares at her staring at the planet it's all silhouetted it's a giant horse and a plow it's so homely there's birds isn't it lovely it's peaceful and pretty be as shame of her space Nazi showed up and destroyed this implausibly rustic idle we go into the village to find the vaguely nor space people are having a party to celebrate the fact that a hunter has bought them fresh meat for the first time in a long old time because otherwise is they they what they just eat bread and corn that looks like corn I think it's corn they're so agrarian in this far flung Outpost of a Galactic Empire that they have parties when a hunter brings a carcass back to the Village Zach you know this is a sci-fi film right Zach these people have electricity Zach spaceships exist Zach they trade with people don't they we know they trade with people that's the thing later they definitely trade with people why are they relying on a guy who probably uses a [ __ ] bow and arrow to bring back livestock for them the film wants us to be interested in a potential love triangle between generic man from earlier Hunter man and [Music] Kora and to drive home this point it has modog stand up and tell everyone to get drunk now because the [ __ ] it's coming for we all know it is the thrusting of hips and the loud sounds of pleasure that summon the seedlings the Sprout subtlety is not Zack Snider's strong suit as evidenced by cor staring at her two potential hunks in succession oh god oh no the dirt sniffer she she's staring at me again [ __ ] I hope she go God I really hope she doesn't want to [ __ ] me I really I'm not committed to this she does weird things I don't know no I I no I shouldn't why is she staring at me why is the weird one staring at me ah but you might be thinking just who is Kora we know she likes huffing dirt and she seems completely Unsure how to direct her sex drive but who is she as a person what's her backstory what's her character what does she feel and in a competent film this is the sort of thing you can discover piece by piece over the course of the movie observing her interactions her actions her personality her behavior her moral choices Etc but this is not a competent film this is a Zach Snider film so forget all of that she's just going to tell us exactly what she thinks Dan is a good man he the best hunter Among Us and a loyal friend have you thought of a more permanent relationship I know that he's aable to the idea it's easy between us does it have to be more than that that would be your last step to becoming a full member of this community I'm telling you this is home now I want that to be true you know the two seasons I've spent here have given me happiness that I don't deserve but understand I am a child of War to truly love and be loved I I don't know if I'm capable of either the very idea of Love of family was beaten out of me I was taught that love is weakness and [Music] I I don't know how that will ever change apparently Zach Sider just thinks this is how writing works I mean credit to s Sophia beta bellia bellaa sopia Bella will go with that she consistently does her best in this movie but there's that all adage about the chef being limited by his ingredients you can have all the Michelin stars if you want but ultimately Zack Snider is telling you to cook a pot noodle there's only so much you can do with that also I mean well yeah hold up a second why do these impossibly rustic people have electricity and and Star Trek sliding doors in their houses thick of [ __ ] Lane people the day after we're still talking about sex because it's why not but then Kora and we're going to call this one Rosie cuz that's basically her role in this village Village Maiden that's what she is Rosie we'll call her Rosie she's just waiting for Sam gamji to come and put some little Hobbits in her anyway kaora and Rosie are interrupted by sci-fi noises and they look up to see Space Battleship yam entering orbit this causes cor to drop her seeds it's in slow motion for some reason Zack Snider sees sesame seeds and and these just require slow motion context be damned you see a spaceship there's slow-mo seeds a trucker drops a burger slow-mo seeds Bora runs back to the Village picks up a hammer and Rings The Alarm Bell oh you've got [ __ ] electricity guys that could have just been a button but never mind this alerts the village that a giant evil spaceship is hovering over them which is very lucky because they otherwise might might have missed it given that it's you know clearly hovering right over them and most of them already here and they've they've already seen it but but never mind the alarm Bell is really for the audience because it tells us that we should be afraid of this evil spaceship and it also tells us that Kora is afraid of this big evil spaceship which is about as subtle as the character work is going to get in this movie The Evil space people do not immediately descend from Space Battleship yam and land because the script needs time for a village meeting to take place where they argue about what to do here again is the lack of of actual history generic man accuses modok of always choosing a fear first response which sort of implies that this sort of thing has happened before and yet if it had happened before these people wouldn't live as they do and be as confused as they are would they the way they act this is their first interaction with the Empire that otherwise we're led to believe rules over them we also can't help but recall that Anthony Hopkins told us this was the first time the mother world had sent a proper force all the way out here so how they captured it and conquered to begin with is anybody's guess so presumably it hasn't happened before but it's necessary in order to establish that there are other factions in play as well to whom these dumb villagers usually sell their grain modok tells generic man don't act like we don't know you've been selling our Surplus grain to the enemies of that ship up there but but modok if he hadn't acted like that how would we fill the audience in on these important details cor tells them that the evil ship is really really evil that ship does not represent Prosperity its purpose is to destroy to subjugate to enslave partnership is not in its vocabulary oh no it's it's an inanimate chunk of flying metal darling I'm pretty sure there's quite a few words not in its vocabulary mushroom piano joystick table webcam I don't think it knows what a webcam is that's not a word in its vocabulary either sofa pillow keyboard I this movie is so boring I'm literally just naming what I see let's move on and look I don't want to keep poing on about all of this but well actually I'm going to so tough none of this makes much sense if and this is cor's strong implication these vaguely nor space people have never encountered a ship like this before then why on Earth would the evil space people be at all interested in what became of their excess Harvest from the previous year would they even know that they had excess Harvest from the previous year it seems like you have no existing economic ties with the mother world so the question of excess Harvest is irrelevant anyway cor's already told us they're here to take everything so this question of excess is again irrelevant I mean sure don't blurt out to them we're selling stuff to terrorists you're not the United Nations after all but the Empire has no business knowing what your excess was or expecting that you would have kept it aside as tribute to them since apparently no such tributary relationship exists they're here to raid you and rape you it's a Zach Snider film after all got to get the edgy sex stuff in there somewhere the weird adolescent boys who watch this sort of [ __ ] on iron ically we don't need to Pat out this with irrelevant questions they are just here to take stuff you don't really have a choice in the matter you can't really lie to them about how much you produce because you know they're sitting up there on Space Battleship yam and they have a very clear view of all of your Fields trying to lie to them will be very very obvious and it will not end well as any sane person with half a brain could have told you right I've heard enough we will volunteer nothing oh so okay fine so they try to lie to them meeting a j it's time for the evilman to make their Revival wait for the ramp Morty they love the slow ramp really KS their dicks hard when they see this ramp just slowly extending down oh no the space nais are here or is it is it space Communists you know what you know what it doesn't matter because uh because they're basically the same oh my God and the internet explodes no comrade of mine off to goou with you space Nazi Pride does a good job of being Sinister but that really is his one thing he takes off his hat and we learn he's really just like he's come here from peeky blinders so we'll call him pey [ __ ] Nazi that will be his name we also get a quick look at space twink Alpha and he makes eye contact with Rosie this is a Zack Snider film eye contact means either you're going to kill someone or you want to Bone and he wants to Bone her Nazi blinders makes his pitch we're hunting for terrorists led by some woman named blood axe edgy name bro and we need food eeky Nazi offers to pay them in money that'll let them buy robots to help them with their farming but modog says no because working with your hands connects you with the land it's what his people believe and also they have absolutely nothing to give so oh no bad luck but come and have some ale so you can get drunk I do think this needs to be stressed this plan was never going to work and it was quite obviously never going to work and even pey Nai who will go on to be established as a bit of a [ __ ] throughout the remainder of the movie knows it was never going to work he's on to them from the beginning modok has turned down the offer of fair payment in both money and technology in order to tell an obvious lie to the actual Space Nazis who can disprove the tale simply by noticing that none of the people in this Village has died of starvation recently or looks like they're about to oh god there were so many better lies you could have told you moose say you trade your Surplus with local settlements in exchange for equipment and other supplies you know the sort of thing it's absolutely natural for small farming outposts to do Point them in the direction of the planet's biggest city since there's bound to be a lot more food and stuff over there it's where you get all of your food and most of your stuff after all or you know hey since the Space Nazis plan on sticking around for a while at least until they decide they're not sticking around after all accept their offer of payment and draw up some sort of work and delivery schedule so you both get at least some of what you want underplay what you can give them and hope that they accept it is true maybe allow yourself leeway to bargain up a little bit do anything in other words except make it so very very clear that you are lying to them because you would only be lying to them if you have something to hide and Hell especially don't tell a lie if you're the kind of people who act like guilty children the minute your mark looks at you have you people never heard of guile gu is important for liars you need to put some points into deception you need to have some points in the speech section of your skill tree to pull this off you people have got a like a minus minus speech skills what is going on here Bey Nazi asks who oversees the Harvest and generic m volunteers himself he not only cannot lie he also reveals that modok was lying by telling them that actually they've got more grain than they can possibly store because modok likes keeping it in reserve in case of famine or whatever so God so now py Nazi who already knew you were lying anyway doubly knows you were lying and now the story has completely Fallen apart and frankly it's of no surprise at all that pey Nazi clubs modok to death I'd have been tempted to do that for the sheer incompetence he displays you're improving the gene pool doing this I will give the film a very small small tiny little microscopic Zack Snider's penis level of credit it's really really really hard to do but you know if you scrape through the bottom of the barrel and then then down into the dirt and then down a bit further into the dirt you might find a little green shoot of credit down there growing ready to be you know found the film has just established a character trait and that drives in action and God I can't believe this is the level we're at the film has established a character trait that drives in action and that doesn't require a character outright telling you what they think I did say it was a really small tiny amount of credit all right but it's shown us that generic man is a chancer and a dealer who's prepared to go along to get along and this is why py Nazi lets him live and kills modok instead that's um well it's it's just kind of fine it's about fine just about fine if you ignore that the setup makes no sense at all and by having [ __ ] not to use the same words Kora warned them with they want everything to I want everything it firmly establishes that she unlike these vaguely North space people knows something quite a lot it is implied of the mother world and the character of its agents this is supposed to get us wondering just what her backstory is in relation to the mother World about whether she might have been one of them and the film does give us a fair few minutes before it decides to give up on suspense all together and just have a narrate her whole backstory in an exposition dump but for those few brief minutes the film sort of does maybe kind of just about progress in relation to her anyway like it's not just been targeted at Absolute mongooses so [ __ ] Nazi and his goons bugger off and they fly away but they leave behind a clearly insufficient Garrison you do sort of have to wonder why they even bother since the Garrison isn't big enough to actively keep control of the village and the main threat is that Space Battleship yam will return and kill them all anyway if they haven't got the Harvest ready in 10 weeks time the Garrison is principally here so Snider can do creepy sex things later this man is South African so you know he's incredibly nasty that's how I like him young God okay good one Zach classy for some reason this is just a rule most of his other men are varying degrees of nasty but not as nasty because their accents aren't as strong but it does also introduce us to by far the most interesting character in this entire movie interesting because he's only really in it for this one scene and so he escapes being reduced into a steaming part of stupid later it's Anthony Hopkins playing a robot Anthony Anthony robkins that'll do that's good that's the kind of quality we're dealing with here Anthony robots introduces himself to space twink Alpha the only non-evil space Nazi in the movie and much prettier than Kora gay gay gay Anthony robots is the presumed last of a race of robots once designed and designated to protect the royal family but now without purpose given they failed to protect the royal family because they were serving on battlefields far away um okay okay fair enough film he serves however briefly as a sort of Emissary from a dead World which is always a fascinating drope and probably the reason almost everyone with any sense picks Anthony robkins in his backstory as the only halfway decent thing in this entire film we must of course establish that he and space twink Alpha are good people and the easiest way to do that is to have space twink Alpha be nice to Anthony robkins and then have one of the evil africanas be a dick to him this duly occurs after nasty Africana 2 explains to his boss what Anthony robkins is and why he doesn't fight anymore which you think would be entirely redundant information since his boss man has absolutely no business not knowing this already nasty afriana 2 puts a few rounds into Anthony robkins to prove what an [ __ ] he is this prompts space twink Alpha to come to Anthony robkins his defense for no reason I've been able to deduce say that he is good people let you be wondering why every single one of these Nazi Space Marines is the epitome of cliche dickheaded save for space twink Alpha about maybe why their training seems to have turned all of them into rapy psycho Killers yet left no moral effect on this one pretty twink on whether this means space twink Alpha has some interesting backstory that imparted strong morals into him that no training regimen could beat out the answer is of course no stop it stop your wondering stop it this instant this is a Zach Snider film we're not doing any of that character establishment [ __ ] here and we won't be doing it in the director's cut either you mark my words that'll just be Gore and nudity more tits more blood and slower even [ __ ] slower trust me space twink Alpha is just good because he's good that's all we're going to get boss man then forgets that Anthony robkins is a robot and he tells him to go and clean himself in the river for no reason at all why is he washing his face in the river Zach he's a robot Zach he's not people Zach evil africanas aren't concerned about keeping him looking pretty Zach one of them just shot him several times in the head because they don't give a [ __ ] about him Zach stop this nonsense oh but it has to happen you see because Zach has this cool idea for a scene where Fair Village Maiden Rosie sits next to tragic robot Anthony rootking by a river at Sunset as Anthony robkins uses her as an excuse for more Exposition no Dak couldn't think of any other way to earn this scene so he had evil Africana tell the robot to go and wash his face in the river oh God but hey at least we got to the scene but um yeah no it's not even a very good scene the nonsense never ends in fact recall if you will the premise of this Village this is a far distant Backwater planet of simple farmers who shine almost all technology save for their electric lights and their Star Trek doors these robots are so rare that the leader of the Nazi Space Marines who owned the robot had to be told what the robot is Rosie is a fair Village Maiden who hasn't seen so much as a vibrator before in all of her life and yet here she is calmly walking up to Anthony robkins and offering him a cloth to dry his metal face with and then sitting down for a casual chat as if he's just normal people no fear no doubt no uncertainty no curiosity even about what should to her be this almost impossibly strange thing nope NOP none of that just going to sit down for a chat so we can have the exposition wonderful anyway this is an excuse for exposition take it away Anthony tell me Sam do you know the story of our slain King and his beautiful daughter the princess Isa I don't well you remind me of her in myth she was called The Chalice or the Redeemer she was pueri salvatoris and even before she was born I and my brothers pledged everything we were everything that dwells inside this metal skin to fight in her name so when word reached us on some distant Battlefield that she as prophesied had been born of flesh and blood into our world I felt a great warmth for the universe and trusted that she was to usher in a new age of peace and compassion and bring us home she was Magic ah yes she was more than Magic on the day of her coronation she along with with our honored king and queen were assassinated in Cold Blood by those they trusted most I fear we lost some measure of our honor since that betrayal I'm afraid our compassion our kindness our very Joy died with that young girl so to recap Anthony robkins tells young Rosie that she's very pretty and reminds him of the princess as Isa daughter of the slain King known in myth as the Chalice or the Redeemer myths we must assume have Arisen in the very short time since her death since the premise is that that the royal family ruled in uninterrupted Bliss for a thousand Generations so they scarcely had need of a Redemptive figure did they oh no but you see her birth was prophesied by someone for some reason to some end don't worry won't come up again not in part one anyway the prophecy was that she would usher in a new age of peace and compassion and also yes she was magical at this stage only figuratively we assume but later tragically we find out it's literally as well of course it's very sad that she was assassinated along with her parents by those they trusted most to quote Anthony robkins which is interesting because it suggests the identity of the Assassins was and is known and yet has never been acted upon gee it would sure be inconvenient to the plot if it turned out belisarius was the Assassin and if Anthony robkins knew he was the Assassin all along but did absolutely nothing with this knowledge and if belisarius took the throne as region unchallenged by other people who knew he was behind the assassination cuz then you know nothing about the setup would make any sense at all Anthony and his robots had pledged everything of themselves to fight an issa's name posing such questions as who made you are you programmed to be this way if so by whom was it by the Imperial family I would assume so but does can you be reprogrammed if not why not has anybody tried if you're refusing to fight your good Fighters why wouldn't they have tried why do people just allow you to go around pretending that you're people and needless to say none of these questions will be answered in part one at any rate because Anthony robkins is shortly to disappear from the script entirely he says movingly that he feels the assassination amounted to a loss of Honor a sacrifice of our compassion our kindness our very Joy all of these things died with the princess he says which is again awkward since if the princess was supposed to bring these things then it rather implies they were missing for the thousand years before the princess in which case the long and unbroken rule of the Royal bloodline was a a bad thing and B highly implausible but I you know I think we've established by now that Zach writes on the basis of what looks and sounds cool he pays very little attention to whether these words in this order actually make sense sense is for boring square rude type people standard nerds with absolutely no cause at all Rosie tells Anthony robkins that she thinks all those qualities still live on in him and she gives him a crown of flowers and touches his face and he does a little robot blush and she leaves in order that she can be nearly raped later because you know it's a SN film and we need to get that kind of [ __ ] in here somewhere ah now mean and mocking though I have been this is undoubtedly the film at its absolute strongest nothing else in the entire movie comes close to the pathos embodied in Anthony rootking and his story sure I mean it's got only a tangential relationship with logic and it becomes almost entirely irrelevant to everything that follows in the aot but to the extent Anthony robkins is widely hailed as the best bit of the the movie I think it's because he's the one that gives us what the rest of the film does not a sense of time of place and of History a sense that this story actually takes place somewhere that it has some sort of context rather than just being invented on the Fly by a talentless hack that and Anthony ruins is here established the important bases for character he has wants motives emotions he conveys a sense of tragic lust and by virtue of conveying anything at all this makes him much more fullsome a character than anyone else in the movie I'd have much rather follow him for the remaining two-ish hours than the actually robotic cast we condemned to suffer oh God speaking of we're back with the robotic humans their leader is dead they don't know what to do even though some time has now elapsed since the killing these people still insist on pointing out that modog is indeed dead I didn't know that he would kill them do that he's dead now I took noticing in high school I guess just in case the audience has woken up briefly and they need reminding of it themselves unfortunately in reming us of this trivial and unimportant thing the film risks forgetting the actually important bit of information conveyed in that death scene you'll recall that evil Space Nazis wanted all of their grain and this was bad because without that grain they would starve there was no possible way that they could give the Nazis what they asked for and survive except that now their proposed solution is uh to to give the Nazis all of their grain and just hope it'll all be fine but but you do remember guys you remember this means you will starve right remember remember how this was this was the thing you established because you know if it turns out you could have just harvested a ton of grain and given it to the Nazis and then made them go away and you could have done this without starving to death after the fact then the entire premise for your earlier conflict the one that led to modok's death was was redundant that was all just there in order to get some expositionally [ __ ] into the movie wasn't it we show them how valuable we are okay and when we have fulfilled our side of the deal they will be forced to rethink how much food they leave we can appeal to those gentlemen in The Granary appeal to their Humanity they must oh no okay I see I see so you want to give them all of your food in the hopes that these evil heartless cold bastard Space Nazis they'll see this as as very useful so they will leave you with more of the food you gave them you're going to appeal to the humanity of people who happily puns around looking and acting like [ __ ] Nazis in the year whatever the [ __ ] of the future this movie is set in really okay solid plan guys and if this all seems ridiculously naive that is of course the point what Snider is doing here is contrasting the hopelessly innocent villagers with the Wy and worldly wise Kora she sees things for how they really are oh no wait but no cuz overt as the contrast already was such that I barely even needed to explain it to you there's still a chance a good chunk of Snider's target audience hasn't caught up yet so just in case you missed it it has Kora explained the mechanics to us in the following scene so it's running would have thought you'd have had enough of that you heard them their delusion they think those soldiers will show them Mercy even after what they did to cindry right in front of them oldtime here decides now is the time to pitch rebellion and issue the Call to Adventure what if you could find the Warriors that Noble seeks The Outlaws to fight alongside us I refuse to answer a literal Call to Adventure Morty let it go to voicemail now Kora here explains that finding Warriors to fight for the village only gives the village hope in a fight they are doomed to lose and this is absolutely correct and something the film just has to sort of forget about during everything that follows because only by ignoring its very dumb premise can it hope to outrun how dumb the premise is in the first place it is one tiny farming Village plus whoever cor can press gang into this apparent suicide mission versus one massive Starship that could and should wipe these Farmers out from orbit at the first sign of resistance in the second place if by some long sequence of entirely incomprehensible [ __ ] spoilers that's the rest of the film we're about to watch they manag to take out the immediate threat this one ship belongs to a massive Galactic Empire with who knows how many other ships that can come and take its place your only recourse would be to run if you wish to survive but this is what I mean when I say that you have to ignore the premise to escape the nonsense of the thing because accepting this incontrovertible truth you realize that they could and probably should run right now overpower the small Garrison head to the nearest city blend in or Escape offworld there is no scenario where this Village survives it is either immediately destroyed or it's destroyed somewhat less immediately but just as inevitably what the movie is attempting to do here is it's just Star Wars for the bottomites but the comparison is useful because Star Wars shows how insane this plan is the Call to Adventure here amounts to find us a few Warriors to defend the L's Homestead obviously that is a non-starter no sane Rebel group would voluntarily pin themselves down to defend the L's Homestead that's because the rebellion in Star Wars is properly realized there's a reason they're always on the run Zach there's a reason that immediately after their biggest ever Victory against the Empire's biggest weapon they leave Yavin 4 and run away they leave the base they would defending because they knew the Empire would return and obliterate it same again at ho the final base occupied by the rebels was their staet and that was always on the move because Rebellion entails sacrifice and the first sacrifice you have to make is your home there is simply no world where these villagers get to rebel and keep their Village and yet that's the plan alltime here presents and it's the one core is going to go on to enact with the final Victory preceding a return to the Village at the close and the movie suggesting to us that it's being saved somehow whereas you know all sense and logic determines that it is very much not been saved not at all in fact it's probably been condemned if cor is as worldly wise as the film wants us to believe she is she should know this already and she should be doing everything in her power to convince the villagers to leave with her instead though she refuses the call because she rightly thinks defending the village would amount to throwing your life away only to accept the call and cross the first threshold a few minutes later when she stops poor Rosie getting raped none of this changes her sensible objections to alimer plan but the film thinks that it does because the film is speaking of poor Rosie even though all the villagers know they're being occupied by a bunch of violent alien thugs apparently nobody has thought to put a less [ __ ] person on water pale duties at nighttime which is unbelievably careless of them what exactly did you expect to happen sending your fair Maiden alone at night down to your occupying Force why didn't you send a fat hairy [ __ ] down instead why are you leaving rap bait outside on her own at nighttime next to some horrible Africana space nais and so to nobody surprise whatsoever they grab her and take her into their Barn it's raping time but her screams alert Kora who's busy saddling a horse and after a brief moment where she considers refusing the call so to speak she picks up a hatchet and decides she will intervene space tweak Alpha meanwhile has been rather quicker on his feet he's already tried to intervene because he is good people with absolutely no sense of self-preservation but this just gets him beaten up the second most evil africano in the Galaxy says I'm going to tie you to a boast and make you watch every day and just in case this wasn't edgy enough yet boss man adds but you're not going to do anything not until I split this sapping myself okay great one Zach good dialogue top work I do love how complex all these characters are love me a bit of rapen Ren's great good on you Zach still at least there's no edgy gay rape threats huh that's something I guarantee it by morning you're going to be begging me for more oh oh okay we've got that to look forward to cor arrives and demands that they stop doing their raping she knows they all have guns they know they all have guns and this is a Zack Snider film so we get to see that they have guns but we see this in SL o as one of them does the eminently sensible thing of closing to melee range with his gun so that she can beat the [ __ ] out of him and so the fight begins and here most of the africanas forget they have guns in order that they don't instantly win rather than shooting her from range or surrounding and suppressing her they obligingly pop up one at a time in order that she can take them all out sequentially oh no no but you see what you don't understand you [ __ ] snobs you Snider hating snobs is that this this is all really cool actually because it is slow motion you [ __ ] on and on it goes at one stage space twink Alpha gets himself free so he can join in boss man's holding Rosie hostage though so it all ends in a stalemate until that is Anthony robkin shows up and he shoots Bossman that would be Anthony robots robot who refuses to fight since his princess got murdered he shoots Bossman and just runs away and that's it for him that's the last we're seeing of him until right at the end of the movie where he pops up and cruy teases us with a much better Adventure that we could have gone on with him but didn't because we were stuck with these boring [ __ ] I could ask why it is the mother world would still be using autonomous robots whose capabilities and inclinations it is completely unaware of apparently why it wouldn't have either reprogrammed them or decommissioned them why it just allows these potentially unstable and unpredictable agents to embed with their military forces Etc but I quite like Anthony robkins so I'll let this one slide I mean it's not like mother World forces are trained or competent or intelligent vanguards of an all-conquering Empire or anything I'm sure this stupidity is just half of the course if this was Star Wars somebody would pop up right now and tell me that a stormtrooper once bonked his head so the bad guys have always been dumb and incompetent everything goes it's fair game this is how this sort of thing usually works at this point all the villagers walk in tightly mashed on mass having been given their queue from the director why yes the entire occupying Force has indeed just been taken out by a woman a twink and a pacifist robot and there you were up there being all scared don't you look silly now you bunch of [ __ ] cowards Kora tells them they're going to have to fight which is incorrect no Kora they're going to have to run stop leading them on this [ __ ] doomed Mission Oldtimer hands her her father's lights I mean the pistol he found with her at the sight of the crash spaceship he pulled her from but that he he just never bothered telling her about or giving her for unaccountable reasons anyway this is the point at which she should be demanding they all follow her to the nearest Township because the village is doomed we have to run with the idea that Space Battleship yam doesn't maintain contact with its Garrison I've not seen Fus or Marcus during your reports they've been busy driving The Villages sir otherwise it would return rather quickly upon losing contact with that Garrison but we know it's going to be back in 10 weeks time at the latest that was the deal after all and I mention it here because you might think it's going to function as a ticking clock except that well uh no no not really no it's it's just not really going to come up again at no point in the movie does cor ever really worry that she's running out of time to save the village if anything the film kind of forgets about the village but it does mean that there is a hard end point for the village and there is absolutely no way a small farming Village of people who shun weapons and Technology can fight of an Empire so yes come on Kora be sensible use your wits stop lying to them give it to them straight they are doomed if they stay oh but she doesn't do that because that's not that's not what the film wants she's just going to go off on a fetch Quest looking for people dumb enough to resist a whole empire to save a doomed Farm there is one relatively nice touch in all of this though and since there is little opportunity for praise in a review of Rebel Moon I will call it out the gun she's given the one definitely not Ben Kenobi pulled with her from the wreckage of that crashed ship has markings on it and they match the floral patterns found on Anthony robots' head and armor so if you're paying attent you can glean some sort of connection being built here between Kora and the mother world and more specifically given the similar design work between Kora and the ideal of the mother World Anthony robots represents that's not bad stuff abides by the show don't tell rule a shame if we were you know just about to get a flashback in a couple of minutes in which cor just exposits absolutely every tedious detail of her backstory for us yeah that would be a real shame wouldn't it from this point onward the movie is almost exclusively fetch quests are not good story driven fetch quests oh no no no the really boring tedious sort of fetch Quest the type you only do cuz you need to farm resources that's how this movie treats its nominal characters they're not actually people they are just resource we need to grind until we've got enough of them to take on the boss level so when asked about her plan cor decides that she used to know or at least knows are an old General called Titus who turned his forces against the mother world she wants to find him to get to him she'll need to contact the rebel alliance or the blood axes or whatever the [ __ ] they're called and to do that she's going to need generic man because he's previously sold grain to the rebels so he's going to lead her to Moss icely to pick up the trail they hop on their space horses and trot off out of the village it's an overnight trip to Moss eely so unfortunately they have to use one of their Explorer camping kits from Dragon's Dogma this allows time for some Exposition and well it's Rebel Moon so naturally it's all kinds of awful generic man Begins by doubly confirming for the slowest members of the audience what kora's backstory is a soldier fighting for the mother world but he poses this as a question so you were a soldier fighting for the mother world and this causes problems because it means she's been dwelling among them for a not inconsiderable amount of time and yet this most essential part of her backstory is only now known to them it's one of those questions that once posed makes you think uh okay but why haven't you asked this before now are you in the habit of bringing strange women with motherworld weapons out of crashed spaceships and just letting them live among you no questions asked wouldn't her origin and her reason for crashing on this planet have been of particular interest to pretty much the entire Village might they want to know if for example she turned out to be the most wanted criminal in the Galaxy but I'm sure she can't be that because nobody recognizes her the most charitable interpretation possible is that they have asked this question before and she said nah not telling and they said H okay go milk a cow that would still be very very dumb but I think the more likely explanation is that this question hasn't come up before because Zach just writes these things on the hoof this is the first time he's considered it so it's the first time anyone in his Universe has considered it it wouldn't have been impossible it wouldn't have even been particularly difficult to make this important unknown a part of kora's character and her relationship with the village if she' sold them some vague backstory enough to not be turned away but refused to elaborate upon it creating a very definite distance and even animosity between her and the villagers but since this would require both character work and World building of course it finds no place in Rebel Moon generic man further suggests that she might have been a high rank though it's not really clear what would have given him this impression and he asks if she's wanted for desertion she replies that and more which is at least a relevant tease and then we get a big old flashback ensuring that whatever mystery and Intrigue has so far being built up around her character can be dispensed with as quickly and generically as possible here we go then quickfire character establishment round when Kora was nine the motherworld forces invaded her home World they did this for by kora's own account absolutely no reason they never asked for anything it was all because they had a Lust For Destruction belisarius commanded the mother World forces he is the bloodthirsty man in charge of a bloodthirsty Army that for all intents and purposes commits genocide when it gets bored by virtue of the fact that the people of cor's Home World resisted this Invasion belisarius and his men got even more angry and they started murdering civilians um wait wait what the [ __ ] are you guys doing here aren't you the same people who arrived with py Nazi earlier you know the the obvious Dune ripoff characters are you priests is that what you meant to be you look a bit like priests something vaguely religious the mother World priests just stroll around through active battlefields reading books and overseeing firing squads at what point will you air dropped into the middle of an active war zone what even are you people anyway little Kora runs away but she runs into a dead end and who should bump into her all alone completely without backup or guards or any Military Support why it's a young belisarius himself oh very fortuitous oh but remember he's out here out of bloodlust and the mother world is just killing all the Innocents they can find because it has nothing else to do wherever we've been explicitly told that they get very angry when the people they've come to kill resist them so they are especially murderous at the moment and belisarius is their especially bloodthirsty leader which shouldn't bod well for young Kora should it I wonder who's going to come and rescue her because you know that is really the only way she could get out of this alive right like there's no way that belisarius won't just kill her right oh as it turns out no because Bellis Arius general of the mother world World someone we already know is fiercely ambitious because in the present day he is Regent of the mother World decides in this moment that he is an idiot I would say it's out of character and it would be out of character if he had a character to be out of he drops his own gun he kneels in front of Y Kora who has a gun of her own and he's very edgy you see so he points her gun at his own head and helps her prep to shoot him yes just park the fact that sci-fi laser guns have hammers don't ask me why Young Kora having just seen all the people she's grown up with die horribly makes a strange noise and then she pulls the trigger Alis Arius is dead the movie ends the rest was just a dream hooray we don't get part two thank [ __ ] for that oh no sadly not we have to we have to carry on going the gun doesn't fire because luck so belisarius kills cor's entire family and takes her away with him now then um you might be thinking uh wait so the mother World invaded her home without ation and murdered everyone its lead General belisarius quite specifically murders her entire family and she knows that this is happened he then takes her away with him even though he's killed everybody else and even though she's just tried to kill him he does this pretty well exclusively because the film needs a protagonist but if all that is so then why oh why would Kora grow up to be a loyal servant not only of the mother world that invaded her Planet but of the man who killed her family this is not usually the way way of things is it seems like this is the sort of thing that's likely to make someone resent you just a little bit seems like she'd have good reason to refuse orders try to run away try to betray you try to bring down your Empire not in other words the most reliable Soldier to have on your team it's as if I broke into your house [ __ ] and or murdered your dog [ __ ] and or murdered your entire family and then said well uh that was fun now now be a good girl go get me a beer Gora tells us that she doesn't know why bisaria should have spared her having just sent hundreds of thousands of people to their deaths that is a good question Kora I don't know either good job you don't ask it to any point between then and now she pauses that it might be because he saw something in her someone and I quote to share in his pain which is very silly indeed since we had no idea until this precise sentence that he was in any sort of pain and her description of him would rather suggest that he was here because he enjoyed being a dick don't worry answers to this question will not be found in part one of this duet don't worry answers to this question will not be found in part two either skirting over all the many questions that arise as a result of this bizarre Choice cor explains that belisarius gave her training and an education and she lived with him on his ship for 5 years where his soldiers were her only family I mean well yes that's well it's true after a fashion but that's only because those same soldiers murdered your actual family darling and you seem to have moved on pretty [ __ ] quickly she says there was no softness only the hard lessons of War she then tells us that belisarius often took her on missions of diplomacy as though she was his child which sounds like something that isn't the hard lessons of War doesn't it he made her his Protegé and with the ease that can only come from being a cardboard cutout character with no feelings memories or emotions of any sort she seamlessly became one of them eventually joining the Army and thereafter seems rather to have enjoyed herself though also growing up friends with the royal family and a child of privilege she was nevertheless expected to do her Duty and fight for the mother world she explains fight and [ __ ] for the sake of the mother world I don't know if it's normal for military members on Parade to randomly start kissing each other the sort of the opposite of don't ask don't tell isn't it but because zag wants to cover as many bases of her personality vacuum as possible in as short a time as possible she does indeed start eating the face of her fellow officer this is to show us that she was once in love in order that this nameless grunt can die in the very next scene thereby explaining why she now struggles to fall in love love is encouraged by the mother World Training core we learn because on the good old thean principle it's easier to attach your love to a person than it is to an abstract ideal that's not a bad touch it's just that it never recurs again ever anywhere anywhere at all in the entire movie those evil africanas from earlier weren't all [ __ ] each other tenderly at night time they were trying to find farm girls to rape because that's what that scene demanded this scene Demands a short-lived love interest because Zach is attempting to do character work see what I mean when I say Snider just writes things on the hoof none of these things actually connect he's not building a culture never mind a universe he's just making [ __ ] up as he goes along cor's [ __ ] Budd does indeed die tragically she then bravely goes off to fight for the ideal that she just finished telling us was too abstract to motivate anybody it's a combat scene and so obviously though this does give us a chance to glimp one of Anthony's robots getting shot in the background which I'll praise because well at least it's sort of in continuity we won't even get that when we come to part two even more slow motion follows and then even more slow motion at last Kora boldly and bravely waves the flag of the mother world over the battlefield of this newly conquered planet and it too is very [ __ ] Cora sums all this up by telling us that she fought for the king of a distant World under the banner of a people who destroyed her home and her family then the flashback ends and she as good as speaks directly to the audience I'm only telling you this so you know who I am but but here's the thing cor darling we don't we have no idea who you are none of this makes any sense this is just a chain of events that bought you to this very specific place I suppose it gives us a reason reason for you shunning love which would be great if that ever again became a character beat in this movie but it doesn't otherwise it's a good example of the difference between events and characterization between people and characters this actually isn't a universally understood distinction lots of people get confused when you point out that there are no characters in for example Godzilla X Kong because they're under the impression that character is a quantitative thing here is one unit of person on the screen Ergo here is one character how it's futile trying to explain to monsterverse fans that characters and people are not the same thing that characters require proper motives feelings needs all combined in the bracket personality it's futile because most monsterverse fans are themselves people not characters but Kora here is helpful in fleshing out this point because she very neatly encapsulates the difference we've just seen her undergo a series of events from her home's Invasion to the murder of her family to her joining and leading the army of the very people who committed the preceding this explains her knowledge of the mother world in the present day but these events proceed without actually forming a character and indeed fly in the face of plausible character since a plausible character would not act or behave in this way Kora does not think about these events she does not react to these events she has no agency in these events because if she did the setup wouldn't work and she'd not now be sitting here narrating It All To Us dispassionately in this way there is actually a pretty handy contrast while reviewing part one of this movie movie I was desperate enough to find a character that I went and delved into the official novelization of Rebel Moon part one it's pretty [ __ ] bad as you might expect but unlike the movie alongside which It Was Written the novelization has the Bare Bones of characterization the entire prologue is in fact given over to the character of space twink Alpha you will recall that I've been wondering so far why it is that he and he alone is the nicest out of all the Nazis in fact the only nice Nazi well the novel ation gives him the prologue in that prologue we see almost the exact replica of the flashback Kora has just given us the mother World Turns up on young space twink's Planet it forces him to kill his father it separates him from the rest of his family his younger sister and his mother in particular and he is taken away as a Child Soldier when later on he sees the Nazis being mean to Rosie it awakens in him his feelings of guilt and regret his inability to save his sister so he acts to protect Rosie as a way of overcoming his survivors guilt this is the difference then between people and characters the novelization has decided it might try and make Aris or space drink a character whereas Rebel moons part one and two are content with Kora being just a person the flashback means of exposition is also by far the cheapest and laziest way to go about integrating the past with the future it is again all predicated on nobody in the village ever asking her about her past during all the time she's been with them and it fast forwards through essential beats in one condensed block with without any real bearing on the present day events that prompt the flashback for comparison because Arcane is always a good comparison you can compare the use of flashbacks in Arcane to the use of flashbacks in Rebel Moon Arcane does not view flashbacks as simple tools of convenience and their placement is always with a mind to present day events they very often parallel present day events which both ties the past and the present together thematically whilst also giving a diagetic reason for characters to be reminiscing In This Moment about these things in this way flashbacks in Arcane sometimes serve as thematic bookends tying the present day narrative together and sometimes serve as reactions as Reflections by characters in the moment and they're Artful because they do not overstep their bounds the stress is often on the flash in flashback it's a momentary thing establishing one historic detail the basis for one present thought the motive for one present action without ever revealing too much or becoming a crutch on which the present day narrative has to lean and at no point of the flashbacks disp Ely narrated by a present day person reading a cliffnote summary of their character which is the approach that Rebel moon has taken here applying the Arcane approach to Rebel Moon everything we've just seen would be broken up into many more vignettes and those vignettes would be spread throughout the narrative in a way that contextualizes kora's current thoughts and actions for example having established that she may have feelings for generic man an arcan ified story might show her being incredibly reluctant to take him on this adventure to put him In Harm's Way and it could be contextualized mid Journey hell even in a dream or a nightmare sequence that would be cheap but not impermissible by a momentary flashback to the scene in the flashback Snider gave us where she cradles a dead man in her arms on a battlefield you could tease events like this across the First Act of the movie even across the first two acts and then crystallize them in the third when generic man finally challenges her about it demanding to know why she doesn't trust him forcing her to admit the reasons publicly for the first time that would be the essential difference between an event and a character beat the audience would piece together cor's personality and motivations rather than being told them artlessly allowing us to wonder why Kora acts and reacts in the way that she does and then to discover why she acts and reacts in the way that she does no character should ever utter the line that's why I'm telling you all this so you understand who I am the rest is so obviously bork that it doesn't really need a recap evil man killed my entire family so I became his daughter and fought for the empire he commanded and never told you any of this until now because the camera wasn't rolling and Zach hadn't thought of it yet I went around killing and murdering people just like what happened to my home and my family but according to Anthony robkins it's only when the princess dies later that the mother World loses its compassion and its decency right here then oh God no flashing forward Flash Forward to part two oh yeah no no no we'll get there I'm going to save it but uh yeah Kora is very very much on board with the Empire at this point Kora will go to drastic lengths to demonstrate her falty to the regime that murdered her parents ooh I can't wait that's a that's a real doozy the next day they arrive at Moss Eisley though for a very brief moment Snider seems to think it's the village of Brie from The Lord of the Rings and be too careful outside the MOSI Cantina some bounty hunters use a giant robot scorpion thing to take a prisoner Kora helpfully tells us exactly what's going on bounty hunters they work for the Imperium the excuse being that generic man doesn't know any of this which is debatable since the whole reason he's tagging along is that he's been here before and he trades with known terrorists he's not the perfect novice accomplice which is the usual and perfectly acceptable use for filling the audience in but never mind oh no no wait no no [ __ ] no not never mind because the film doubles down on the problem in having generic man recognize the prisoner as his contact [Applause] no that's our guy he blurts this out mere feet away from the bounty hunters and they proceed to talk about his links with terrorists and the location of the terrorists and all sorts of very useful incriminating information at volume just across the street from these known bounty hunters I me Jesus [ __ ] Christ Zach would it be too much to ask that you had them whisper maybe that they go and hide around a corner something that gives us some sense that they're actually reacting to events like they are a part of this world we also discover that they had really no need to come to this bar to meet this contact because the terrorists who are apparently completely incompetent told generic man exactly where they were hiding and who was hiding them no they said they were sheltered on a planet called Sharon protected by a king named L but they they go to The mely Cantina anyway it's just that now they need transport off world myself the man and no questions asked let's just say we'd like to avoid any Imperial entanglements you know the drill this is going to be it's ah it's going to be so hard not to spoil the part two stuff in this early that's just say all of this works if you assume that they have no ships of their own and I'm mentioning this now for the very obvious reason that part two is going to go on and give them a ship of their own and [ __ ] it all up but uh no we we'll we'll make fun of that when we get there a big menacing alien walks past them and Zach very subtly wants us to know that this big menacing alien is going to be relevant later because as the big menacing alien passes he goes all slow motion and the generic music generically does its generic [Music] thing honestly Zach you could just put a sign on the screen in neon saying this guy will be relevant remember him even though they're in a bar where their contact has just been picked up by bounty hunters they continue openly discussing where to find their terrorist friends generic man says their best bet is to contact uh the levitic the Leviticus are the race of deeply homophobic aliens who are Sheltering the terrorists I guess this is all information he could and should have given her before they left the farming Village by the way I'm genuinely not sure why he didn't tell her all this before they arrived or no no I I know I I I I made a mistake am sure why Zach wanted to Trail the bounty hunters and intro the very obviously significant menacing alien in order to set up a tediously predictable betrayal later but you you could still have accomplished all this in a more sensible way say generic man you deal with the terrorists do you have any idea where to find them well yes I happen to know that they're hiding on planet Leviticus where they are being protected from the evil sodomites by the levians but I don't know how we'll get there oh I know let's head to Moss eely let is bound to be someone there with a ship that can get us to alderan I mean Leviticus who will have to sell your speeder that's okay I'm never coming back to this planet again mind you I suppose if he'd done that then he'd not have needed to come with her on this Mission but that problem exists in both versions since he already knows where the rebels are and so he doesn't need to accompany her anyway you'd have to invent some other reason maybe some combination of his past dealings with them and is want to redeem himself after getting modok killed he could actually insist that she takes him with her thus giving him the beginnings of an arc he simply doesn't have in the film we actually got I know way back in my rings of power videos I made a bit of a meme out of the saying writing is hard but that was always supposed to be ironic all right most of this is not hard it's really [ __ ] simple basic stuff the only people who seem to find writing on this level difficult are paid professional writers and maybe people in comas they might find it pretty hard as well in any event it doesn't materially alter them plans yet because korus still wants to go and find General Titus and his army first the implication being that the rebels would be a handy but optional extra and I could waste time pointing out the awkward implications there too but hold on no no I can't because I'm being distracted at the moment I'm being distracted by the introduction of a gay clown creature this guy this gay clown creature ha see you're not a ghost at all you're some kind of gay clown apparently ew it's slightly more repulsive than regular clowns what what is going on sack he's basically King Jelly Bean from that Rick and Morty episode oh okay uh bye oh no stay go with the flow stop you're making me really uncomfortable stop fighting me just let this happen that is also set in a weird alien bar and the similarities are such that I'd really not be surprised to learn that it's where Zach got the idea here yeah I have a room upstairs with relatively clean sheets but it works in Rick and Morty because it's part of a bit deliberately and comically subverting the usual tropes of adventure stories whereas in this film it's really just there to be gratuitous and icky and also I slightly suspect to establish a firm case of the not gays Snider films have this slightly weird adolescent male sexuality thing going on on the one hand look at these Rock card glistening abs look at them look at how shiny the ABS are look at the slow motion ABS my God these abs are [ __ ] and then in the next moment LOL no homo bro no no creepy creepy gay disgusting clown creature gay shit's gay shit's icky right yeah we're not gay honest oh but but then again those abs surprise gay clown creature oh but the ABS are really just so [ __ ] no homo LMAO what are you [ __ ] oh just come out already my God in heaven gay clown creature tries to buy a generic man because he wants to [ __ ] him he artfully gets this point across by grabbing his balls and doing creepy gay clown sex talk I guarantee you by morning you're going to be begging me for more corra then beats the [ __ ] out of him in slow motion she then decides huh I know I've Just Seen bounty hunters in the pay of the mother World haul a guy out of the bar but I'm sure just just announcing my plans to the entire bar won't get me in any sort of trouble I'm looking for information has anyone here heard of General Titus or know where he might be a creepy alien Metroid mind rapist creature uses an Independence Day reference to tell our very blind Heroes that General Titus currently fights in a Coliseum on a planet called bollocks at least I think it's called bollocks and before you start doing that dumb overrated thinking thing asking questions like but hey Kora if he's fighting in a Coliseum doesn't that suggest he's a slave and he's lost his army and he's now completely useless to you shouldn't this change your plans Kora don't you know who fights in coliseums Kora haven't you seen Gladiator before you start doing any of that stop it thoughts in a Snider movie are like Republic credits on taten no good even the space Jews won't take him they reason that they will now need to find a ship to take them to planet but before we can meet Han Solo gay clown creature gay clowns his ass back into the bar with some gay clown backup he has a gay clown posy if you will and he does that very silly thing where villains say you should have killed me when you had the chance now you are the one who is going to die rather than just you know killing them at some point in the intervening some other people who were in the bar when Kora beat the [ __ ] out of gay clown creature the first time remember that they work for gay clown creature after all and they should probably have tried to help him so they attempt to make amends by belatedly trying to help him now and a shootout ues in the subsequent fight we learn such curious details as laser beams cannot penetrate pub tables gay clowns can pack quite a bunch Zack Snider really really really likes and then a very silly thing occurs a roped figure stands up and pulls a gun he's looking at cor who has just mowed her way through the gay clown posy gay clown creature himself is advancing on her from the rear I guess he thinks she looks boyish enough but she hasn't seen him yet rather to make the very sensible assumption that another robed man pulling a gun on you is trying to kill you like everybody else in the bar was cor just stands there and waits for him to pull out his pistol Take Aim and shoot and the shot of course takes out gay clown creature not Kora but I think that probably has to go down as incredibly [ __ ] lucky since if it had been anybody else Kora would no longer have a head anyway mysterious robed person is this movie's hand solo Kora spotted this guy taking money at the bar earlier so she and we learn quite quickly that he's the one who sold out generic man's contact and this might lead you to suppose H not sure about that one man who has no principles and works for the highest bidder ah not exactly the most trustworthy sort is he probably the sort of person I'd keep my eye on at the best of times absolutely not the sort of person I trust to take me all over the Galaxy as I try to ferment a rebellion against the empire I mean I'd have to be really [ __ ] dumb to put my trust in a man like that and if I were to do such an incredibly stupid thing I'd really have no cause to complain if he betrayed me to the Empire later because really you know this is exactly the sort of thing people like him do as evidenced by the fact that this is exactly the sort of thing people like him have just done and having just seen him do it all the red flags are raised all the alarms are jangling when he basically offers to help me for free he seems far too Keen doesn't he what an idiot he must take me for what an idiot he must be to assume I can't see straight through his incredibly obvious rules ah but once again I must point out that if your IQ is measurable it is higher than the IQ of any character in this movie so of course cor goes right along with it and at this point it's not spoiling anything to say that yes he does indeed betray them later look we even get a shot of big menacing alien as discount solo ship the bicentenial eagle flies off oh God it's just like Star Wars only it's really really [ __ ] this count solo says he'll first need to stop off at another random Planet so we can do a fetch Quest there's a guy there Kora might find useful he said days she points out that they can't afford to waste any time but she agrees to go anyway even though it is the very definition of wasting time given her plan does not require picking up strange men on the word of obvious traitors this is what I meant when I said that the film has a clock it's just kind of forgotten to wind it up and set it ticking meanwhile over on Space Battleship yam Pik Nati is getting high in his bath this is dangerous children it is not something to try at home an underling reports that the bounty hunters have information pertaining to the whereabouts of the rebel base on dantoine which Kora and generic man already know about which will make it the height of silliness when they decide to toddle over there anyway in a few hours time heinti is very pleased by this news but he's much more pleased about the private time that he's about to have with his pet hentai monster that is presently sucking on his pole whoa wao no no no not gay not gay here's look here's a gay clown we're not gay no homo L I'm sure will get the extended Universe version of the hentti scene and the SN cut of this movie if you watch that though then I'm I'm afraid you are just very very gay no amount of gay clown can no homo the homo away we hop away to nondescript fetch Quest Planet number one you might recall that discount solo had his own reason for coming to this planet but the film does not quite recall that because at no point does Discount solo benefit in any way from this journey we are just here to pick up a person this person is inex ably being kept as a slave by this old Rancher man who inexplicably sets up shop on what is by all available evidence an entirely Barren Planet when he could be literally anywhere else having an easier time the Dragon's Dogma porn they've come to collect is basically mowgly after he got smashed by a whole truckload of puberty and then discovered Planet Fitness ABS God look at the glistening ABS no no no gay clown creatures save us save us from the gay now Kora and Co know nothing all about mowley but having taken one look at those Rippling ABS they've decided they really need some of that and you know who can blame them really so they're going to try and set him free by way of character establishment mowgly lets us know that he is guilty of crimes against the mother world and we are shortly to learn that he could also talk to animals this is the extent of his characterization and neither of its two components is at all relevant to anything that follows either in this part or part two you might be asking why is he a slave here here specifically how was he captured where is he from you might also be asking why our hero should so desperately want him on their team given they know absolutely nothing about him he says it's well known that he's no friend of the realm but it isn't because we have literally no idea who you are hunk moggly and neither do our heroes at this point Our Heroes do not have the money required to buy hunk mowle out of his slavery but because he needs to join their team and we really don't care about how they go about it cuz with Zack Snider the Rancher randomly decides that he will let hunk mowley go if hunk mowley can complete the How to Train Your hippogriff side quest the Rancher has a hippogriff you see he's got himself a buck beak how he got a buck Peak and why he wants it is about as clear as anything to do with anything in this movie why he would only now decide to have hunk mowgly try to train Buck beak when he's had both of them here for some considerable time it is implied is likewise complet the unknown why the film is about to do an extended how to train your hippogriff section given that hunk mowgli's animal wrangling skills will never ever ever be at all useful or relevant for the remainder of either movie we're covering here I do not know but that's what's happening so yeah you're just going to have to suck it like your peaky Nazi goggling on alien tentacle dick no homo the terms of the deal are that if hunk mowgly trains Buck Beak he goes free but if he fails everyone Kora generic man discount solo all become his slaves but if you're expecting Kora to say um well [ __ ] that then because we didn't even know this guy existed and our plan doesn't need him so these terms are completely unacceptable ah well you expecto incorrecto you little Gremlin because nobody in this movie thinks things through Gora asks hunk mowgly if he can ride Buck beak yes that is now a sentence and he says yes I can she should really be asking him what he can do besides riding animals because riding animals really isn't going to help her against the giant evil [Music] spaceships oh no [ __ ] of course oh no so yeah we're doing how to train your hippogriff as everybody knows you have to bow to them first oh my God he's actually [ __ ] doing it why aren't you flying away bar beak you're free you can fly you don't need to stick around here just because the plot wants you for no [ __ ] reason just leave be gone Fly Away live a happy life no but no hunk mogle bows he speaks some gibberish gibberish being a guaranteed way to calm down feral animals honestly you give it a go go to the zoo hop into the lion enclosure speak gibberish at it it'll love you and it'll be your friend trust me bro I'm sitting here wondering how hunk mowgly knows how to talk to hippogryphs are they both per chance from the same planet is that planet this planet what's the background here movie uh but never mind none of it matters we'll get a little bit of this background in part two but it still really won't matter at all for now though hunk mowley and his glistening ABS go flying off on Buck Peak uh the only noteworthy part of this sequence is that Zack Snider sort of outdoes himself he thinks this shot of hunk mgly jumping to try and land on bug be looks cool enough for slowmo and then he looked at the slow-mo and he thought you know what would make this even cooler more slowmo and then he looked at that and he thought you know what would make this even cooler oh yeah this Pioneer of the Cinematic Arts has given us the prophesied the Mythic triple slow motion shot bug Peak is now his friend he flies Buck beak back the terms of the deal having been fulfilled he goes to leave with the rest of our boring saps The Suicide Squad that's what we'll call him but he stops and looks back as the Rancher attempts to ride Buckbeak himself but Buck beak throws the evil man off and kills him horribly I I still why why movie Why does the Rancher want to Buck beak why would bug beak not just have flown off what do these lives like when the camera isn't on them oh [ __ ] it never mind cor asks discount solo if there's anybody else he knows of along the way and he says he has a couple of ideas I scream into my whiskey that we're just wasting time because the plan doesn't need any of these [ __ ] and the village is dead anyway and discount solo is obvously going to betray you and none of these people are characters so what are we even doing here Zach uh but never mind never mind more fetch quests yay but before I forget I'm going to do a bit it's a recurring bit each time we pick up someone this film thinks is a character I am going to play you back to back every bit of dialogue they have in the entirety of Rebel Moon part one are you ready it's not going to take long here's what hun mowgly has to offer us going forward wow that was that was amazing y I do got maybe this isn't suicide after all they gave their lives for us I know a thing or two about the guilt of carrying on when those you sworn to fight with a gone honor them with everything that you can from now carry them I you thanks kunar you know I never did trust that pilot it's almost a shame you killed that son of a [ __ ] Noble and we don't have the fight would have been a beautiful place to Die the next fetch Quest takes us past mustapa to this generically dystopian hellscape and I'm going to ask you to note the extent of this planet's Industrial Development it is essentially a Factory world all this stuff I'm pretty sure would have taken decades if not centuries to construct it looks like it's been this way for quite some time and I'm asking you to note this because the film is about to do that thing again where it just makes [ __ ] up on the Fly we here to pick up one of the cast of The acolyte Zach couldn't actually get the license to use real lightsabers because even Kathleen Kennedy thought this thing was too [ __ ] to be Star Wars but the acolyte here does have laser swords and she she is basically a Jedi and that she looks kind of cool and has no character to speak of oh it was as if a billion prequels fans cried out in Terror and were suddenly silenced our mly crew actually meets this next pivotally important character offscreen since we jump from their landing on the planet to their descending with her on a lift this count solo pitches the suicide mission to the acolyte while the rest of the team stands around gormlessly having forgotten that they really don't have time to be pissing about on these side quests the acolyte though is on her own mission at this present moment as she leads Suicide Squad into a large room where we meet and fight and inevitably beat a giant Spiderwoman for some [ __ ] reason Black Widow has been stealing people's children because she is upset about climate change this was my home before they came taste the air it's poisoned my body it weak my eggs and now my children cannot approach black widow's problem as she helpfully exposits is that climate change has damaged her eggs and so now she steals and kills children in the name of Justice my problem though my problem is toold in the first place I invite you to cast your minds back into the Mists of time way way back to about 2 minutes ago where I asked you to remember the big Factory Planet Vista that has clearly been built up here over many decades at least and that has therefore been here for at least some time this is a very good example of the film just making [ __ ] up on the Fly and forgetting to factor in any sense of history since if Black Widow used to live here then she ought really to have been very pissed off by industrialization a long time ago this is not something that has suddenly occurred it is as the tedious environmentalists like to put it a systemic problem mind you they also like to pretend it's racist and there could be no environment without gay Palestinian indigenous rights so I don't propose to draw too heavily on their rhetoric here but in so far as environmental degradation is systemic and is longterm Black Widow has no business getting upper about it now when she should have been very uper about it back when her home was being demolished to make room for the factories in the first place she wasn't because this film operates on a Just in Time Manufacturing basis we have arrived here just in time to meet the acolyte just in time to accompany her on her personal mission just in time to meet Black Widow who has become angry just in time to steal a child just in time for the purposes of a cool fight scene some people can Overlook the complete absence of history in a fictional creation but this is a Zack Snider film and so it's far from the only problem with this scene which leads us then to the second place if Black Widow has been pissed off in stealing children for maybe a few weeks at this point and if as we shall shortly learn she kills the children she steals and if she hasn't actually come here to negotiate terms with anyone from this big old Amazon warehouse of a planet then why is she holding an un murdered child being charitable and assuming maybe she was open to negotiating terms and she just forgot to mention it before they started fighting then why does she keep the Child Alive In Her Arms during the fight given she is now fighting for the right to murder that child as Vengeance you seem to have unnecessarily encumbered yourself my Spider Queen anyway this is all sort of slightly maybe kind of done in order that the film can establish the acolytes one bit everyone on the team gets one bit Punk mowgly vaguely dislikes the mother world we learn here that the acolyte knows a mother's pain and so we assume she lost a child a daughter maybe at some point in the past never mind though it's not going to come up again maybe in part two though yeah yeah oh God can't wait for her backstory in part two it's so Illuminating and as everybody knows you should never do any character work in your first movie anyway Black Widow promises to kill the child she's carrying and the fight duly commences then she completely forgets to kill the child she's carrying and the acolyte kills her with her not lightsabers Black Widow grabs her lifts her up and just kind of snars at her and then gets stabbed and dies not really sure what your plan was there darling but whatever it was it was wrong you probably deserve that all this while the rest of Suicide Squad just stands around watching because when you've come to try and get somebody to fight for your cause the one thing you really don't want to do is to help them fight for their cause first Spider Queen dies the child is rescued and returned to her mother the acolyte attempts to convey some sort of emotional depth by telling them not to gloat because there is no honor in this killing there is no honor in Revenge which is a line I encourage you to remember because the film is about to forget it she says it could easily be any of them lying here which would be true if any of them had taken up kidnapping and murdering children as a hobby but you know since they haven't done that no oh mind you on the basis that absolutely none of them has a character it is true on a meta sense it might as well have been any of you since there's really nothing to tell any of you apart anyway the acolytes introduction dispensed with it's time to do the bit again it's time for the the for the for the thing the moment you know that the thing I I haven't haven't thought of a name for it yet I'll come back to that one it's time for the bit where we play all her subsequent dialogue scenes that bit what will they do [Music] now up on the bicentenial eagle cor applauds generic man for stepping in to try and save the child earlier and since characters are here having a rare conversation it is of course time for another flashback God forbid we do any present tense work Zach in this flashback we learn that Kora with her Kate Kane Batwoman power lesbo heru was very successful on the battlefield and was rewarded by being made personal guard to princess Issa it's all pretty and it's snowy and it's a flashback and that means we get a motion do killing a b as if we care as if we care we learn that Issa was named after some Mythic Queen called Issa the lifegiver this Mythic Queen was said to have the power to give life my [ __ ] hell putting out all the stops there aren't we Zach and this means that young princess Issa literally has the power to give life so she magically heals the little birdie creature and Kora ever the observant protagonist says I saw on more than one occasion things that I couldn't explain things that made me think that she was different special um well spotted in a subsequent meeting with the King Zach decided it's a hell with subtext actually let's just make it all text when she becomes Queen I believe she'll bring her compassion that I've lost after all these hard years of war if this doesn't sound like the sort of thing a normal person would say it's because it isn't Zach is vaguely aware that the princess myth is really important to this overarching story and also that he's not spent very much time on it because training irrelevant hippogryphs looked cooler though the king is really just recapitulating with all the subtlety of a startled platypus the basic setup given us earlier by Anthony robots Issa is the personification of Innocence kindness and so Redemption and her loss amounts to the death of the soul of the world it doesn't work generally because as established this world doesn't really have a soul and has never had one because that requires that thought care and attention is paid to the world's history and to its story and Zach can't be bothered with any of that [ __ ] I'd written the script of course in a vacuum just as I would and it doesn't work particularly when it comes from the King because if he knows that his daughter will restore The Compassion that he's lost and he thinks that this is a good thing then he hasn't really lost that compassion in the first place and what part of it he seems to have temporarily misplaced is perfectly within his power to find again this model arises from Zach's two contradictory pieces of setup the mother world was already fallen and then it fell when the royal family was assassinated and you cannot have both of these things at once there are relatively simple ways to fix this one of them an extension of something I've already mentioned is that you portray the mother world as falling with the assassination of the royal family it's turn to evil embodied by belisarius with the princess's importance being as the nicest of a nice bunch of rulers this would though involve either dropping the evil militarism of the Anan regime making that belarus's unique gift of the Galaxy or else putting in the work to establish that the royal family was benign in inclination but in increasingly overruled by a militaristic faction led by belisarius and his generals the obvious comparison is with the fall of the Jedi in the Star Wars prequels being the victory of the ruthless and corrupt the death of the monarchy is the death of the Republic and belisarius is Palpatine's new Galactic Empire this would have the added benefit of clearing up the problem I raised right at the beginning and the confused motives and timing of the outer rim Rebellion they would have a new cause for revolution it's a Well trodden story sure but then again everything about Rebel moon has been artlessly stolen from better Works already so borrowing this world set up from the Star Wars prequels wouldn't be any less original than what we got it would just have the added bonus of making sense part two does attempt to add some clarity to this but as we'll discover when we get on to part two it fails anyway cor has a cry and tells us that she came to really believe in Princess Issa but since that comes dangerously close to conveying an actual emotion we immediately cut away to the set of Gladiator 2 Maximus Decimus bugaloo where they have decided it is finally time to pick up the one person they actually planed to grab from the beginning General Titus who is fighting in the Coliseum at bollock General Titus is now a hairy drunk who's just been left to pass out in the streets nobody much Minds that the suicide squad can just walk right up to him and take him away for a cleaning and Suicide Squad itself doesn't seem to have registered yet that this man is obviously not the great general in charge of an Army on whom they had pinned all their hopes this is quite a big deal which is why I'm not spending any time asking why it is that Kora can just walk into the Coliseum and command the staff like she owns the place hey at least she's not like the most wanted criminal in the Galaxy or anything Titus was their plan Titus was so much their plan that finding the blood axes at the Rebel Alliance was portrayed as a secondary bonus if this man is no longer of the power and station they were expecting their plan is [ __ ] and he quite obviously is not not actually he's quite obviously not been since they first mentioned that he now spends his time fighting in a Coliseum actual characters might react with Dread and horror at this realization because it means their Village is probably doomed or you know at least probably more doomed than it already was which already was a lot cor though she still acts as though he's her one best hope well act as a bit of a stretch she just tells him that he's her one best hope he says n cuz he surrendered in the past and got his men killed so he just wants to die but she says she doesn't think he's meant to die here and she suggests he takes Revenge pretty sure this slightly undercuts the acolytes prior message about the futility of such things and if she was a character this might be a source of conflict but she isn't so never mind but Titus Titus has been here for many years Walling in booze and self-pity and you'll telling me that he hasn't at any point considered that revenge is an option so just like like that cor turns up and says hey have you maybe thought about taking revenge and and that's enough that's the thing that makes him just like that sign on the dotted line and join the team nobody in the Coliseum seems at all perturbed about one of their Fighters just Waltzing off without compensation they had a harder job getting hunk mowgly off of a Rancher and um that's yeah that's kind of it that's that's Titus Titus is on the team now kora's biggest bestest hope for salvation turns out to be just another muscly drunk but never mind because the plan has changed it's just that nobody has really acknowledged it yet rather than Titus leading an army and training The Peasants it's Titus is just another member of a ragtag team of Warriors that they only really picked up by accident ah I do love it when a plan doesn't come together but the film just muddles along without anyone ever worrying that maybe they're all [ __ ] that by the way would have been the much more natural way to do this you accidentally pick up team members but your sight Ser on titis but when you finally get to him you realize that he's just a washed up old drunk the second act low Point begins as our heroes realize they have labored seemingly in vain they now have no choice but to seek out the Rebel Alliance who have become their last remaining hope what they have not yet begun to realize is that the adventure itself is forming bonds of friendship and compassion between them that will ultimately turn them into a proper team capable of taking down the empire together strength was never going to be found in begging distant generals for help strength can only come from within you know that sort of thing the slightly less conventional way of doing it would have been for them to go and find Titus first learn that he's a washed up hobo who can't help them which then sends them on their Adventure picking up less likely but more valuable friends on route to meeting the Rebel Alliance either one of them works much better because it means our characters actually suffer a setback and feel something about their Adventure but no instead we just get this a soulless succession of fetch quests picking up people we know nothing about whose skills aren't particularly relevant who go on to play almost no point in the plot oh oh oh speaking of which it's time it's time o' it's that it's the the thing the bid again it's that the thing where we take the piss out of the movie's awfulness by playing all the important companions dialogue scenes it needs a better title it's the bit hit it Johnny this was a blow to the mother world what we did this day criminals nobody's standing Against the Machine of War this small Act of defiance gives voice to the voiceless this is more than just a foreign prick officer and some of his men it's the beginning of something we still get paid I presume I've been wondering is what that dead Bounty Hunter said true that you're aers don't call me Jen [Applause] Titus collected The Narrative swings back over to Space Battleship yam remember how the last time we were here piki Niti was informed that bounty hunters had captured an informant remember how that was right near the beginning of the movie remember how suicide squad has gone on no fewer than three fetch quests during that time yeah well time gets confusing in space so the informant is only now being bought to space batt ship yam for interrogation the robot scorpion brings him off the drop ship the mark tells pinti what we already know because generic man somehow already knew it meaning it's very odd that it's taken this long for the mother world to learn it that the Rebel Alliance has been hiding on planet Leviticus as a reward fiki Nazi fires a bolt gun through his spinal cord and orders his goons to dissect his brain to see if he has any more useful information I'll give the film some credit I I I'll try anyway in that it's a a creepy and visceral and horrifying but not gory way to kill somebody but as is usually the case the film will shortly go on to ruin its good thing by being dumb so Space Battleship yam goes to pay a Leviticus a visit which is another of those sentences you just never ever expect you'll ever have to write as bad Co no [ __ ] it stay as as bad cuck would have it suicide squad has itself just arrived on Leviticus now this is all quite severely broken since you will recall that generic man knew that the Rebel Alliance is on Leviticus and he learned it from his contact and he and Kora both saw the contact get nabbed by bounty hunters way back before they even left Moss eely meaning in other words that they should assume that the mother World also knows that the Rebel Alliance is on Leviticus and is actually ahead of them in getting to Leviticus this really does break pretty much the entire plot of the movie again the because it means they are fully aware that a clock is ticking and they have quite deliberately left Leviticus until last on their list of fetch quests when the setup should have them in a Mad Dash to get there before the mother world does either to recruit the rebels or to warn them of their impending doom it makes the entire sequence of events all those pointless fetch quests to find more mute Sidekicks not only redundant but actively counterproductive and it deprives the movie of any sense of urgency if our protagonist isn't actually invested in this story why the [ __ ] should we be Zach anywh who we arrive on Leviticus and we meet the king of Leviticus this happy little guy with a face like a Japanese porn Sho the blood axe Rebels aren't here in person yet because they are very secretive which explains why literally everybody knows this is where they are and despite being so very secretive they have no problem with Kora landing on the planet to meet Squidward who confirms that the rebels are indeed here they're just waiting for the the coolest moment to reveal themselves because this is a Zack Snider film after all the rebels duly make their entrance and considering how much they've been built up throughout this story they are deeply unimpressive and remain deeply unimpressive throughout the remainder of the movie they want to know why a generic man should contact them from an unknown and flagless vessel he says he assumed they had a certain degree of trust at this point we've just sort of given up doing believable dialogue because the film is completely out of practice so m a says do not confuse your business of Commerce with our business of Revolution I I don't really know what this is supposed to mean or why they'd have accepted this meeting if they thought generic man was confused about the relationship to begin with OR why they're publicly here at all given everyone knows about this place and the fact that random farmer has just been able to find them should clle them in that the location isn't a secret anymore but never mind that would require some thought and we don't do that here I mean hell sis ax even tells him that he's put them in danger by coming here no you Puffin you're in danger because you told him where to find you and he's just a random [ __ ] farmer oh Muhammad on a moped these [ __ ] people oh well Kora makes her pitch I've recruited this small team of randoms you don't know in order to defend a village you've never been to that has no value to you at all against a massive Starship that can blow it up from space so how about you sign up and help us needless to say this pitch is not especially convincing sister ax tells us that Space Battleship yam is much too powerful to be destroyed by a few dozen Villages which is necessary because we've not seen it do anything yet and which will be at least slightly undercut later when we see giant ships getting taken out by one solitary man with a [ __ ] spear anyway sister axay now were not too keen on this plan actually and cor loses her temper his people toil with their bare hands to grow the grain that fed you all of you and because of that transaction their Village is now threatened by Admiral Noble wait no no that that's not that's not actually what happened though is it Kora the mother world doesn't know you've been trading with terrorists they just want all the food anyway and you very explicitly told us earlier that the mother world has come to take everything that it can't be bargained with which sort of implies there was no way they weren't going to bleed the Village Dry do you remember Kora remember how the whole point of the mother world is just generic Aly and all consuming evil that was quite explicitly the deal here Kora so this little attempt at a guilt trip is really just a lie isn't it Kora none of this should appeal to the rebels because if they were stupid enough to fall for it they would not still be alive you could have done a relatively interesting parallel if you'd shown the blood ax is just as likely to exploit poor Farmers as the mother world is but no because again that would require something like World building and characterization so brother axe says he'll join the cause sister axe is upset brother axe finally points out that if a farmer could find them then anyone could and he gives his men and women and in between us a choice sacrifice everything you've built to go and save a doomed Farm which is the good thing to do apparently or be a [ __ ] and Carry On Building your actual Revolution which is the bad and cowardly thing to do a good chunk of morons agree to join him on the suicide mission so he says goodbye to Sister Axe and tells her to leave the planet as soon as possible and then they all fly off in their ships upon on the bis Sentinal Falcon something rare and wonderful occurs that's right people are having a conversation that isn't just the Launchpad for a flashback discount solo asks Kora why brother axe would agree to join her suggesting that it's shortsighted to weaken your entire resistance movement to take out one ship over a doomed Farm which is completely correct K tells him that guilt is a powerful thing he's going to betray you Kora he says he vaguely remembers having honor but he doesn't have it anymore because he's going to betray her then He suggests that she's changed his mind and convinced him to join the cause he's going to betray you Kora but before he does that he has to go and drop off some cargo because he's going to betray you Kora I cannot stress this enough he's going to betray you Kora darling he's going to betray you how can you not see where this is going Abba [ __ ] tell her it's a TR I mean for [ __ ] sake cor if getting rid of this mysterious cargo was so important to him why wouldn't he have boor it up before now why wouldn't he have done it first thing why would you now risk taking this team you've expensively assembled to some random planet to meet a bunch of criminal thugs on the word of a man who just told you he has no honor my God you're a [ __ ] Gora oh God I bet you're a monsterverse fan Kora also seems to be slightly flirting with him which might be interesting if this weren't the first extended dialogue scene between them since they met since it suggests a certain breaking down of barriers but once again that would count as character work so park that thought until part two at the very least when zacher belatedly decides that she's in love with generic man after all there's no room for it in part one though you can't do character work in the first part of your movie it's just the rule back on planet Leviticus the man who likes putting tentacles in his holes plays reverse of reverse on God and glasses the place B Squidward is very sad and the creature design department at least does a good job giving us a sympathetic goober I I think this is probably the first time I felt anything about the movie kind of like the whale death in avatar The Way of water well you know anything besides scorn and derision obviously it still fails the World building check because Squidward tells us his civilization took in the rebels to uphold its 10,000 years civilizational tradition of honor and charity meaning you have to ask just how this place survived a thousand Generations under a cruel militaristic mother World dictatorship what we'd have needed is again a sense of definite change in the mother world with the Advent of belisarius is Rule but the movie has done absolutely nothing to establish that so never mind [ __ ] Nati then does this very confusing blend of character plot World building and theme honor I understand charity I do not our king showed charity to an offworlder like yourself and was slaughtered for his charity so we named the ship to remind us of the power in that benevolent gaze it was lost to charity um um but but none of that's [ __ ] true though is it the king wasn't benevolent he presided over the violent expansion of his Empire and believed his daughter was lovely because she represented compassion he didn't have we have as yet been given no indication of how showing charity to an offworlder LED to the King's death which might be cleaned up in part two spoilers it really kind of isn't but I'm inclined to say that part two is far far too late to start addressing stuff like that it's confusing to say the least to be naming your ship after a benevolence you despise but I I guess that's a a piece with the space nais General edginess anyway pey Nazi Club Squidward to death that's another of those [ __ ] lines Space Battleship yam starts bombing the planet surface and we also learn that motherworld forces are closing in on the rebels led by Sister axe the film taking the novel approach of hinging its second act low point on the deaths of people we first met 5 minutes ago about whom we know pretty well nothing at all and we then jump away to edgy bpin an unregistered trade Depot suspended in the sky floating above the planet surface looks like plastic car from solid marble there but the weight of it what's supporting it what keeps it there art this is where discount solo is nominally going to drop off his cargo but of course he's really here to be a big old traitor this has been obvious from the big beginning but cor becomes aware of it when who should walk past in slow motion but big menacing alien from the M isely Cantina you know the big menacing alien who walked past in slow motion in the MOs Heisley Cantina oh remember how wonderfully subtle that was yeah here's the payoff bet you never saw this coming oh no they get attacked the guy who told you he's a dishonest mercenary with no honor who'll sell people to the highest bidder turns out indeed to be a dishonest mercenary with no honor who will sell you to the highest bidder no one could have foreseen this turn of events a big old evil spaceship takes out the Rebels air cover and some more of those robotic rape scorpions grab all the members of The Suicide Squad my goodness the Peril you're telling me we've just done Galaxy hopping to pick up this band of fearsome Warriors and they can't outrun or out fight a few run-of-the-mill meca scorpions they are beaten by the first enemies they face well what was the giddy [ __ ] point then the reasons having to do with sheer [ __ ] contrivance the only person not grabbed by a scorpion is generic man this is not because he escapes oh no he's captured just like they are but the film thinks this is time for him to redeem himself and to achieve this it requires that the villains display all the intelligence of your average Snider fan and here yet again the movie decides to just be completely [ __ ] broken because it has discount solo explain his evil plan thusly unv Providence first time I heard your story thought with your ideals of resistance I could rind up a couple of heads t for instance his world enslaved and there was an nesis her whole family slaughtered but General tius have you any idea how much he alone is worth they would have all jumped at the chance to exact any small Vengeance against the realm even if the payment was only a sack of grand Then There Was You Kora or should I call you arthus the biggest prize of the mall H so wait up wait just one second his grand plan was hoping that Kora could convince a bunch of known terrorists to sign up to fight in her Revolution a bunch of known terrorists he introduced her to in the first place Zach what are you doing Zach Jesus Christ Zach this oh God this really does take the biscuit it takes the biscuit it dunks it in like scolding hot tea and throws the biscuit and the tea in a baby's face discount solo could have turned any of these people in at any time over the preceding however long it's been before the movie began even and he didn't solely in order that he could perform the world's most obvious heal turn in this second act there is no diagetic explanation for his actions not only could he have done this at any point before the movie he could have done it at any point during the movie since the crates they unload from the bis Sentinal Eagle contain the Scorpion rape robot meaning he could have just turned them on last night and grabbed everyone while they were still aboard his ship and taken them directly to [ __ ] Nai rather than stopping off here which just only invites things to go wrong and how by the way how in the name of Steven Hawkings Mega cyborg testicle did he learn that Kora is really arthaus Buster daughter of belisarius he just drops it in here with no explanation whatsoever oh and by the way this guy discount solo he's yet another character whose motive for helping the big old evil empire is that the big old evil empire tortured and murdered his parents and his entire planet I mean don't get me wrong it makes ever so slightly more sense than Kora willingly fighting for the big old evil empire but it still makes very little sense that he'd now willingly help them now you know what would have been a much more interesting Journey this count solo goes around rounding up this team under false pretenses he brings them to this planet specifically but betraying them to the Empire in order that he can lure pey Nazi here to try and kill him make him something of an anti-hero a guy whose traitorous actions have a perverted moral point and purpose to them it did even pay off the acolytes line about revenge from earlier and by the way it's still very funny that she hasn't said a word since we picked her up but no man with dumb motives concocts dumb plan to make dumb trade with dumb Empire that will inevitably go wrong because he's left dumb generic man unrestrained for no reason yes well done Zach I can see why you get paid the big bucks it took me about 90 seconds to come up with something better for Discount solo but there we are another very funny scene follows as pey Nazi goes around the captured Heroes and reels off the extent of their characterization it amounts to one sentence each who indeed Commander blood X leader of the very Insurgency the king's gaze were sent to this back quarter of the Galaxy to capture he alone will secure my seat in the Senate I would be remiss if I failed to mention we're in the presence of royalty t desus or should I say prince T General Titus needs no introduction does he his actions at the Battle of sarahu precede him the farmer the ambitious farmer I pride myself on never being surprised and yet here I am I understand why all of them are here but you what could you possibly hope to gain by mounting such a feeble stand the legendary swords woman known only by the name of Nemesis assassinated 16 high-ranking Imperial offices and their security details or in a hunt to eventure slaughtered children the only thing we actually learned from this sequence is that hunk moggi is a prince of somewhere not significant enough to visit or explore or talk about or even explain in any way I guess it sounds better than HK mowgly you speak to hippogryphs but it's of no more use to us than that but wait it gets Dumber because when he comes to Kora he says now I thought I'd recognized something in you down in that filthy Village out there amongst all those simple people Most Wanted fugitive in the known universe scar Giver ar oh no what you what what you're tell you're telling me you you you are telling me you are seriously telling me that you just vaguely recognized someone just a slight stab of recognition not enough for you to actually act on nothing clear or declarative you just had this tiny tiny little inkling back in the village that this woman was and I quote The Most Wanted F the Most Wanted fugitive in the known universe the Most Wanted fugitive in the known [ __ ] Universe oh well tickle my fanny isn't this just something else kind of recontextualizes the entire preceding movie doesn't it Gora the Most Wanted fugitive in the known universe has been Galaxy hopping making absolutely no attempt to hide her face Kora the Most Wanted fugitive in the known universe has stood face to face with motherworld soldiers has stood face to face with pey Nazi the Admiral himself and nobody not the bad guys not the good guys not the random guys not Squidward not Titus not the acolyte not gay clown creature [ __ ] nobody and I mean nobody recognized her except for Discount solo no I I don't believe you film I don't believe this is possible I think this is just fullon bked beyond sense Intergalactic OJ here just wandering around out in the open and only now because the film is ready for it as anybody thought huh you know you do kind of look like the Most Wanted fugitive in the known universe oh [ __ ] you Zach and it just gets worse we've already established that pinky Nai is an evil Psychopathic war criminal who just murders anyone and everyone he possibly can we've already seen him sever the spinal cord of an informant who cooperated with him he's just finished telling us oh no he hasn't actually told us yet take it away pigy Nazi when I lay your bodies at the foot of the region I'll be a hero of the realm they write songs of my Feats of Courage okay so now he's just finished telling us that his entire future his entire reputation rests on the impression that he has won a great Victory and B these criminals to heal cynical and worldly why his discount so low then says it's not like I didn't do all the work and this is the moment [ __ ] Nazi should shoot discount solo Because by the terms just established the only person who now poses a threat to [ __ ] Nati's ambition is Discount solo we already know [ __ ] Nai is not above shooting people who tell him the truth people who help him people who follow orders so he should shoot discount solo and to be fair discount solo should also have realized that this is the sort of thing [ __ ] Nati is likely to do and have either kept stum or concocted a better plan the only reason he is not murdered in this scene is that this is the one scene where Zach decides nah actually [ __ ] Nazi isn't that evil in other words the only reason he survived this scene is sheer character breaking contrivance oh and it gets even worse because even though all these most wanted criminals have already been captured and completely restrained they decide they need to do the bolt gun to the spine thing for [ __ ] I don't know reasons and for equivalently I don't know [ __ ] reasons this job is given to generic man discount solo gives generic man the bolt gun and tells him to do it why why would you be this [ __ ] dumb what is the point what does anybody gain by doing this this is only likely to make things worse it's only introducing a failure Point what the [ __ ] are all you fuckle Berry [ __ ] bits doing discount solo tells generic man he knows he's in love with Kora no idea how they've not shared so much as a line of dialogue discount solo and generic man but that's small fry compared to the giant mistake that is this setup oh look it's all going wrong oh no oh no generic man turns the gun on discount solo oh gee who could have foreen this ah Godly it's so unexpect ected oh gosh and now core is free oh we and now for some reason they don't immediately shoot all the other prisoners so I ah jeez they're all free now oh oh what an unpredictable mess nobody could have foreen this nobody at all ah gee totally unexpected right out of the blue ah Shucks there's a battle oh oh my goodness my goly my goodness and isn't this just isn't it so exciting like your [ __ ] testicles are buzzing it's it's a battle oh so invested so invested in the battle now then you'll recall that there is a giant enemy ship hovering right by the platform so of all that preceding nonsense you'd think they're still all dead it can just take off and blast them from a distance oh but oh no oh jeez oh God Godly no it doesn't it decides it's a close- range fighter so it starts shooting at them and it takes out a few of the rebels and this upsets brother ax and then he oh [ __ ] it just roll the tape for Fore [Music] [Music] we've analyzed their attack sir and there is a danger should I have your ship standing by evacuate in Our Moment of Triumph I think you overestimate their chances [Applause] [Music] [ __ ] oh ship designer hey yeah you why are the controls for your whole massive ship located in a gun turret that seems like a bit of a design flaw to me might want to rethink that one if a big old Starship can be knocked out by one man with a spear I don't think your big old Starship is fit for purpose really imagine being the government that shelled out tens of billions of dollars through a massive piece of military hardware that that just doesn't work God that would be embarrassing good job there's no real world equivalence obligatory Noble sacrifice dispensed with the big old useless hunk of space junk crashes into the platform and inconveniently looks set to separate Kora from pey Nazi rather than shoot him before the ship gets in the way cor decides to run at him with her gun this is just a thing in modern media nobody understands the difference between ranged and melee weapons guns are for punching people this is now a rule the ship crashes into not besin and of course it all goes slow motion again hiy Nazi survives by hopping down onto a tabana gas platform then it turns out cor was there all along somehow standing in the rafters [ __ ] knows how she got there big shame she lost that gun of hers at some point in the proceeding otherwise we' not have got this thrilling fight scene oh God yeah um ying your your noises this is the problem when you you've not bothered building characters or relationship iips there's just nothing to give a [ __ ] about I don't care who wins not really I know cor is going to win because there's a part two but I don't particularly want her to I don't want anything I'm just a passive Observer which is not the effect you want your climactic punch up to have on the audience korus stabs peaky Nazi yay nay I what I don't care then she [ __ ] him off the platform Ray the movie's nearly over pretty sure a fall of that distance would a blit itate his body but it won't cuz we need him again for the sequel up on what remains of cloud city some characters have a few generic lines they gave their lives for us they believed in their cause I don't know who either of you people are for [ __ ] sake this means nothing just get on with it roll the credits Titus attempts to convince us that this battle represents a blow against the mother World an act of defiance giving voice to the voiceless Etc you might be forgiven for thinking um not really no one was around to witness it Space Battleship yam is probably still up there somewhere and you think the motherworld will react with terrible Fury once it learns that one of its Admirals has been killed right remember how in that first flashback cor explains how belisarius genocided an entire planet because it had the goal to fight back against Invasion no this solves nothing you've just poked the bear oh except that actually the film has decided that what it really needs to do before part two is to reset the board completely so it has cor explain the crews of the Imperium are not known for their bravery after the death of a Nal protocol would demand the ship's return ah yes that was the distinct impression I got when I saw that flashback of you leading mother World troops into oncoming fire against entrenched Defenders no bravery there at all you knock out one and the rest run away yeah that's that's absolutely in character with everything we've seen of these people so far well done good oh no problems here at all and and hey it gives us a clean reset for part two enemies are back where they started Heroes go back where they started and we haven't actually begun giving most of them a character yet so it'll be like meeting them again for the very first time how very neat also how completely [ __ ] pointless they do a hero pose over the wreckage of bpin then they return to farm World I'd expect the farm to be quite upset having sent someone off to gather an army and now to see them returning with a grand total of six strangers HK mowgly suggests it's a shame that they came all the way here when she's already killed pey Nazi so they don't have to fight but um no no my friend part two is coming it's right around the corner and obviously you're going to have to fight because you've achieved nothing if anything you've just pissed them off and if the film hadn't just now decided they're all cowards at least until part two when it needs them not to be again Space Battleship Yamato would have already come back here and raised this Village as Vengeance you have brought immeasurable pain and suffering to the far reaches of the Galaxy but never mind for now because that all happens in the sequel they ride back to the village in the fields Anthony robkins is wearing some antlers and he has a spear he turns to look at the camera and we all regret not seeing where he got those but that is not quite the end of the the movie oh no first we've got to rip off Revenge of the Sith as a motherworld ship flies over the sight of the last battle and finds the broken body of py Nai it's not quite a ripoff though because rather than lava there's there's water that's a difference it's it's not Mustafar it's more like Camino the ship takes him back and the weird religious Ben jeser cultist types set about turning py Nazi into Darth Vader this involves establishing a neurolink connection between his mind and bisaria back on the mother World which for some reason can only take place inside a a like a sperm bubble I'm not even going to ask what the mechanics are that see him fully clothe the again and transported to a fully realized frigid world for a conversation with Bellis Arius but whatever the cause he informs Bellis Arius that he has located Kora or ass licker or whatever the [ __ ] she's called bis arus isn't very happy to learn that his wonderful skilled fearsome former daughter has joined the Rebel Alliance but py Nazi says if she could be turned she could prove a powerful Ally but assaria says yes she could be a great asset can it be done pyazi say she will join us or die my master and then belisarius threatens that if pyazi can't do her then he'll get crucified lovely chap this belisarius and the neuralink ends and the bubble bursts and his body is deposited back on the floor of the ship so the Benny jeser types can continue transforming him into Vader they zap him and he wakes up with where is Kora he asks is she safe is she all right old creamy sheave creeps his way out from his little corner and says it appears in your anger you killed her and that's the end of part one we made it we made it all the way to uh oh [ __ ] me to the halfway point oh no there's another one part two I'm regretting this massively it's time for part two you never know maybe there'll be a character in this one the always wonderful Vera Herzog has this to say on the subject of chickens the enormity of of their flat brain the enormity of their stupidity is just overwhelming you have to do yourself a favor when you're out in the countryside and you see Chi try to look a chicken in the eye with great intensity and the intensity of stupidity that is looking back at you is just amazing this quote comes back to me from time to time as I encounter something that at least poses the question does anything else rival the chicken's cosmically deafening stupidity monsterverse fans perhaps or that breed of person in your YouTube comment section who begins every attempt at a sentence with bro or bruh granted these are often one and the same but it seems to me that the defining feature Herzog identifies in the chicken is not backward borked or misfiring intelligence that would entail the presence of something that has simply gone wrong at some point in your life but that's being dropped on your head as a child taking the wrong cocktail of mind altering substances or spending too much time on subreddits devoted to Godzilla rather what he's describing is an antithesis of being not a broken mind but an absence of mind the chicken's stupidity is terrifying because it's an emptiness a hole where thought reason Consciousness itself should be the chicken is a clucking labotomy this makes it a formidable opponent for any Contender to the crown of nihilistic emptiness yet the question has again been posed because I've spent the last few weeks considering Zack Snider's Rebel Moon and at some length but if it was hard finding substance in Rebel Moon part one I think Rebel Moon part two probably comes closest closest of pretty much all the terrible movies I've been cursed to review even to being a Vera herzog's chicken of a movie not just wrong not merely incompetent but actually spiritually cognitively dead let us begin where is Padme AIT po oh stay go with the flow stop you're making me really uncomfortable stop fighting me just let this happen get off of me isn't he beautiful say hello to buckby ha get in there defend my honor Rebel Moon part two begins with an admission of failure once again we open on J Eric space visuals over a generic score with an Anthony rotkin narration but this time rather than filling in new bits of History World setting and context rather than filling in any gaps in the story since we left it all he's doing is giving us a barebones plot breakdown of part one and adding a few ridiculous nouns that we didn't have time to include back then on the far edges of the mother world's reach circling the gas giant Mara was the small Moon of velt there a village of humble Farmers lived a simple life born of the earth until the shadow of a warship fell upon their fields the ship's Commander Admiral Noble demanded more than V's people could give so it was that a woman named Kora and a man named Guna set forth from the village to gather Warriors to stand against the dreadn on new body they were joined by the mighty Tarak in the minds of dagas the fierce Nemesis in the colosium of pollock the way were General Titus and on the planet sharan Daran BLX and his lieutenant melus in an ambush on the floating docks of gandal Kora triumphed over Admiral Noble leaving his shattered body on the rocky Coastline the Victorious Warriors returned to V to collect their pay the threat of a Dreadnaught extinguished I say this is an admission of failure because part one came out less than a year ago and yet the Assumption being made is that nobody can be trusted to remember even the most essential details of its story aha says you but maybe this is intended to Future proof the movie maybe it's done in case people come to this movie many years after the fact and they need a reminder to which I'd point out that Empire Strikes Back didn't feel need to bother recapping much at all of A New Hope because A New Hope was as brilliant and iconic as Rebel Moon wishes it was so yes it is an admission of failure the funny thing is though that in reminding the audience what happened in part one minus all the dull pointless and stupid stuff obviously Anthony robkins is summary actually makes it sound like an intriguing film so he should probably be sued for false advertising I mean hell imagine hearing this thinking oh I've not seen part one I might go and check that out and then watching the thing we just witnessed but while it's reminding the audience what happened in part one part two has ironically forgotten what happened in part one for instance we finished up in part one with pey Nati doing his Cosmic Skype call with belisarius then waking up in his pod of jizz screaming yet here when we rejoin the Benny jeser knockoffs and this new non- entity Commander Casas we are told and I quote he had no brain function for quite a while this can only be true in The Meta sense that Rebel Moon part one was brain dead for pretty well its entire runtime but it cannot be true in the particular sense because the whole point of wiring him up in this goo pod was that his brain could commune with belisarius and since he woke up screaming I think we can safely say he was more alive at the end of part one than he is now at the beginning of part two which is not generally how time works time breaks in other ways too since though we've just been told by the Benny jeser knockoff that y nii had no brain function for a while the implication being that they've been trying to heal him for some time the narrative is shortly to pick up on Farm Simulator having not skipped so much as a beat since the end of part one that movie ended with them riding their space horses toward the village and we join them again here riding their space horses towards the village meaning more time seems to have passed on Space Battleship yam than has passed in farm simulator but that's a tiny tiny little grain-sized quibble next to most of the flaws in this movie just you wait so yeah I'm only really mentioning it here because um I can't even be bothered to come up with a reason Benny jesser knov says they don't know the extent of the damage inflicted on [ __ ] Nai and they won't know until they bring him out of his Cocoon of dried Seaman forgetting that he came out of his Cocoon of dried Seaman at the end of part one and was very much alive in fact not only is he undamaged when he emerges from his jiz cocoon he's actually improved gone to the weirdo that the hentai monster sucked on in part one for instance and the teeth that cor knocked out of his mouth have all regrown oh and he's also been given super strength but it never really comes up again in the movie and it'll only come up again in this video when I point out that it really should have come up again in the movie but didn't for some reason Zach has decided to pose pey Nazi in the style of Christ on the cross because this is just the kind of [ __ ] Zach dozle right accidentally creates Nazi Jesus cuz he thinks it looks cool oh my goodness the symbolism [ __ ] knows what it means though they scrape the dried J off [ __ ] Nati's face and they are relieved to discover that he's breathing on his own which is the sort of thing you think you might want to check before now cassus then fills him in on the events since his not death and in doing so breaks yet more of the setup from part one you'll recall that at that time Zach was very keen to establish a clean reset in order that he not have to remember what crap he'd committed to in his first movie and so he had some [ __ ] one of one of them I can't remember which explain that the motherworld Empire is really a bunch of cowards that runs away whenever it loses named characters in a battle this was obviously dumb since it basically means this Empire is a logical impossibility all you have to do is knock out one man in the entire fleet warps away through its vagina portals and leaves you alone but it turns out that that is not what they do after all even though we were explicitly told that that is exactly what they do as cassus explains that Space Battleship yam has just been holding in orbit waiting to see whether [ __ ] Nazi would come out of his coma even though he already did that in part one this wouldn't be a problem if our heroes back at farm simulator believed and acted as if the mother world would be back for vengeance ASAP but that is not how they believe or act they believe and act as though the mother world has indeed run away and so they aren't going to have to fight which is very very dumb the astonishingly simple fix to all this is just to drop that [ __ ] line from the end of part one one and have our heroes act as if the clock is still ticking beginning part two in a state of heightened tension the mother world is easily startled but they'll soon be back and in greater numbers you know that sort of thing but since that would constitute feeling something and rebel moon appears designed to make us lose Consciousness no we just get random contradictory [ __ ] like this [ __ ] Nazi tells casassus that Kora the scar Giver is on Farm Simulator scar Giver is a much more important name in this movie than it was in part one one hence the movie being called the scar Giver or maybe because the movie is called the scar Giver that name only occurs twice in the entirety of the part one script and both of those mentions it in the third act because again the movie inexplicably forgot to mention how massively important cor is to the mother World until it had discount solo reveal an identity that should have been widely known to everyone before he got around to it belisarius has apparently not told anybody else aboard Space Battleship yamama about Kora the scar Giver since when [ __ ] Nai says she's on Farm Simulator Casas hasn't got a clue who he's referring to and this is also quite dumb since we just got done being told that they have no idea whether piki Nati is even alive and sentient anymore if hypothetically he was dead or he came out with severe brain damage both of which are presented as likely possibilities then belisarius would have lost Kora already given he couldn't be bothered to circulate his a to anybody else in his Fleet orders demanding the capture of and I cannot stress this enough even though the film kind of forgot about it the most Wanted fugitive in the Galaxy [ __ ] Nai orders Casas to set course for farm simulator and here already the movie is pretty much irretrievably broken you see we're about to discover that Space Battleship yamer has been keeping in contact with space twink Alpha on Farm Simulator this entire time this is actually something established in the novel ization from part one but again Zach ditched everything in that novel that might have made his movies make sense so this is the first we hear about it space twink Alpha has been filing false reports in order to keep the mother World ignorant of the fact that the evil africanas are all dead but space twink Alpha is on Farm Simulator and casassus now knows that the number one fugitive in the galaxy is also on Farm Simulator and he still believes he has a Garrison on Farm Simulator meaning he should now be telling space twink Alpha to put Commander rapist on the line so he can order him to capture Kora no and in fact this should have happened after belisarius had relayed the information to him however long ago it was but he didn't do that for unaccountable reasons but then if he were to do that they'd learned space twink Alpha is lying to them before the movie is ready for them to learn that meaning that space twink Alpha would have alerted Kora that the mother world is coming for her before the movie is ready for her to learn that so nobody takes this very obvious course of action in order that the rest of the broken movie can flop pathetically around on the screen like it deserves to live the really maddening thing about this is that you've instantly and obviously got the premise for a much better movie here if you actually let the characters do what they are supposed to do on the Assumption they're not completely [ __ ] of course Kora and Co return to farm simulator fearing that the mother world will strike back somewhere somehow but maybe arguing amongst themselves whether this really puts them in danger after all they think [ __ ] Nazi is dead and he's the only one who knew Kora was with the rebels so maybe farm simulator will escape the wrath of the mother world after all they've got no reason to link her to their world so yeah maybe things will be all right so could say for example generic man or his name is gona now I think gona so could say gona who maybe wants to settle down quietly with Kora and just ride the war out but continuing this hypothetically not [ __ ] movie when [ __ ] Nazi wakes up and tells Casas about Kora and farm simulator Casas could radio space twink Alpha space twink Alpha could then tell Kora that py Nati is still alive and he is after her and that he knows that she is here this would set up a pivotal character and thematic conflict generic M no [ __ ] Goa keep having to say it's so generic I forget his name Guna Goa and the villagers want her to stay with them because she's one of them she's family and this is her home now but Kora struggles with her attachment to these people in the knowledge that her very presence is putting them all in danger if you absolutely insist on setting the rest of this hypothetical movie on Farm Simulator then they could convince it to stay but this tension should be a fundamental part of her character and decision-making it should probably inform a later attempt to sacrifice herself for her home only then for her home to ride to her rescue again none of this is especially novel or complex as a story type but at least it gives us characters with agency with personal Stakes with Dynamic relationships that influence their decision making at Le at least it gives us an actual feeling reason to Value farm simulator and the people who live here at least it makes Kora a character but no as it is we get [ __ ] all of any of that we just pick up after the title slate with the suicide squad riding into the village old bare not canobi and Hunter man walk out to meet them and given nobody here yet knows what's occurred on edgy bpin you would think the villagers would right now be despondent looking on even in disgusted disbelief we sent you to get an army and you've come back with [ __ ] this but they don't because the village is supposed to represent peace and tranquility and love and niceness and if you miss that that's what it's meant to represent the soundtrack is positively vomitrocious in its attempt to drive the point [Music] [Music] home old Ben not Kenobi and Hunter man tell them they've prepared a feast in their honor meaning I have again to point out that for a village that likes to moan they on the brink of starvation they sure do put on a lot of Feasts also [ __ ] knows how they prepared it in the time it took the suicide squad to ride in must be damn quick Cooks Rosie spots them coming and goes to tell space twink Alpha that these Six Samurai of The Suicide Squad have indeed arrived and he quite rightly points out that it doesn't matter how strong they are then since six people is still only six people against an entire Empire not just a pretty face this space twink Alpha gay this is the moment we first learn that he's been communicating with Casas on Space Battleship yam at no point during any of these communications does Casas ever find it odd that the rest of the squad seems to have disappeared cassus calls this kid who is defected at this point to help the village uh and then he says all right is everything going smoothly uh Aris is like yeah and yeah we'll be there in 5 days why did why did he tell him this I don't know I don't know how how they managed to keep this a secret this whole time because random he's just a private he was the lowest ranking soldier in this team it's worse than you think because the first thought is like man it'd be really awkward if Cass is like hey can I talk to Bob I haven't seen Bob for a while can you put him on the phone it's wor he's already he's already there he does do what you just said fry but he doesn't that until Noble is like yeah you should probably find out like what's going on there and he's like I haven't seen the sergeant or whatever his name is um and yeah so he evidently didn't have the idea to do that it's worse than that he was told in the first scene of the film by Noble that cor was on velt he know like unless he believes that Noble is lying or mistaken why the [ __ ] would he call and give them information about when they're going to get there when at this point he already knows the Most Wanted fugitive in the galaxy is there that is true I missed that that's insane uh play the EAP clip kazas demands that space twink Alpha ensures the Harvest is ready for their arrival in 5 days time which um well no it wasn't it 10 weeks in part one pretty sure that movie didn't take nine weeks to occur and mind have [ __ ] felt like it but it didn't mind you I mean who really knows but that movie established that a 10 we Harvest was already pushing it especially since they'd only just started planting the seeds at the beginning of the movie but it's because this movie wants to do that generic movie thing where someone says how long do you need and is told we'll need 10 weeks and replies You've Got 5 days got to pull this sorry just very quickly how long is it going to take to have this baby n months you have n days that's [ __ ] this isn't how things work God damn it things take time grain has to grow you can't just tell the grain to hurry up because you need to cram in an action movie Trope Casas doesn't think it worth asking about Kora even though he now knows she's on Farm Simulator because again if he did that as he should then nothing about anything that follows would hold up meanwhile Anthony robkins is watching the sick Samurai of The Suicide Squad enter the village he'll be doing a little bit of this here and there throughout the movie's first Acts if anyone was hoping we might get to spend more time with Anthony robkins get more information about his backstory his current Journey his thoughts his State of Mind his motives nope pretty much n on that front which takes him from a character with potential which is how we left part one to just wasted potential the villagers haven't come to the feast because they're too embarrassed to have to ask for help right and this gives um uh this person they them a chance to be very kind saying the villagers should understand that asking for help is itself an act of Bravery even though it isn't because asking other people to Die to Save Your inevitably doomed and cosmically insignificant farm simulator when you should instead be running away no that's not brave that's just [ __ ] dumb I have no idea who they them is by the way or why they them is in the movie they them were are picked up in part one from edgy besin because they then was is a generic Rebel Alliance soldier who distinguished themelves by pulling a funny face when brother ax died and apparently I guess this is all you need to do to become a character in The Rebel Moon universe so for no very good reason they then is are tagging along as one of the Six Samurai and will be given quite an astonishing number of lines for someone who is really the definition of pointlessness anyway Kora of all people ex motherworld Special Forces Kora person whose entire planet was massacred by the mother World Kora soldier who helped Massacre whole planet Kora person with ample cause to know this isn't true Kora says L doesn't matter anyway we won right won't ever have to fight again we're all peaceful it's all peaceful now yay I'm giving her the city voice because she just has no character that City voice is is so much more character in depth to it than we get from her and then Titus former general of the mother World Titus former Invader of planets Titus former big military Chief who should know better Titus doesn't contradict her on any of this both of these people who should know it isn't true apparently believe truly that killing an imperial Admiral won't lead to any sort of reprisal whatsoever ever again at any point in all of time so they've won it takes space twink Alpha to run in and inform them that Space Battleship yam is in fact headed this way and will arrive in 5 days time to disabuse these absolute [ __ ] brainlets of their utterly absurd belief here again the movie is irrevocably broken in new and interesting ways cor now knows as she always should have known that the mother world is coming back and it's reasonable to assume they are coming back for vengeance she also has good reason to suppose either that they know she's here and after her specifically or that [ __ ] Nazi isn't actually dead and so is after her specifically after all she grew up on mother World ships she was in the highest ranks of the Armed Forces she lived on Space Battleship yam we got all of this in the flashbacks in part one so she should know that it has the gist tank Revival machine thing meaning that she should now in this moment realize the mother world is after her that they are only coming back for her and that she is the one thing putting everyone here in danger she should at least attempt to leave but the movie is about to spend a good long while convincing itself that grain in this universe for this massive Galactic Empire that can fast travel between planets through giant vagina portals no grain is just as important as spice milange is in Dune so not only does Kora not make this very obvious realization the movie tricks itself into thinking that the Harvest is the really important thing here and tricks the mother world into thinking that the thing it really needs is the grain at least as much as Kora even though absolutely none of it is true and the movie will realize that none of that is true before the end but only after wasting a lot of our time with Peak redundancy it's against protocol to come with our an admiral to command the ship right that is true but death is not always deterrent enough for the designs of the mother World there must be more in need of this graining that we could have known no no you [ __ ] morons no how is this actually aign in your movie Zach cor's question clearly implies the obvious answer no the grain isn't [ __ ] important Titus my man you're supposed to be a general how can you be this stupid oh it's probably worth recapitulating the mother world came here in part one asking for grain because they were planning a long and exhaustive search of the outer reaches of the Galaxy looking for the Rebel Alliance they are no longer planning this and you know they are no longer planning this and you know all the things you need to know to draw them much likely a conclusion godamn it which is that they are hunting for you specifically there's a [ __ ] bouquet of evidence to tell you all of this I I really do think it's just that Zach has backed himself not so much into a corner here as off a cliff narratively speaking because the premise is obviously unwinable the mother World wants Kora it knows where Kora is and where she is is so clearly overmatched tiny defenseless farm simulator versus spaceship with orbital nukes and whatever else all of which combines to make for a very short movie mother World arrives gets Kora and or nukes the site from orbit it being the only way to be sure the end and the only way Zach could think of to give the villagers a Fighting Chance while also patting the runtime with as much slow motion harvesting as possible is if he has everyone temporarily tricked themselves into thinking that grain is the most important thing in the Galaxy at least until the 90ish minute Mark when they're allowed to wake up from their stuper and forget the grain again there have been many quick and easy fixes to a lot of the problems I've mentioned so far across parts one and two but I really don't think there is a fix for this one certainly not a quick or an easy fix you'd basically have to rewrite most of both movies the suicide squad has no leverage here so Zach just has to invent a temporary one that they logically don't actually have and then surrender to logic again after the fact but too late to save his movie it's just broken it's as if the rebels had stayed on Yavin after blowing up the Death Star and George Lucas had decided for 75% of Empire Strikes Back That the Imperials couldn't just wipe them out from orbit because I don't know they really [ __ ] love Tor TS or something only then for them to realize that they don't really [ __ ] love torns after all and bomb the place for moreit anyway no there's a reason Vader has to use Hannah layer as bait to draw Luke elsewhere to capture him the rebels sensibly ran away otherwise they would all have died before the second movie even began oh it's honestly tempting just to stop the review right now because from this point there is no logically coherent way for the movie to progress it has to be wrong in pretty much every conceivable Dimension uh but since a lot of those dimensions are really quite funny I guess we'd better carry on having decided for no [ __ ] reason that the mother world is breaking protocol and coming all the way back here just to get its hands on the precursor to bread because nowhere else in your whole empire can you possibly find the precursor to bread Titus Rouses these poor doomed Farmers with a speed in which he doubles down on the profound [ __ ] of the setup we need every man and woman who's able the grain is our most powerful weapon no no it isn't you clown the grain is not important it's not going to save you uh but hey at least you've already had more lines than you got in the entirety of part one I hope you got paid more for this Titus I was going to say that that's a theme of cross part too we get a little bit more from the rest of the suicide squad which is almost a logical necessity since getting anything from them constitutes more than we got in part one but even then it's only just about true and is mostly notable for the frankly horrific way Zach tries to retrofit them with character Titus absolutely gets many many more lines and the basics of the most basic sort of Arc being tasked with leading the defense of the village he gets a couple of rousing speeches and he also stops drinking and um that's that's kind of it for him DD is his journey that's the whole of it the acolyte gets similarly scanted but I suppose present development you'll recall that her shtick from part one is that she lost her children and so at some point between the films this Village Farm Simulator has spawned some children in order that she can fight for them and redeem herself it's not at all subtle this child just pops up when the script needs him so she can look at him so Snider fans can say oh my God it's so deep look how he's paying off her backstory and so the general audience can say um yeah so what you just spawn children so you can pay off her one dimension that's [ __ ] boring still it's more development than pretty much anybody else gets so I suppose it's worthy of Praise at least by comparison they're coming they're coming how long does it take to bring in your crop half a cycle around Mara no it must be done in 3 days time look they said the thing they said the thing I guess if you just tell Farmers they need to have their Harvest done in 3 days it makes grain grow faster look at that I'm farming I'm doing it we've no idea how long half a cycle is by the way it would probably depend a on how big the main planet is and then on how fast the orbit is and how quickly it's spinning and whether it's elliptical or perfectly circular if it's a really really tiny planet then of course a Cycle's not going to be very long at all is it maybe a cycle is only six days look at this baby would you even know that wasn't Earth yes because there's no Africa white people problems Morty let's go down and check her out Oh I thought it was further away I uh I guess this one's a little small it's probably for the best that we don't get any Clarity on this though because Clarity would only make the premise seem more ridiculous but still pretty sure it's not how harvests work you can't just tell things to grow faster that night Kora and Guna have one of those conversations where they just turn some sub text into text because the target audience for these movies is um it's probably Barts isn't it I mean I'm pretty sure the SNY cut campaign established that Guna tells Kora that he loves her so they [ __ ] truly a romance for the ages Cas a blanker eat your heart out part one establishes that cor isn't particularly swayed by either Guna or hunterman because she can't fall in love because her generic boyfriend died in a flashback at no point throughout that movie did they have anything even vaguely resembling a romantic conversation because all their conversations were launch pads for flashbacks then discount solo who never has a single conversation with goona in that movie and only one meaningful conversation with Kora tells Guna that he knows that he loves Kora and apparently Zach considers this good enough as far as relationships are concerned so yeah now gona loves Kora and Kora loves him back even though one of the few things we actually know about her is that she doesn't do the whole love thing mercifully we skip the scene where they actually [ __ ] meaning we'll have to wait for the rated EXT ended cut to discover which of them has a bigger penis but the fact these two are talking invokes one of the few consistent mechanics in these movies that's right it's time for another flashback and my goodness this is this is this is a good one strap yourselves in Kora murders children no no word of a lie our protagonist is a child murderer now yay the setting for this flashback narrated this passionately by Kora like she really is just reading straight from the script for the first time is a new dreadn class warship the last one planned for construction because the king who told us in the previous movie that he had no compassion left but heho at least his daughter seems nice has decided that he does have some compassion in him after all so he's decided to pull back from the whole world pillaging mass destruction era of Empire princess Issa isn't much older in this flashback than she was in the flashback from part one so this dramatic shift in the king's character and also in the character of the Empire and also in Imperial POC generally has come about quite suddenly we will just park the fact that Anthony robkins believed that the princess was the sole reserve of compassion and love and decency in the Empire and never once thought to mention that the king had second thoughts about it but again why why bother why bother remembering this [ __ ] Zach doesn't the king his wife and the little princess are up here to celebrate the ship's completion apparently in a bit to frame The Narrative Kora takes care to remind us that she was a loyal daughter to belisarius she could neither betray him nor defy him this is the s of loyalty you earn when you murder someone's entire family and Massacre their entire planet do you want a loyal child or a partner well forget speed dating forget courtship forget apps forget buying them flowers and all that boring nonsense that's a brand new dating strategy fresh on the market just find the one you want and murder their parents in front of them that will earn their loyalty that is how it works anyway this means that when bis arus orders Kora to kill the little princess because he doesn't want want her to destroy the military industrial complex that they've all sacrificed so much for so long to build cor has to do it because she's just so damn loyal and no this is not me reducing the premise to absurdity this really is the motivation as she puts it make not mistake I was the loyal daughter of my adopted father I could not betray him or defy him he had told me the princess Must Die die and die she would what follows is oh my goodness it's it's a very embarrassing Amad Dramatics rendition of Julius Caesar in that Zach is basically just doing Julius Caesar maybe with a touch of the Roman of aesthetic but no otherwise it's just Julius Caesar though we are nominally in the hold of a Starship We are really in the Roman senate now the there are people wearing [ __ ] togers and everything oh there's also a wedding band and this is just so absurd it's funny uh top tip if you're about to assassinate an emperor you really don't want many witnesses you absolutely don't want to be hiring a [ __ ] wedding band for the occasion and to make it all so much better the wedding band makes the soundtrack diagetic meaning the music you hear when the assassination plays out is the music they hear when the assassination plays out and as I think it was bagf face said when we broke this movie down on the best show in the universe probably the podcast I run on Mondays with the movie cynic it's very very nice of the royal family to die in perfect 44 time the king detects that something is a Miss because there's no Cali here and the furnaces aren't lit what's a Cali you might be wondering and why would there be furnaces on a Starship oh [ __ ] yeah we'll get there we'll get there it's honestly one of the most bizarre things I've ever seen in this II film but we'll get there in due course no spoilers just now belisarius and the Senators pull knives the king says at two brute and gets himself stabbed the wedding band obligingly UPS the tempo for this scene because it's just a [ __ ] joke movie kaora then pulls a gun on little Issa and she hesitates but Bellis Arius demands that she goes through with it the musicians somehow in the moment register kora's angst and indecision and perfectly onbeat hit the dramatic de minuendo in time for the princess to say I forgive you Kora shoots her and she explodes s into magic yes this is just a thing she does nobody else reacts to the magic I guess this is just a common occurrence people just Sparkle when they die in this universe nobody thinks it's at all odd even though part one has Kora tell us that the princess's magic really is quite odd but never mind the King dies and Bellis Arius comically does diagetic amate Dramatics blaming Kora for the assassination of the royal family what have you done what have you done she [Music] her there she is gentlemen the Assassin of the royal family and offer and cancer of ethnic impurities murderer murder Mur murderer murderer oh snake dude all these people are in on it who are you acting for despite the entire plan now hinging on kora's capture or [ __ ] it why not just kill her and blame her nobody thinks it might be worth shooting her or stopping her or indeed fighting back as she grabs a gun and blasts her way out of the room and she doesn't think it might be worth shooting anybody important on her way out because if either of those things had happened the film wouldn't um well well it doesn't work anyway really does it but the film wouldn't be broken in the precise way Snider wants to break it and that would have been bad probably I guess I don't know now I have a few problems with this scene besides the [ __ ] comical wedding band obviously there is a timeline problem and there is a setup problem the timeline problem first the timeline problem is that the princess is not much more than a few months older than she was during the flashbacks in part one back when the King was still a happy genocidal Emperor with no doubts about the morality of pillaging Planets For Fun Part One also established that his was a bloodline that had ruled uninterrupted for a thousand Generations which as I said way back when reviewing part one is pretty well impossible to believe if you also have men of the character and caliber of belisarius we now know thanks to this scene that it's not just belisarius but a whole big bunch of senators as well who are by inclination Cutthroat and traitorous and selfish this means that in the space of a few months maybe a couple of years if you're being unduly charitable to the movie The King has rediscovered charity and kindness decided whether and how to change the moral character of his entire Intergalactic Empire implemented that plan in a way that threatens the military industrial complex and left enough time for a pro militarist faction to form amongst the Senators which has enough time to decide on a leader enough time to discuss and debate and now finally to action a plan of assassination and to have gained Mastery over the leaders of succession in order to install belisarius as Regent without a Civil War and my response to all of that is no this is not the sort of thing you can cram into a period of a few months unless you spent absolutely no time at all on your world building and you assume that none of your characters have either there was no need to cram it all into a period of months either when you could quite easily have portrayed the king himself as being a new kind of Royal from the word go someone increasingly dissatisfied with the status quo someone who has moved gradually over the course of his lifetime toward peace giving enough time for his rival faction to First emerge and then to CES in the person of belisarius the problem here is that Zach has tried to imbue the very young princess specifically with all the moral soul of his Universe making her the instigator of events of the king's change of heart and so confining his entire historical narrative into her far too short lifespan by all means maintain her as this be I ific Angelic creature but have her be the inheritor of something of a tradition an ethos from her father and yeah I guess a [ __ ] magic as well if you do that though then you've gone some way towards solving this problem all of this takes time to uniquely and quickly imply that a lot more time has elapsed but again all of that requires thought and evid and work to pull off and we can't be having that the second problem the problem of setup is that the way this assassination has been pulled off is solely for dramatic effects hell I mean they hired a [ __ ] wedding band for God's sake but if your plan is actually to assassinate the royal family and then pin the blame on somebody else you don't actually need that somebody else to take part in the plan do you all you need is for people to believe that they Cor in this case are responsible inviting the king up to your sinisterly gathered meeting of senators for a ceremonial assassination is just theatricality and yeah yeah this is a movie theat theatricality is fine on principle the problem is that it's dumb theatricality that defends against sense reason and believability there are safer serer cheaper and altogether more foolproof ways to carry out assassinations of this sort ones that don't allow your scapegoat to turn into an escape goat I'm sorry the two problems actually combine then to make a third which is that the nature of the setup cannot actually occur within this time frame the plan cannot always have been to pin the blame on Kora because Kora is an outworlder which is the narrative they tried to spin in this part of the movie because belisarius took her as his foster child long before the king had any inclination toward pacifism before the king had even had the daughter who instigates that change in him I think the film wants to imply that Kora was manipulated through the ranks and then assigned to the Royal Guard in order that belisarius can use her in this way but again that means the plans for the assassination were laid before the cause for the assassination was present the other way to read it is that kora's Ascent through the ranks was natural and incidental and her placement in the Royal Guard was likewise earned on Merit the plotters are just acting based on convenience but that acts against the Evil Genius I think Zach wants to imbue bellarius with injects a whole massive chunk of luck into the plan after all what if cor had been appointed elsewhere and then undercuts that sense of betrayal he wants us to feel on kora's part that she was bisar as's loyal daughter for no [ __ ] reason but whatever so loyal that she would go along with this plan to assassinate an innocent child but that she was being used by belisarius all along so no in short this scene is broken in pretty much every way compounded by the fact that it looks ridiculous it has some truly abysmal beards some pretty Naf costumes some comical overacting and a [ __ ] wedding band playing in time with events Zach Zach my god oh man what what are you what are you doing Zach that brings us to the end of the flashback Guna now realizes that he just slept with a child killer oh God I knew it I knew it I knew there was something worse not only she a [ __ ] not only she Huff the dirt she's also a child killer I'm in bed with a dirt huffing child killing space Nazi oh though I mean she does have a really nice peanut by the way this is another problem with cor's lack of character we know she ran away because bellisari has convinced her to murder a child and then dobbed her in for it but we don't actually know that she knows that anything she did before then or even that event itself was particularly wrong she ran away because she was betrayed and otherwise she would have been killed but we have to assume that this betrayal completely deprogrammed her of the brainwashing that saw her go in for the child killing plan to begin with because the movie doesn't show us any of her wider or deeper thoughts remember this is a loyal soldier of the mother world who helped it brutally contact many other worlds and who was so boted with the ideology that she would willingly murder a small child to further the mother world's Ambitions the only reason this isn't a massive problem for her and for the movie as a whole is that we've established quite well at this point that none of Snider's characters actually have internal lives thoughts or feelings about anything they're not looking at at the time so we can assume she's no longer a red-blooded genocider in spirits but only because we know she doesn't have a spirit to speak of now then I'm sure you'll all agree that this is all been tedious dull pointless Meandering nonsense thus far the only thing that could make it not tedious dull pointless Meandering nonsense is if we get some sweet payoffs pretty damn soon right patented 300 ER Zach Snider action scenes maybe lots of slow motion Gore intense choreography that zany comic book come to life magic that everybody used to love that'll make it all worth it right well [ __ ] you [ __ ] you audience we're not getting any of that but if for some reason you are in tely interested in farming I have absolutely no clue and you think that harvesting grain is a criminally overlooked art form that's really worthy of some mainstream cinematic attention as you keep a certain place and not too fast I can do the loading all right well then I hope you've got a lot of lube because it's time for the Harvest so much Harvest so much so much slow motion Harvest slow slow Harvest more Harvest more slow slow motion grain slow motion Titus filling his flask with water which you're supposed to notice because it's a really important character to be honest guys more Harvest more grain you realize it's going to take you more than 3 days to gather this Harvest if you're doing it all in slow motion right oh thank good is we back on Space Battleship yam heik Nati has woken up and he's in a bad mood and when the Benny jesser knockoffs insist they need to run tests on him to see if his recent death has left any ill effects he gets very angry and he kills one of them this is where we see he now has super strength as he lifts a priest up by the neck onehanded this is also the last time we see he has super strength since it's not relevant again at any point in the movie going forward and he doesn't use it even in situations where it would have been immensely useful to use it he doesn't even use it here to kill the Benny jerit knockoff he borrow someone's gun to do that which does sort of leave you wondering just what the place of the priesthood is in the mother world and whether murdering them like this might get you in some sort of trouble after all they're important enough to be sent aboard seemingly every mother World Mission they're in charge of reanimating people in part one they arranged the Mind meld with belisarius which might leave you with the impression that they're quite important indeed but the film never asks this question never mind answers it so there's no point us wasting time on such a trivial detail here the scene is also the bed where Belarus reminds us that the movie is called the scar Giver Admiral my apologies for the scar that was left by this incompetent medical team I'm sure it can be removed no leave it she gave it to me when I deliver her to belisarius and her body is displayed in the rotanda of the Senate I shall bear my chest and it will stand as a symbol that it is I who to Justice the scar Giver oh God you're so [ __ ] cool pey Nazi you're so cool and edgy I know that the jiz cakon healed all your other holes and scars I guess those just weren't narratively important holes and scars meanwhile on Farm Simulator it's still [ __ ] farm simulator obviously so more Harvest more grain more slow motion and I am baby wants to know why did Rebel Moon's action sequence have so much slow motion the obvious answer is slow motion is awesome these movies are physical there's a physicality to what our heroes go through the use of slow motion to me is a way of just embellishing heroic moments that our heroes go through because I think I'm a fan of beautiful classic artwork or paintings I like to kind of make the moments into those iconographic frames that you can hang on and see otherwise you just go right by and you'd never have a chance to appreciate the like composition the sort of tension that's created by the characters and how they're pushing the frame in all the different directions slow motion Tableau where you're moving with a character I'm not a fan of like action that is hidden by the camera the camera becomes a third character in the fight when it's like looking for the action in the end even in a sequence with a lot of editing I tend to like to see the action um unfold uh-huh yeah okay Zach so why this also also why this um and while we're at it why this and also maybe also why this at this juncture I have to point out that we are about quarter of a way into the movie and so far a bad person has woken up and the good people have harvested grain we do at least get a tiny tiny tiny tiny little bit of character work amid all the grain as the acolyte shks off and gets teased by a child who just conveniently spawns into her scenes in this movie so the critics can say hey we do at least get a tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny little bit of character work amid all the grain oh my goodness is she actually going to speak is this core character going to get a to speak oh never mind now I wouldn't necessarily mind this Zach is attempting to show rather than tell which is an inversion of his preferred approach which sees characters turn subtext into text and deliver it with all the feeling and Charisma of those bags of soggy depressing salad you get from cheap Indian takeaways the problem is that it barely counts as a journey for the acolyte what the film seemingly wants to convey is that she lost her children and so she lost her hope and her will to fight question mark But now this conveniently spawned picture perfect aryion boy is Reawakening that Spirit within her unfortunately though that's not actually the acolytes story is it yes she did lose her children she told us this in part one and she will tell us this again a little bit later in a worse way but we were introduced to her in part one fighting to defend children meaning that her choosing to fight to defend children in this movie isn't character progression it's just repetition the movie attempts to show and almost succeeds in showing the ACO being bought out of her Sullen miserable Shell by this small boy but because it really has nothing besides this vaguest of vague ideas for what to do with her character it doesn't really go anywhere person introduced fighting to protect children in part one realizes in part two that she can fight to protect children which is the kind of Arc you could draw with a ruler I mean in isolation the scene is nice enough even if you do have to very deliberately forget that this child didn't exist in part one and is only been created here to satisfy the most immediate of needs hell would it have been too much to ask that the film portray him as the son of modok from part one kid who's lost his father meets woman who's lost her kids and they form a bond that sort of thing yeah apparently even that is too much work we then take a quick break from Rebel Moon a farm Wars story a space twink Alpha goes to file another Report with the bads Commander casus finally thinks it's just a little bit OD that all of the senior officers on Farm Simulator seem to have disappeared but space t Alpa says n it's cool they've just been getting the Harvest ready the work has continued Around the Clock we should have all the grain M into flow just in time for your arrival wait you're you're Milling it as well how you don't have any [ __ ] Mills you can't possibly do a whole Harvest and Mill it in 3 days you're just making this even harder to believe and if you're turning it into flower then why are we going to spend the rest of the movie talking about how important grain is Casia suggests that maybe just maybe the villagers could be rewarded with leniency for getting the Harvest ready so quickly but space twink Alpha plays his part and says nah we're the motherworld we're a bunch of it's literally the only thing we have why is your screen saer an Illuminati triangle now I think I I don't know because it's so very incompetent but I think the film wants this to be a tense scene where we know but space twink Alpha doesn't that cassus and Co already know that they have been betrayed but it simply doesn't work because they should already have known they had been betrayed when they immediately radioed in asking him to capture Gora for them which they didn't do for reasons it also doesn't work because though pretty space twink Alpha is not a very good actor so it would be screamingly obvious he was lying even if they didn't already know he was lying and they do already know he was lying which they should have confirmed earlier anyway so really you just left wondering what the point of the scene is it's clear that Fus and Marcus and rest of their men are dead the scar givers among them and it seems our young private has chosen a side yes like I said obviously why are you wasting my time film we get even more [ __ ] harvesting but hey at least there's even more sweaty ABS what's that do you have an erection here have a gay clown creature that'll fix it and then they finish finally and in case you wondered what the theme of all of this is being the very rings of power esque soundtrack hopefully tells us it's all all about home that night they have another feast and Rosie gives the Six Samurai of The Suicide Squad Gifts of knitwear this is where we get to remind ourselves what the rest of Suicide Squad is called which is helpful because I've already forgotten again so my abiding question from all of this is wait these guys rocked up your village a couple of days back we the audience have spent more time with them than you guys have and we know [ __ ] all about them because Zach forgot to write their characters so how have you come upon all these deeply personal Revelations Rosie where are you pulling all this information from you've not had time to talk to them you've all been too busy harvesting From Dawn till Dusk or in your case knitting like a good woman are you just maybe making all this [ __ ] up I also like that in part one Zach got as far as giving space horses a slightly alien name and then stealing hippogriff straight from Harry Potter but that's as far as his imagination took him when it comes to populating his sci-fi world with alien animals so we've got space horses and we've got hippogryphs but otherwise farm simulator just runs with Earth forer elk wolves they them gets given a what's that a crow of some sort I guess and gives a really awkward thank you almost as if they them thought things that this is just an awful load of vagina bollocks oh it's the acolytes turn she gets given a storm because these villagers whose entire lives depend on reliable weather patterns believe for this scene and this scene only that storms are the mother of us all which means [ __ ] all but it's her thing we've got to get her thing in there somewhere right will she speak though is she going to speak we're still here look we're ping in on her I think I think she might oh my [ __ ] God she talks as with everything else I've got no idea how they got this information about her personality given that she doesn't have one of those but never mind young Rosie then turns to Kora and says you stand between us and Annihilation and again I'm bound to point out that this is the precise opposite of the truth since cor is the one bringing the Annihilation to them and in a competent movie she'd have twigged this by now allowing for some actual character Conflict for instance she could hear this from Rosie and become very sad because she knows that she cannot stay that night she could steal away and a bid to distract the mother world or because she can't watch another home inevitably crumble around her perhaps then she could be forced back later when the Space Nazis arrive and hold the village Hostage to draw her out but since that might actually be interesting not to mention competent and rely on the characters actually doing things that make sense it is not what we get a little party follows in part one Zach had forgotten to include any children in the village so that party was all about [ __ ] the [ __ ] it becoming in part one but there are children in this movie so nobody talks about [ __ ] Boo or maybe they think the foreigners would be weirded out by it or maybe it was modok's peculiar Obsession and they're all quite glad the Randy [ __ ] is dead so they can have normal parties for a change or maybe they all [ __ ] after the the party in part one and all the women got pregnant and they said they'd give birth in 9 months but someone said you've got 6 days and so they all pop these children out in time for part [Music] two wait what oh [ __ ] what are we doing now is there an Africa in space we're more than half an hour into your less than 2hour movie movie like this isn't a good use of our time why is he singing outside Anthony robkins lies down and has a listen he hasn't intervened to help at all in any of the proceeding even though part one established that Rosie reminds him of the princess he has sworn to serve probably because she is the princess that's probably going to be what happens isn't it by some contrivance of magically the princess has reinstantiate herself in the body of a farm wench and though you could come up with reasons for his reticence you would have to actually you know come up with reasons for his reticence and this movie doesn't Anthony robkins is really just loitering around ready for the coolest moment to reenter the script part one's novelization actually spends a bit more time following him on his journey of self-discovery his realization that he sits somewhere between maybe even above robot and human culminating in the implied Revelation that he has an independent soul and it achieves all of this in a few very short scenes thus proving that Zach has absolutely no excuse for including none of it in his [ __ ] movies next morning Titus wakes every every body up Zach continues the habit of not doing his job properly by making it painfully obvious when the extras are being given their Quee to walk in on mass titus's plan is still to treat the grain like it's the spice milange they have somehow reasoned that if they move it all inside their buildings it will act as a kind of plot armor and prevent the mother World from nuking them from orbit oh for [ __ ] remember that both Kora and Titus are experienced motherworld commanders neither of them has any business being this night recall too that space twink Alpha has been in frequent communication with the mother world so if they' wanted to make absolutely sure why Space Battleship yato was returning ahead of schedule they could have just had him ask why the planet changed once again the only reason none of this occurs is that the movie needs everybody to be intellectually constipated in order for it to proceed which means of course that to the unconstipated audience absolutely none of it works it is really quite foundationally [ __ ] but we've come this far so we might as well stick with it the villagers have the weapons left behind by the dead africanas they also have knives and axes and hoes and farming implements and such which you'd think would be entirely useless against a battle hardened mother World Army that has spaceships and laser guns and tanks and who knows what else again Zach this is a Sci-Fi world you're building here you've done nothing to establish why melee weapons would have any tangible use you've not got Shields as the Dune excuse for these backward ass tactics H versus battleship doesn't well no it does doesn't it it does they took out a whole Battleship with a spear in part one oh [ __ ] never mind it's all bed so they train the villagers to shoot and they train them in the basics of Sword Play and an obvious ripoff of about 50,000 different movies where this sort of sequence occurs it's not just the African's motherworld weapons they are gathering by the way the movie has also decided that the villagers have some antique weapons of their own [ __ ] flint lock laser rifles here we [ __ ] go mean that I'm now going to have to go back and play that clip from part one where I'm pretty sure it's established that the villagers don't have weapons you may need this thought he was lost our culture is not for such weapons somehow not only have they had time to complete a full Harvest and Mill it all into flour in 3 days though Titus is back to talking about the grain again so I guess I don't know maybe they just kind of forgot but they've also got enough time left over to complete basic training and then then to build networks of trenches and underground tunnels so the villagers can go all via Kong on the mother World needless to say this only works if you assume the mother world will land all its forces outside the village and have them approach from distance which you think they wouldn't do given they have complete air superiority they can drop soldiers directly into the village onto rooftops and such they can surround the village they can place artillery in the Hills they can place snipers around it they can do anything you can possibly imagine a modernday army doing never mind a few futuristic science fiction Army again the village is indefensible except by using a massive overpowered intelligence reducing debuff on the bad guys it is equivalently needless to say that this is exactly what they are going to do and then the film commits another Act of completely foundational destruction this time though the victim is not this movie oh no it's the previous one that's right not content with having broken part two Zach has decided to go back and do even more damage to the wreck of part one because it's at this point in proceedings that old Ben not canobi remembers that Kora crashed a ship here however many cycles ago and as luck would have it it still [ __ ] works oh for [ __ ] sake Zach really Zach what are you what are you doing Zach really Zach leaving aside that the premise was that Kora crashed on this planet which sort of entails there should be something wrong with the ship leaving aside that it's just been sat out here in the elements for however long which can't be good for it leaving aside that it's a motherworld ship making it the height of convenience that it has no sort of tracker or iff transponder on it that could now or later alert anyone to its presence leaving all that aside do you remember how the only reason in part one that they went to Moss eely and ended up bumping into discount solo is that they needed a ship remember remember they already knew where the rebels were Titus wasn't hard to find either but they needed a ship that's the only reason they went along with discount solo and so the only reason they met the rest of suicide squads and so the only reason the entire plot of part one happened but now it turns out that they already had a [ __ ] ship and it still works and it got Kora all the way here meaning it's fair to assume it's capable of interstellar travel given the movies never bothered establishing how Interstellar travel Works anyway but if they already had the ship and they knew they already had the ship then why didn't they just take the ship and bypass the entirety of the plot of part one what are you doing Zach why are you doing this to us oh wasn't it broken enough what compelled you to go back and say yeah you know what this needs more [ __ ] mistakes now I'd have to go back and check and I really don't want to do it but but I'm pretty sure the novelization for part one oh [ __ ] it I just went back and checked and I'm right the novelization for part one has the villagers go to strip the ship for parts after cor leaves believing that they will need its guns for their defense space twink Alpha has the idea of fixing it because it's broken so they couldn't use it Zach but he can't it's Anthony robkins who at this point is acting as a kind of Silent overseeing Guardian while discovering his own will and agency who fixes it for them in the dead of night this takes pretty much one scene two at most and they are quite short scenes but I don't imagine it's going to be added into the snut extended version of part one because here we are in part two and it's the first time any of them have paid the ship a visit they just rock up say huh wonder if this still works press a couple of buttons and say hooray it [ __ ] works meaning that yes the entirety of part one the movie is broken while the guy who got paid so much less than Zach to write the novelization alongside the movie managed to get it right I think Netflix might have hired the wrong person that night Rogue Squadron discusses their plans and because we've had no character development at all yet Zach decid he can just break to the most foundational rules of narrative writing and have them read out their back stories in a sequence oh my God it's it's just a script reading you know that thing where all the actors gather together for the first time and read through whatever nonsense the writers have in store for them that's what we're doing we're just doing it fictionally a fictional script reading it's [ __ ] absurd this shouldn't be in anyone's movie this shouldn't be in an amethod dramatic script R I bitched about that line from Kora back in part one justifying her flashback I'm only telling you this so you know who I am and Titus basically does his own version of that here you're all here because I want you to know who the hell you're fighting with you know that Team America Pearl haror song by the lyrics go how does Michael baay get to keep on making movies I guess Pearl Harbor suck just a little bit more than I miss you I think that needs to be updated How does Zack Snider get to keep on making movies I guess Rebel Moon sucked significantly more than I miss you oh well [ __ ] it here we go Titus goes first he was a general leading an army and told to obliterate some Village somewhere at some time for some reason having presumably done this a load of times before this was the time when he said nah you know what not cool with this so he refused and then he surrendered and he tried to trade his life for that of his men but the mother World said nah and made him watch as it orbitally bombarded his men and the village refused to destroy Point why they then let Titus himself bugger off to fight in the Coliseum for several years I do not know but the upshot is that Titus here resolves that he will never surrender again he will fight to the death to protect his home and his home is now farm simulator I suppose this is the extent of the character work in this movie at this point we could just skip the rest of the scene by having everybody else say yeah same really because every one of these stories so closely resembles each other that calling them variations on a theme really overstates the variation part of that sentence but we persist next up is they them I still have no idea who they them is are or by their thema in this movie they them's backstory is that they were are a tribes man woman whose people were enslaved by the mother world and sent to labor camps but then there they were rescued by Brother acts of the Rebel Alliance and the Rebel Alliance became them their new family meaning they them will are would fight to the death for this Village [ __ ] me but then but then there they were are rescued by the but then but then there they were are rescued by Brother ax of the Rebel Alliance and the Rebel Alliance became them their new family meaning they them will are would fight to the death for this here Village because is there our home now this is the extent of the character work in this movie Next Up holy [ __ ] guys it's the accolite she speaks this is my favorite one by some distance she grew up in a peaceful fishing Village because she is Asian and everybody knows Asians love their fishing villages then they got bombed by the mother world for no established reason and she remembered that there was a time long ago when her people were not so peaceful after all so she digs up a box containing two lightsabers and two robotic arms she uses the lightsabers to cut off her own arms and plug in the new robotic ones because they are just plug and play and then they still work which is really [ __ ] lucky and then her ancestors taught her how to fight F through the blood their blood that's still in the arms I think so now she has become Revenge even though in part one she told us Revenge was a bad thing and not to be celebrated incidentally she has to install the robot arms because the film will later decide that these lightsabers get so hot that the hilt burns your flesh which seems like a design flaw to me it does pose the question wait but then how did you cut off the first arm with the lightsaber if you couldn't use the lightsaber without already having a robot but um but you know that's just that's just piddling nitpicky logic reason sequential ordering [ __ ] okay the important thing is that it looks cool and hey at least the rest of it makes sense yeah absolutely peaceful fishing Village has ancient lightsabers and robot arms that just happen to be the same sort of lightsabers used today by the militaristic Home world that's all fine no we absolutely didn't need to spend any time on the death of her family because the death of her children is only the one thing we actually know about her character so no showing that moment and giving it weight would just be completely pointless it's not as important as the robot arms and the lightsabers cuz they look cooler and no we don't really need to know why the mother world would have come all the way out here just to bomb a tiny fishing Village it's just the kind of thing they do they blow everyone up just for fun it's just bad luck that this Village got in the way question mark so they destroyed it probably explains why they're always so hungry for grain they blow up all the AG ultural planets and forget to take any of the food stuffs with them beforehand and no we don't need to delve into the fact that the acolytes ancestors live on inside the robot arms and teach her how to fight through her blood that's just details all right it's trivia is what it is no explanation is needed this is the extent of the character work in this movie Next up it's hunk mowgli's turn yay his father was a king and he went to negotiate with the mother world but then the mother world just killed him and said his body back and said right just for that we're going to come and [ __ ] you up as well reasons hunk mgle wasn't always hunk mgle he did once wear actual clothes his people rode hippogryphs in battle against metal spaceships and needless to say this did not end well his mother the queen refused to run because she had too much honor so instead she yeated herself off a balcony because this is this is honor okay and honk moggle himself ran away in a refugee ship IR ran for Duty's sake for the preservation of a kingdom and a bloodline that no longer exists but no but you you you you're what no you're the you you are the blood what no oh [ __ ] it this doesn't explain how he should have ended up on the random ranches World from part one and it especially doesn't explain how a hpog ended up on the random R's World from part one since you'd think hippogryphs wouldn't be easily smuggled off world as refugees and it would be the a height of convenience for two entities native to one particular destroyed Planet ending up captured by one random Rancher on one random planet with an entire universe of random planets and random ranches to choose from but who gives a [ __ ] this is the extent of the character work in this movie Next up it's chorus turn to yes and which should be unnecessary since we already had all this in flashbacks across both movies she tells them that farm simulator tort her what home and family could really be which is art since I distinctly remember that in part one she didn't feel that at all and was just a coint us or a convenient rape scene away from just abandoning everybody to their face I guess she's had time to reflect since then and Zach just forgot to include those scenes cor does not tell the whole truth though oh no anything else You' like to add no sure how's to Spring Water what for several days now Titus pretends to drink this whole time too by the way she actually thinks that she's fooled these people into uh thinking that that the dreadn and the villain have mistaken her she is not the Most Wanted villain on the planet you are mistaken sir actually and they and she actually thought that when they were like oh okay that that's theit is so they have the team building it's the flashback sequence and they're all talking about their back stories and she gives hers and she doesn't tell him about the thing where she murders the defenseless innocent small child and Titus says huh are you sure there's nothing else you want to tell us and she's like no that's definitely it for me he's like really yep that's I'm done yes yes old stories they're hard to let go of aren't they yes they sure are why have you drinking hey hey everyone Titus isn't an alcoholic anymore he's drinking water get off my [ __ ] back weren't you an alcoholic like go so um just to recap Kora has lied by omission and we know and we know that Titus knows that Kora is lying by a mission and her response is L You're Sober now this is not a distraction H and even though we know and even though we know that Titus knows and even though it'll be explicitly confirmed later that we were right in saying that we know that Titus knows how massively important the missing part of the story is nobody presses her on it because once again the movie is completely broken and so the only way to justify continuing with it is for Zach to have his characters just not say or do what they should very obviously say or do in the moment but we will come on to the specific reasons why this is all completely broken at the end of the movie oh and Goa is just so unspeakably generic he doesn't even get a flashback this tedious nonsense dispensed with I suppose it's time to return to their tediously nonsensical plans to defeat the mother World they have the grain which may or may not be flower at this point and it's serves the same function as the energy shield on hath because this film is they also have a drop ship their plan for the drop ship is um to fly it many many miles away and hide it behind a waterfall just in case this is a confusing plan because it's simultaneously your one Escape vehicle and your one air support unit and here they've just made it as inaccessible to their own side as possible now this will end up being fine of course because in the moment the movie will do that thing where it folds SpaceTime in order to have characters teleport from place to place in far less time than it's supposed to take but if you naively assume the rules are consistent then hiding the drop ship up here is illogical it means that if things get so bad you have no choice but to use it you'll have to get on some space horses to go on a long Trek up the mountain first but if things have got so bad that this is your last best hope the odds are things are so bad you'll not be able to get on the space horses to make the long Trek up the Mountain Side the mother world will spot you on your silly space horses and take you out long before you get there there is another consideration we are shortly to learn that the villagers plan to keep the women and the children secured in a big barn surrounded by grain because the film stupidly thinks that a barn full of grain is a fortress the Space Nazis for their part will decide that capturing the women and the children in the barn full of grain will give them the sort of Leverage that their massive spaceship with orbital nuke cannons cannot provide and comp compel the villagers to surrender which they have no incentive to do because we just got done with all those flashbacks where the mother World genocides villagers for fun and which the mother World itself shouldn't want or need them to do because they have a massive advantage in man and Firepower even before you consider the giant spaceship and because they don't actually need the grain anyway but just running for the moment with the assumption that they are all right and these are all the bargaining chips why exactly wouldn't you send the women and the children into the waterfall cave with the drop ship it's a super secret cave that's why you're putting the drop ship there to begin with and should the battle go badly it would mean the people you most want to protect would be right next to the one thing they need to escape which makes a good deal of sense no well say Zach it would make a good deal of sense so no cor flies the implausible drop ship up into the waterfall and who should be waiting for her there why it's Anthony robkins why is it Anthony robkins how did he make it up here in the time it took Kora to fly a drop ship given she is flying a drop ship and he has to walk what's he been doing in the meantime and why couldn't we have seen that story instead and why for the entirety of this scene does the movie proceed as though he and Kora have some deep actually no scratch that and why for the entirety of this scene does the movie proceed as though he and Kora have any kind of backstory at all I'm pretty sure this is the first time they've met each other they were in the same room once briefly in part one when Anthony Robin stepped in to save them from the VIS udes of General rapist but they've never spoken before we know cor has served with others of Anthony's robot kins look here's that one getting shot in the background of her part one flashback but that won't come up again later but I don't think the movie has established that Anthony and the robots have shared Consciousness has it that would be a rather important mechanic if true also why is he so [ __ ] hopeless that being called James makes him happy hello James you know the last person who called me that was the old commander of the mechanicus militarium as he died in my arms oh I'm sorry it's all right I like the way it sounds it makes me feel something other than hopelessness and if that is true then why does he then tell her that it's hopeless anyway because they can't hope to win I he's right obviously or rather he should be right because situation should be unwinable that he ends up being wrong is pretty much entirely because the movie is dumb but if all he wanted to do was pop up and say LOL you're [ __ ] you silly woman then um well why bother also oh [ __ ] no wait wait up one God damn minute Kora killed the princess and that's not a secret everybody knows Kora killed the princess in fact everyone thinks cor murdered the entire Royal Family deaths should have left Anthony robkins feeling nothing but fu ility and despair so why exactly isn't he killing her in this scene why isn't he at the very least very angry with her in this scene shouldn't everything in his nature compel him to try and Avenge the king he couldn't serve and the child he couldn't save this shouldn't be a peaceful conversation and in fact Kora should now be absolutely terrified shouldn't she why are we not making use of these character beats Zach meanwhile Space Battleship yam has arrived in the system I still don't know how space travel is supposed to work in this movie part one space vaginas and implies they can travel back to the mother World pretty damn quickly since protocol dictates that they all run away when their Admirals get killed it it also proceeds as though they can't fast travel at all hence their need for grain and local supply routes and here the ambiguity is used to explain why the villains only arrive back on the scene when everyone is ready for them to arrive back on the scene now yeah yeah sure drama has its own rule set and strategic ambiguity can help arrange scenes just so and this is probably as old a rule is drama itself very few films have completely consistent physics a charge leveled against Rebel Moon though is that the ambiguity isn't so much strategic as it is General it's useful in this particular instance but because no thought has been pair to how the underlying mechanics really work it invites many more damaging questions elsewhere how and in what conditions can they instop around the Galaxy for example if they can insta hop around the Galaxy then why do they need grain supplies from random Backwater planets if they can insta hop back back to the mother world then why can't they insta hop from the mother world to here but if they can insta hop from the mother world to here then why would the mother world not have sent a whole Fleet to make sure the Most Wanted fugitive in the galaxy is captured you don't have to go all hard sci-fi specificity in your world building and your mechanics but setting out a few basic rules for instance that interplanetary travel operates like so and takes this amount of time very much helps ensure that your entire creation feels more purposive and directed rather than a hodg podge of scenes in compet ly stuck together to suit whatever your terrible director wants to happen in any given moment bace Battleship yamaz then arrives in orbit over farm simulator and titus's reaction seems to imply that he is surprised by the type of ship they're up [Applause] [Music] against which he shouldn't be because he's an exgen he knows who he's up against and Kora would surely have told them what to expect anyway Space Battleship yam scans the ground from all Orit and detect that they are using the grain as a shield which shouldn't matter but whatever curiously the orbital scanners can look through the roofs of buildings it spots the grain it also spots the women and the children in the barn but it can't detect the tunnels they've built all over the place because again there are no rules in operation here there is no real consistency it's just a hodge podge of scenes incompetently stuck together to suit whatever the terrible director wants to happen in any given moment cor then does that thing you've seen several dozen heroins do in many better movies movies she cuts her hair ready for the battle I knowe that these villagers occasional aversion to technology means they don't have razors or Clippers or anything like that but cor must have taken the Advanced Hair trimming module in her military training because she manages to give herself a skin fade using what a pair of Rusty shears but hey she's got her Kate Kane power lesbian Batwoman haircut again so there's absolutely no way she's losing whatever fight is coming Space Battleship yam launches many aircraft and tanks and drop ships you know they are evil because some of them Billow black smoke except where the VFX team forgot to animate it look smoke oh no no smoke smoke again no smoke smoke no smoke it's the sort of attention to detail that really lets you know you're watching Boutique premere content from Zack Snider and his Netflix Gremlins anyway this once again drives home that the villager's plight is hopeless it is terminal it has to be you're up against enemies that actually use technology they have air superiority they've got tanks artillery massive spaceships they could just land their forces right in the middle of your village and your entire defense strategy is shot they want to capture the women and the children well they can just aird drop Special Forces onto the barn stick artillery in the surrounding Hills look that's a big old Hill right there put men on the rooftops put men in the streets sweep in with a targeted bombing raid and knock out the Defenders with shock and or wait for the cover of night conduct to raid do anything do anything at all just don't land all your men outside the village and then your tanks miles behind the front line and have them walk slowly toward the perimeter that's just dumb you [ __ ] Kora then does her best to give the mother World another Swift Victory pey Nazi and his pey pretorian guard land right outside the village nobody in the village decides it might be worth sniping him thereby killing the Admiral and forcing the mother World chaps to run away like the cowards they are sometimes and Kora walks right up to him she walks out of the village she walks across the bridge she stands right in front of him and at this point you I'm sure recall that piki Nati's primary mission is capturing Kora he is obsessed with it he's been told he has to do it otherwise he will die he murdered a priest for daring to suggest they wait a little bit to make sure he was fully healed first this is what he wants it's the only thing he wants and here is Kora standing right in front of him with no backup at all and she's surrounded by his men right in front of a drop ship just [ __ ] grab her grab her and leave but uh obviously that's not what they do because they want the grain or something I don't know tell me what we're trying to achieve here the same thing as the last time we met I kill you yes what an honor it was a scar from the scar Giver herself no blood me be buil here today not Kora you just said you were going to kill him sort of implying some blood might be spelled here today doesn't it sort of how killing Works cor then asks what he hopes to gain from all of this or what he hopes to grain from all of it am I right and puits that he's after a senate seat a seat in the Senate is what you seek I would imagine if so take the grain you need to feed your men on your Voyage back to the mother world no more and no less you leave the villagers unharmed and report to bellarius that the Warriors you sought evaded capture uh [ __ ] [ __ ] sake cor no you know the answer is no you just explained to us that he'll get a senate seat if he captures you he can't take nothing and still get a senate seat don't give me that if so why don't you just run away and lie to bisaria [ __ ] you uniquely know how that's going to work I'm not filled with confidence by your negotiating skills here kaora this is your choice disgrace and relegation or your head cleaved from your shoulders cor these mean the same thing Kora he knows they mean the same thing you know they mean the same thing why are you giving him this false Choice pazi then gives the game away by telling her that the plan is to capture the women and the children but then he offers alternative terms give us the grain we will leave the villagers alive but you have to come with us as our prisoner obviously this isn't going to work either Kora and the Six Samurai of The Suicide Squad and by this point all of the villagers know that the mother World genocides places like this for fun there are a bunch of traitorous dishonorable violent [ __ ] weasel and you cannot trust them it also doesn't work because they don't need the grain anyway they only need Kora and that means it especially doesn't work given they could just grab her right now and have done with it villagers be damned I keep having to point out that this movie is foundationally broken absolutely nothing about any of this can work logically these characters are just making noises out of their face holes because Zach thinks movies are meant to have speaking in them he just doesn't give a [ __ ] what anyone happens to say a triple stupidity then occurs oh boy kaora as discussed should have known ages ago that she was putting the village in danger but she never realized it because she is a [ __ ] this means that when now she makes a very abortive attempt to sacrifice herself for the village by accepting piki Nati's terms absolutely nothing is being paid off this isn't the culmination of her long-standing doubts and her self-sacrificial impulse coming through because she's never before had those doubts or that impulse attempting to turn herself in is a spur of the- moment decision like every other decision made by every other character in this movie that is a waste that is stupid a stupid b is that she uniquely knows that these mother well types do not keep their word so if anything giving herself up makes them more likely to Nuke The Village on their way out which knowledge should really preclude her making the specific spur of the- moment decision it's not brave or Noble it's just very [ __ ] s silly and that brings us then to stupid sea Kora walks back to gona to say goodbye but Guna steals her gun in full view of hundreds of watching soldiers who I guess are just strategically blind in this moment and then he turns and shoots the alarm Bell and that triggers the battle thereby ensuring that negotiations break down when nobody's really ready for it and so believably making gona responsible for the deaths of hundreds of villagers this might have worked by the way because the villagers go all Viet Kong and start popping up from their newly dug and inexplicably scan resistant tunnels and start [ __ ] [ __ ] up it's just that nobody thinks it might be worth aiming for the very obvious Admiral standing right out in the open even though they should all have been told by now that shooting Admirals makes the mother world run away this is because [ __ ] Nai is a named character and so he has plot armor activated for the entirety of what follows it's far from the most ridiculous example of plot armor as we shall shortly see but it does call attention back to the fact that they could and should have had a plan to take out pey Nazi and they don't take him out because the film just doesn't want them to it's a fight scene so obviously there's even more slow mo and the first Exchange in the battle is just one Viet villager Kong person launching an RPG at the drop ship the rest of the Viet Kong Villages don't think it might be worth seizing the element of surprise and unloading a hail of bullets or triggering any of the bombs they've placed in their tunnels undermining the entire Battlefield oh yeah by the way they've rigged all their tunnels to blow and nor does the highly trained mother World Army think it might be worth shooting back until long after Kora and gona are conveniently out of the line of fire to get out of the line of fire they decide to hop on a convenient space horse and ride it all the way up to the waterfall in order to get cor onto the drop ship in order that she can fly the drop ship up to Space Battleship yam and take it out from the inside this should not work because they should have been shot a billion times already and they should be shot a billion more times as they ride away on the space horce and they should be shot a billion more times when the mother World send its fighter planes after the horse that's carrying the Most Wanted fugitive in the galaxy and they should be shot a billion more times when a mystery drop ship emerges from a waterfall and they should be shot a billion more times when they realize the drop ship is unregistered and has no ifff transponder and doesn't belong to their ship but absolutely none of this occurs because the film just doesn't give a [ __ ] so Kora and go ride away pikiti goes for a stroll across the battlefield and doesn't get shot again and then he drops into one of the tunnels and he does a [ __ ] hero pose before he goes about murdering lots of Viet Kong villagers single-handedly like a boss like an edgy edgy boss also that so that bit that just happened there I don't know if you could rewind to it so just after he does his cringe face um you got the guy who walks up to the woman and he's like oh [ __ ] there's a guy behind you here have a pistol and hold it backwards and then she he just snaps her neck yeah and her face before it happens is like I what is this what do I do with this actually really funny from presumably an entirely different tunnel Hunter M pops up and lobs a grenade into a fleeing drop ship in slow [ __ ] motion none of the mother world soldiers thinks it might be worth taking him out first the drop ship pilot tells someone to bring the main gun around even though I'm pretty they don't need to do that cuz they have a rear turret and it's pointing right at hunterman already but [ __ ] it the grenades land in the drop ship the Dropship pilot does a funny oh damn what is the tone you're going for in this fight scen Zach meanwhile in the long housee the space Nazi special forces are breaking in I'm telling you they're special forces now the movie doesn't really do very much to make this clear it just gives them another city sounding noun while I negotiate will dispatch the cryp TAA to capture the women and children and it only mentions it once maybe twice so that you don't really detect it as you're watching it which is going to make it seem quite pathetic when Ninja Warrior Supreme acolyte woman who's been built up as this excellent fighter gets taken out by people who are for all intents and purposes generic grunts it's not even an especially necessary death Zach has already shown us unwisely that lots of the women and children in the barn not to mention space twink Alpha and Rosie who are also in the barn are armed with ranged weapons this was unwise because the movie proceeds to forget that they are armed with lots of ranged weapons meaning none of them do anything at any point to help the acolyte as she engages in a discount lightsaber battle I mean [ __ ] the Special Forces guys just walk in you could have taken a bunch of them out easily if you just open fire from behind cover but but no no acolyte standing in the way doing another silly hero pose oh gee oh goody oh gosh she can deflect bullets with her sword as well cuz Zach does want her to be a Jedi she's not a Jedi though because when she gets stabbed by a lightsaber she actually dies oh and yeah it's another fight scene so obviously we get slow motion lightsabers and then an even slow [Music] emotion to the face some more special forces bust in through a side door because if there's one thing special forces are known for it is not coordinating their actions [ __ ] Nazi meanwhile finishes up taking out the Viet Kong in one of the tunnels and just then strolls back to his ship once again nobody thinks it might be worth taking a shot at him Hunter man does see him and Hunter man has a gun we've just seen him using it there are also plenty of guns lying around there's even RPGs lying around but rather than doing anything sensible hunterman decides per the rules of modern media to run at [ __ ] Nati with his gun which has now become a melee weapon he then just throws the gun away because otherwise it might have been useful to him in order that he can try and punch py Nazi to death on the drop ship this does not work and he dies the movie wants us to be very sad about this by the way problem is we have absolutely no idea who Hunter man is and he was a Class A [ __ ] to get himself killed in this manner anyway and it's been telegraphed so far in advance that you just watch it and you think oh moving on Kora gunar and the space horse have meanwhile teleported through some sort of Wormhole up into the waterfall and they launch their drop ship yeah I noticed we all noticed Guna hops up on the roof and attaches a smoke grenade to it which they conveniently have because it's just this easy to trick a massive motherworld spaceship that you're one of them and that you're damaged and in need of repairs so they direct them into the main hanger using an Independence Day maneuver to take control of the ship and guide it in meaning I assume that they could have scanned the drop ship and connected to it and realized that it wasn't part of their attack party but they didn't because that would have been the smart thing to do back in the village the fight has just sort of stopped for a bit and everyone has reset for around two which consists of soldiers running in a tight group into the village to be met by War bands of villagers popping out of bars led by Titus and hunk mowgly and this is the point at which the plot armor just gets very silly indeed because they all run out and straight out these heavily armed soldiers and hunk mowley in particular is armed with hatchets for no good reason and Titus frequently decides to run directly into a hail of fire and yet yet neither of them die Zach actually invites us to realize how very absurd it is when for instance he has them run onto a [Music] bridge and start clubbing people to death even as a hail of many many thousands of plasma bolts fly all around them honestly you could have just had Titus do the Rogue one thing and walk into enemy fire saying I am one with the force and the Force is with me Leed to make some sort of sense but there is is no Force to protect them in this movie there is just impregnable ridiculous plot armor I was going to count the number of times they should all have died but I swiftly gave up because there's really no point they should all be dead they should all be dead a thousand times over they should all be pelted with plasma rounds they should be hit With Grenades they should be stabbed they should be sniped they should be shot from Distance by tanks or artillery they should be shot from Air by spaceships they should be bombed from orbit by the giant Space Battleship yam thing at one point a dying via Kong villager in the tunnels decides [ __ ] it this is absolutely the time to hit the self-destruct button he just sets off all the explosives with absolutely no idea who's above him and how many of his own people he will kill they could have led with this when the mother World troops first stormed the village they could additionally have mined the bridges but they do none of this because it's a Zach Snider film so nobody thinks things through everyone just has half a mind to what will make for the coolest scene happily though at least one of our named characters does die in all this that is the acolyte who gets one of her robot hands cut off and then she gets stabbed absolutely nobody else in the long housee thinks it might be worth trying to help her none of the Armed villagers not Rosie not space twink Alpha the only person who does anything at all is the kid who presumably thinks he'll be fine cuz there's no way Space Nazis will kill an Aran child he half saves the acolytes who saves him in turn but she's taken too much damage and so she dies she she she dies I said I said she dies Jesus Christ you're milking [ __ ] hurry up die she dies [ __ ] having them ster at other longer isn't going to make us care more Zach get on with it she dies I said she dies she dies she dies she dies she dies she oh thank [ __ ] she's [Music] [Music] dead only after she's flopped do space twink Alfa and Rosie think oh no I wonder if we can possibly save her upon Space Battleship yam kora's ruse seems to be working quite well as the film decides now is absolutely the time to do a Silence of the Lambs she and goon are opposing as severely injured soldiers and the useless Medics don't think it worth taking her mask off to check her then she does the Hannibal elop face jumps up and shoots them all that brings us to one of the most Biz that uh Snider has ever created so basically cor's plan was that they tricked they they were to trick the Medics on board the ship that they were injured soldiers and the Medics are like all right you're wounded we got you we're going to take good carrier they put them on the uh the the bed with wheels I can't remember what they will yeah and then they wield them into the elevator and they say we're going to do a visual inspection on the elevator imagine if they had done one not in the elevator in front of all of the soldiers but then they're like yeah all right we're going to take care of them we're going to take care of them wait a minute and then she kills them cor just kills M this a war crime like plain and simple you're 90 minutes into your film and the protagonist is so far killed an innocent child and some doctors down in the village the explosion set off by the Viet Kong villagers has wiped out the rest of the first wave of mother World troops the distant shock clearly shows they could and should have led with this and they would have saved themselves in awful lot of trouble if they had but they didn't because Zach thought it would be cooler if they waited so we could give us our second act of the battle low point oh no oh no though they're not done yet it's time to rip off the Lord of the Rings now [Music] because at this point Zach is entirely given up making anything anything at all he is just stealing things he's a dirty little thief is what he is up on the ship having murdered some doctors Kora and gona have an obligatory snug then he runs off to get the drop ship ready for departure while she embarks upon several aliens references stripping down to the vest crawling through vents Mak shift weapons clunky lifts approaching the queen yep it's just aliens after aliens after aliens at this point meanwhile down in the village the next wave is approaching so it's time for they them to get his her hero moment I can't help but note that if you popped out of this window at the beginning and shot pey Nazi like with a sniper rifle all of this could have been avoided bro darling but you didn't because [ __ ] it the mill tanks open fire and we seem rather to have given up limiting collateral damage you might recall that the only reason any of the preceding nonsense occurred is that the mother world had convinced itself it still really wanted the Grain and you will equally call that we all know that they never needed the Grain and this was all the height of contrived nonsense I did Trail it I trailed it don't say you weren't warned I trailed that the mother world would bedly remember they don't need the grain after all and at this point the mill tank decides shad's gone on long enough Shard you [Music] are hey hey Zach what about the grain Zach don't they need the grain I thought they needed the grain Zach Casas you may fire on the village sir the grain there's no need for the grain now you never you never needed the grain you [ __ ] sack of useless balls while they them decides to abandon a sniping position and go and take out Soldiers with melee For No Good Reason cor attaches bombs to the giant head oh oh yeah did I mention no I didn't mention because it's the first and only time it comes up but the mother World ships have giant heads in them they are run by the [ __ ] cromulons from the signus 5 expanse show me what you got I want to see what you got she sticks bombs on its head and its eyes open and it says H I like what you got good job and I genuinely miss this the first time because the movie is just piling [ __ ] on top of [ __ ] on top of nonsense on top of [ __ ] at this point and it's doing it so quickly it's almost as if it's ashamed of itself and it's hoping you won't notice all of its many varieties of [ __ ] and nonsense it's the AJ Abrams approach to storytelling folks if it's quick enough no one will notice the Revelation that Space Battleship yam has a cromulon in it is very swiftly followed by this dumb [Music] scene yeah no this is just this is silly you could have seen her ages ago you just didn't because I I don't know I don't know why Zach shot it this way actually it it achieves nothing but then that is swiftly followed by korus swinging down from the platform and what why H why why is there coal on your spaceships H why is the ship is powered by [ __ ] coal why is the [ __ ] powered by coal Zach I don't even know what to tackle first you just put bombs on a cromulon and now you're killing people shoveling coal in a spaceship furnaces what what is going on Brandon film talk is probably a bigger nerd than I am so he could quote you all the many bits and pieces Zach is stealing from Warhammer in this sequence the parallel between this and Warhammer is the Katan are star gods that are the oldest intelligent creatures that exist in the galaxy and millions of years prior to like the the 41st Millennium the Katan fought alongside the necron tier who became the necrons against the old ones and after they won the necron tier turned against the Katan and contained fragments of the Katan inside shards so as to use them as a weapon um quoting from one of the books they are now only Echoes of their former s splinters of energy that survived their necron servants ancient betrayal and were were enslaved in [Music] turn that isn't very nice March try to understand as a do it is my duty to give nerds a hard time I don't play Warhammer because I would rather mother buy a house but I do have access to the rebel Moon Wiki what does the rebel Moon Wiki have to say about the cromulon the car were interdimensional beings that were harvested by the mother world to power their technology the car appeared briefly in Rebel Moon part one a child of fire the official novelization and rebel Moon part two the skar giver but will be explored more deeply in an animated short film biology the Ki were giant female humanoid figures akin to goddesses when compared to humans when the mother world figured out how to capture them they were able to pull seemingly unlimited energy from them which they used to power their technology allowing them to invent Machinery with almost mystical capabilities it's unknown how the CI lived prior to their capture and what this energy was used for when in their own control but the CI Inc captivity were kept in a Perpetual dreamlike State history there isn't any notable Carly the one from this scene comments there aren't any because Rebel Moon doesn't have a fandom that uh that actually doesn't help help me at all how does a Galactic Empire with spaceships that run on coal manage to capture transdimensional giant godheads if the giant heads provide them with infinite power why do they need the coal is the giant head happy with you strapping bombs to it wouldn't it rather that you I don't know set it free maybe and hell I'm using the wiki absolutely none of this information is actually in the movies the movie just drops it in for shits and giggles I assume there's still a line in the script even somewhere saying explain this later and Zach just forgot to fill it in this this absurd coal powered spaceships cromulons it's enough to distract you from the fact that Kora has just put time bombs on the cromulon that are rigged to blow you guessed it right at the most convenient possible moment just before the ship's main guns obliterate The Village which she can't have known they were going to do because when she left the village she still thought the mother world were after the grino wouldn't have destroyed the village but oh [ __ ] it because remember they've remembered that they don't need the grain anymore meaning you have to wonder why the gun isn't already powered up and ready to go and why it's taking so long to oh oh oh I see oh you aim it you aim it with a wheel [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] talking quiet we have a lock on the village you don't need a lock on it it's a [ __ ] Village how do you guys can't get over it how do you capture giant transdimensional heads with coal powered spaceships whose main guns take three to aim at stationary targets because you're using a wheel off a battleship from the 1920s oh God I don't even care anymore they them takes out a tank with a convenient RPG from close range obviously that is slow motion as well somebody tells [ __ ] Nazi that cor is currently in the [ __ ] cul pits murdering people who are probably slaves he says good that's convenient She's Come to Us rather than using his whole massive ship's worth of backup to corner and capture her he decides to grab a lightsaber and go wait for her in the hanger Bay where I can't help but know that goona is still chilling in the drop ship meaning he could at any point of popped up and shot [ __ ] Nazi in the back but he just didn't because then the dumb fight scene wouldn't have dumb happened he takes out the Meany beardy sidekick that comes along for the ride but he doesn't aim at the the obviously big evil Nazi Admiral so he ends up getting shot himself because he is a spanner they them Mele some more soldiers who just walk right at they them but are apparently deaf blind so don't see spot they them right in front of they them so they them die oh no somehow Titus and hung mowgly aren't dead yet even though they're just running out in the open and this allows hunk mowgly to rescue they them which affords us another blatant Lord of the Rings ripoff you know the scene I thought I'd die fighting side by side with an elf what about side by side with the friends for dying in battle it was all I wanted fighting for something I think I was wrong I think I want to die at all but if I must together Tac and and Hab Biga have a moment when it's just like have you two spoken to each other before yeah that's kind of weird I don't think I actually want to die but if we do let's die together like sure let's do that I guess it's it's the film is again it's it's implying that they've had character development and character growth it's tricking the audience into thinking that they know each other but they don't yeah this is another Lord knock off never thought I'd side by side with a whatever the [ __ ] you are whoever the [ __ ] you with with a Hamburg you I can't stress this enough you don't know each other you've never interacted before you're not [ __ ] friends you're not even characters how are you not dead yet anyway why is the why why why are these two the characters who are doing Lego listen gimly Zach why these two I mean I guess it could have been [ __ ] any of them but why these two didn't you think it might be worth establishing any relationships between any of them and then they all get saved by Anthony robkins take a look at this scene where did he come from how did he get here how did nobody spot him oh well you might be thinking doesn't matter much we saw him get shot in part one and though he didn't die he got thrown around a lot and we also saw one get shot and die in cor's flashback so we know they're not oh okay no he is bulletproof now fair enough takes out the remaining Mill tangle by his lone um we could critique the fact that he is now just Invincible I suppose I I guess it's like fantasy armor he's wearing that little Tiara thing and this gives him plus 50 defense but I'm slightly more interested in what has spurred the change in his character why now why here and why like this wasn't his only vague attachment to Young Rosie because she slightly reminded him of the Dead princess If This Were the novelized version that had actually bothered doing something with his character we might say that this is the moment he discovers his own soul his own to be and his own motive to fight which is what he gains by the end of the novelized version but the movies haven't done any of that so no he just does it now because now is the time for him to do it I suppose and Zach couldn't be bothered to construct the scene in a way paying off any of the very little information we do have about him in isolation it looks cool enough but it doesn't withstand even a second's thought because not a second's thought went into it up on Space Battleship yam cor knocks out a bunch more guards scolds her hand on a light lightsaber hilt can this is [ __ ] stupid rip pleas herself a usable lightsaber because apparently this sort of heat can be contained in a little bit of cloth wrapped around the hilt that doesn't get H doesn't catch fire yeah that's definitely how physics works and then she makes her way to the drop ship hanger and honestly given it plays no role in the blood given absolutely nothing about the movie hinges on this litiz that's not a word given nothing about the movie hinges on this limitation in lightsaber design there's why is it even in the movie why even include this it's just wasting time it's silly but it does mean Kora has a lightsaber and pey Nazi also has a lightsaber so hey you might be thinking at least we'll get a cool lightsaber battle to round off the film oh okay no no we don't get one of those either because Zach doesn't actually understand even the basics of film making anymore for a big climactic lightsaber battle between your protagonist and your antagonist you need a few things in your favor you need the story to have led up to this moment placing all of faith in this climactic battle you need your characters to be established you need their wants their beliefs their agency to be firmly in place in order that the audience understands what's at stake and cares about the outcome and you need a root understanding that these things need time and space in the fight itself in order that they can be properly registered after all we're not supposed to just be watching people who are very good at sword fighting fighting with swords we are supposed to be reading the final climactic battle as a fight between Good and Evil evil or a conflict of Visions the fate of the universe hanging on this moment it is not just technique it is craft and story as well this is what the original Star Wars Trilogy does exceptionally well there are very few distractions in the fights between Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi Vader and Luke in Empire Strikes Back or Vader Luke and the emperor in Return of the Jedi everything in the scene besides the battle itself is on mute and the battles themselves recognize that pacing is just as important in a fight scene as it is generally to any story after all the fight scene is a narrative Implement you need pauses you need moments to breathe moments to talk in order that the participants complete battle is present after all it's not just a test of Sword Play it's an emotional psychological and philosophical battle as well the will to fight is just as important as the technique in fighting if not more important these are actually some of the quietest moments in the three original Star Wars films and so the deepest and most consequential moments everything about the movies all the explosions and the lasers the [ __ ] battles the running the fighting the flying all the dialogue the relationships all the interactions all of it comes to a head in these fight scenes and so there is absolutely no need for distraction for ludicrous sets for intrusive environmental hazards these fights are spectacles not because of how much noise you throw into every scene but because of how quiet you allow them to be it's something the Star Wars prequels don't do anything like as well because Lucas made the mistake of thinking that big Stakes require as much noise and act ction and Flash and Pizzaz as possible in order that the audience understands how important they are but the more your attention is called for example to The Superficial Splendor of the setting for the Duel of the Fates in The Phantom Menace and especially the battles on Mustafar and corusant in Revenge of the Sith the less the truly important things matter they are brilliant to look at but they take an awful lot longer to say much less than any given fight in the original trilogy to the point where the actual character interactions between Anakin and Obi-Wan in their climactic battle are remembered principally for their laughable meme quality you turned her against me you have done that yourself I should have known the Jedi were plotting to take over Anakin chancelor Palpatine is evil for my point of view the Jedi are evil and now Zack Snider has just taken the worst lessons from all of this aided by the fact that he's never had a story or characters to pay off in this final exchange at least in the Star Wars prequels there is an academic big coherence to the spectacle the battle in the Senate chamber is the battle for the political future of the Galaxy between the old and the new orders set up throughout the three movies the battle on Mustafar is so tightly contested because these are two men who know the others every move giving us the high tragedy that is a battle of Brothers again my argument isn't that the prequels have no merits it's essentially that they are just depersonalized and they misplace the stress but because Rebel Moon doesn't have a story and it doesn't have characters all it has is spectacle and so Snider really just recreates the sins of the worst bit of the mustapa battle you know the second act bit where the movie temporarily forgets that the tragedy is meant to be a personal one so it just lapses into the most absurd spectacle where the combatants are much more concerned with environmental hazards than they are with each other and that's what happens for pretty much the entire final fight scene in Rebel Moon before the fight even begins Kor bombs obliterate the giant head boo not cool disqualified and send Space Battleship yam into a nose dive so we don't really get a battle at all we just get people falling through a ship trying not to get squashed by debris there is no character to this fight because there are no characters in the fight and because it's just ceaseless noise there's no time for any character or significance to actually come through it's an appalling final battle orchestrated by a guy who is only interested in explosions and the cheapest of cheap spectacle and [ __ ] it thei Niti doesn't even have his lightsaber for most of it at one Guna who is supposed to be the love of kora's Life slides past her down the ship and she just well I mean this isn't really a reaction is it oh and also Kora falling that distance and landing on her neck nah now she's dead once they finally stop tumbling through the ship hiiki Nati ignores the lightsaber that's right behind him and decides he's going to choke her to death instead I am compelled to point out that if you have super strength and if you're choking a [ __ ] and she's still screaming you're not doing it right um so i' so I've been told you know then goona SA leaves her and pey Nazi gets himself stuck in a closing door and so she chops his head off and I really really really hope this is the last we will ever see of him Space Battleship Yamato plummets to Earth very very slowly somehow even though it's nose diving and we've just seen all the wreckage in the hanger Bay exploding and crashing into each other and falling to pieces they're still functioning drop ships and Kora and Guna are able to board one and fly off so indeed a lots of other mother World types who are likewise able to fly off before Space Battleship yam crashes cor and Guna hit the floor and Guna is now in a bad way because he was shot ages ago and he is finally starting to feel the ill effects he is very clearly dying and cor is sad about this even though the movie has really not done enough to earn this emotion on her part because this really isn't a relationship is it she related a couple of flashbacks to him and then they [ __ ] once for the lack of anything else to do and because the movie is kind of aware that this is the case it's not content to linger on this death scene it would rather cut away to more action this is occasioned by the [ __ ] Rebel Alliance they finally showed up the battle's over you lazy [ __ ] if you'd been here earlier so many many many more people would have lived [ __ ] it goona might still be alive why are you showing up late to take credit for other people's hard work what are you fing Americans and hell I'm pretty sure the only mother World ships stood in the sky or Escape parts and such I suspect wiping them out might be considered a war crime in a more civilized reach of the Galaxy pretty sure you don't get to clap yourselves in the back for showing up late to kill Escape podds I have absolutely no idea why it's taken them so long to get here to the question of how they knew to come here in the first place I think we were told in part one that they knew where the village was and brother ax did sign up to defend the village so it's not a stretch that they should know where to go but why they should come is much less clear given brother axe went off with they them and a handful of others against the wishes of sister axe who didn't think farm simulator was worth dying over correctly I might point out so her change of heart has happened some point off screen and then the question of why it took them so long to show up is just unanswerable really because again Zach isn't thinking these things through and nor her his characters he just thinks it would be cool if they showed up now that the fight's already over oh oh yeah and by the way during all of this Goa dies oh no oh oh so sad he now Bears the same Dead behind the eyes expression of your average sniders fan but we can be happy for him because he now rests peacefully in the knowledge that he won't have to put up with whatever nonsense part three has in store assuming of course that it ever gets made now I get that this is supposed to be very sad but I'm genuinely not sure the film is aware of why it's supposed to be very sad I was sitting there watching it thinking well yeah it's sort of paying off one of the few things we know about Kora isn't it she couldn't love because she fell in love once and her generic boyfriend died in a war and now here we are again again it's happened again she unwisely fell in love and now her generic boyfriend has died again in a war but such as being the utter vacuity of this movie on a character level especially I am not sure it has this payoff in mind for this scene I think it might just be me reading a narrative thread into it where none actually exists it's not hyperbolic to say that the rest of this movie stands as evidence that this could genuinely just be coincidence an accident that it's more likely in fact to be the the film repeating a beat because it's lazy rather than because it actually recognizes the significance of repetition it certainly doesn't come up again everybody cheers anyway and it's cringe you skipped over the best part of the entire movie which is uh when they're on that bridge and the old man just screams at Titus and there's like a weird second pause and Titus turns and just yeah oh yeah that it's literally right there so good Titus yeah the Titus just like me it's more than a second because it's in slowmo just gonna go [ __ ] nuts here in a second dude and this brings us at long last to the final scene of the movie that night we steal from Return of the Jedi for a cremation scene old be not Kenobi thoughts immediately return to the next Harvest because he just loves his [ __ ] grain and he's a peasant when next we bring in the Harvest a season from now a 100 seasons and by carrying on by carrying on sister ax tells them about honor and bravery all of you honor the Fallen you honor my brother and his bravery having just turned up late and wiped out a bunch of unarmed soldiers who'd probably have surrendered if they'd been given the chance and this is the moment that cor decides to spill the beans do not speak of me when you speak of honor and bravery I've lie to you I'm Aras I killed the princess or rather she tries to spill the beans but Titus pops up and says um yeah we know you know that I'm arthus adopted daughter of the region belisarius and the Assassin of the princess Issa I know your name yes Ian that's not the biggest stretch in the world since everybody knows who assassinated the princess the only ambiguity thus far has arisen because inexplicably nobody recognized kora's face I guess they never bothered making wanted posters or anything but the broken bit follows as surely as night follows day Titus says that well actually you're not the Assassin because the princess is still alive but you were not her assassin for the princess is still alive you thought she could be killed so easily no she's more than there oh a [ __ ] magic it's going to It's Magic why not yeah she's aive because magic and this is significantly [ __ ] in pretty much all of the ways in the first place if Titus knew the princess was still alive somewhere and believes she is worth fighting for then what the hell was he doing getting pissed in a Coliseum for years waiting for the plot to show up if he believes that the princess is magical and so above the whole death thing then why the hell would Anthony robkins who's actually programmed to believe the princess is a goddess not believe the same thing and be off looking for her somewhere why would a random General be deeper into the religion than a robot that's actually and specifically been programmed to be religious and if Titus has known this all along then why the hell would he have waited this long to mention it wouldn't this be the sort of thing he'd want to tell Kora as soon as possible to free her of her guilt and make her a better happier Warrior oh and if Titus a random ex-general knows this then who the hell else knows it wouldn't the whole mother World be aware of it even she was their princess wouldn't basar has know about it for example especially since he was there when Kora shot the princess and he saw the whole Magic light show thing wouldn't his fores now be scouring the entire galaxy looking for the princess given what she represents and how very dangerous she is and if they already knew she was magic and could live on in the force or whatever then why would they bother assassinating her in that way and the first place rather than concocting a more sensible plan oh it's so obviously sequel bait it's really quite painful I can think of few other movies that deserve a sequel less than this film and I have to point out too that absolutely nothing about their situation has actually changed farm simulator is still [ __ ] if anything it's even more [ __ ] given they just knocked out a whole big spaceship over it and this is the sort of thing liable to piss off big evil militaristic Empires and belisarius knows this is where Kora is so they'll just come back with an even bigger Fleet and wipe everybody out and even if you've already left which you absolutely should but then you already should have done it and you didn't so you won't they'll still Wipe Out the villagers Vengeance because once again we've seen them doing exactly that over and over and over again oh my goodness it's also very very very very very silly but hey Cora has a mission she has a purpose now find and fight her way to the princess TI says you have my sword and Anthony robkin says and you have my bow fight to F and to fight sister ax says and my axe aren't you excited aren't you excited for the sequel oh boy oh boy oh gee oh golly I can't wait to see what crazy Japes aror Legas and gimbal get up to as they go hunting down a princess who probably turn out to be be Rosy all along making the whole Adventure a [ __ ] waste of time but that's it that's it Rebel Moon part two ends with about 10 minutes of credits that will probably do as much for the careers of those on it as a sex offenders registry summing up the complete um entity that is Rebel moon is honestly quite difficult I was going to call it a Monumental waste of a creative Endeavor but that would be inaccurate because it never was a creative Endeavor to begin with there's no point really breaking it down to plot character World building and theme because as I think we've seen over the last however long it's been reel Moon doesn't have any of those things its plot is a series of disconnected visuals stuck together like its arts and crafts day in the special school to say its characters a one-dimensional is to credit them with one too many dimensions Snider seems to believe World building is a bad thing which is why none of his universe's mechanics have been established and we ended up with coal powered spaceships that are also powered by infinite energy cromulons which aim World War II battleship cannons at small farming villages because grain and because part two lately decided it would sacrifice everything on the altar of sequel base what vague hint of a theme that might have been emerging redemption principally in fighting a just war against tyranny was wiped out when the very bad thing Kora did transpired to be a very bad thing she only tried to do Zach and his crew have said they now want to spin Rebel Moon out into at least four and possibly six entries not accounting the extended versions of the two movies we've already got I assume we'll get at least one of those but you have to imagine difficult conversations are already being had behind the scenes Zach might try and use his SNY maath to conclude that part one was a more popular movie than Barbie you think about like Netflix for instance where like you push a button and like you know Rebel moon right the zeist is crazy because like Rebel Moon so say right now there's like it's like almost 90 million views right 80 90 million people 90 million starts so or 90 million accounts said turned it on okay give or take they assume two viewers per screening right that's the kind of right math so you think if that movie was in the theater as a distribution model so that's uh 160 million uh account or people supposedly watching based on that math so$ 160 million people at $10 a ticket would be what I what is that math I don't know 160 160 million time 10 that's 1.6 billion you know so like you look at the view numbers he sort of you can use that rough you know so more people probably saw Rebel Moon than saw Barbie in the theater right and if that's true it also means that Adam Sandler's murder mystery 2 was significantly more popular than and Barbie even it proved almost twice as popular as Rebel moon when looking at Netflix originals across 2023 if you believe that by the way you're probably the sort of person who enjoys Adam s movies but spending not far short of $200 million on something this bad with this smaller cultural footprint is obviously not sustainable it's so obviously not sustainable you suspect even Netflix has spotted it if they were initially swayed by Zack Snider's name recognition and his Grand plans for a star wars-esque franchise with spin-offs and novels and games and all the various components of a massive Rebel Moon Universe then the fact it's kicked off not with a big bang but with a whimper should by rights do immense damage to Snider's broader reputation and his credibility I don't think even his most robotically devoted fans are jumping to the defense of this latest botched abortion of a movie if this sorry Affair is proof of anything it's that fandom is not a mere commodity George Lucas did not approach film studios promising them the phenomenon that Star Wars became he earned an Empire of the astounding success of a movie everyone underestimated at the time Star Wars became massively successful and popular because a man had a brilliant idea and his team told it in the best way they could the mistake Disney has made with Star Wars since has been to assume that product means popularity and I strongly suspect this is the same error as Netflix made when it backed Zach's plans for a rebel Moon Universe he promised them toys he promised them games he promised them Comics he promised them an extended Universe just like Star Wars right and nobody in charge ever thought to ask him okay but what's the idea Zach what are we capitalizing on what's the story that'll earn the fandom in the first place what is your Star Wars oh but hey I'm sure he'll fix it in the extended versions yeah yeah that always happens if at first you don't succeed make it longer and try again I am convinced in fact I put another $200 million on it that another couple of hours of slow motion grain shots Gore and R-rated sex scenes will make this franchise truly epic yes with just a bit more porn we'll be looking back at the icons of Cinema reeling off a list including Luke Skywalker Indiana Jones Ellen Ripley Sarah Connor Michael Corone Gandalf Tony Stark and [ __ ] Kora oh dear yeah okay that's it [ __ ] it done I'm out mik drop see you in part three go away bye bye-bye bye

Channel: The Little Platoon

Views: 208,052

Keywords: Rebel Moon, Rebel Moon Part One, Rebel Moon A Child of Fire, Rebel Moon Part Two, Rebel Moon The Scargiver, Rebel Moon trailer, Rebel Moon review, Rebel Moon critique, Zack Snyder, Zack Snyder interview, Zack Snyder Justice League, Star Wars, Justice League, Rebel Moon Star Wars, Rebel Moon Part Two review, Snyder Cut, Rebel Moon is Bad, Rebel Moon Part Two critique, Rebel Moon Part 1, Rebel Moon Part 2, Empire Strikes Back, Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, Anakin vs Obi-Wan

Id: H66YvIVle9c

Length: 267min 47sec (16067 seconds)

Published: Sat May 18 2024