'Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver (2024)' is essentially that episode of 'Game Of Thrones (2011-2019)' season 8 where everyone sits around for an hour waiting for the Night King to arrive, followed by that episode where the Night King does arrive and there's that big battle at Winterfell, except none of the preamble is entertaining and the battle takes place in the day but is no more compelling just because we can actually see it. Following a brief recap by Jimmy the robot, the film picks up with the surviving members of the ragtag rebel crewn/ croon (see what I'm trying to do here?) arriving back on Veldt thinking they aren't in a sequel and won't have to defend the village that hired them after all. However, it soon becomes apparent that they are in a sequel and that the baddies are coming not only to take the grain they were promised but also to capture some high-value targets and likely kill everyone in the community as well. The team must prepare the farmers for the upcoming battle; the supposed 'training' mostly consists of slow-motion farming montages and one or two brief scenes that establish the farmers are somehow completely competent in the art of war despite the fact that most of them have never even held a gun (seriously, these sequences don't show anyone failing at any time, instead portraying them all as just instantly as gun-savvy as John Wick). The movie's first half culminates in a laborious scene in which the main warriors sit around a table and take turns trauma dumping their dreadfully generic backstories that are all essentially the same as each other. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that the film's second half is where its big battle finally kicks off (that's what one-and-a-half film's worth of buildup has been about, after all), and - to be fair - the skirmish itself is fairly entertaining in its own generally subpar way. That sounds like I'm hesitant to admit that it's good, but I just want to make sure I'm not making it sound better than it is. In a more competent film, it wouldn't be up to par; here, it's more enjoyable than you'd expect. Still, it struggles to balance its various elements and plays out like a string of loosely connected vignettes rather than a cohesive sequence. The characters feel like they freeze whenever they aren't on screen and there's no sense of stakes because the movie has never really done any character work (even when it thinks it's doing character work). We just don't know any of these people and the spectacle isn't spectacular enough to truly hold your attention based solely on its aesthetics alone. Like the first film, the experience is entirely inconsequential. It's empty fluff that somehow cost millions of dollars. Its incredibly limp and bizarrely vague sequel-tease ending (which, by the way, does the opposite of get you excited for a potential follow-up) feels entirely contractual and devoid of any real energy on the part of anyone involved. It's emblematic of the odd oxymoron at the feature's core: it's a passion project that seems to lack any real passion. Zack Snyder has butchered his own work here, and it's hard to see how his long-promised "director's cut" (which makes no sense considering he seems to have had full creative control from the moment Netflix got involved with him) will make any of this any better. The problems run too deep for that. This may be better than its predecessor, but it's still not good enough.