Yowza...this is a safe place, please don't hold back and share your true feelings on the matter.
I can absolutely appreciate everything you said but I'd kindly have to disagree. Yes, Part I was just fair but I felt that Part II pulled some nice punches. Like Garonman stated, the film was initially written to be a
Star Wars product but when Disney passed on placing their stamp on the movie they simply retrofitted the script to work for a new intellectual property. Frankly, I'm happy that Disney took a pass as I much more enjoy this more gritty/bloody world than that of the sterilized kid friendly
Star Wars universe.
Are there things that I didn't like with Part II. Absolutely.
- Why are a few fields of wheat so valuable that they can try to use it as a bartering chip/protection? I mean come on...how much food can you create from that for an entire empire? That being said, perhaps they're doing the same to many thousands/millions of villages throughout the system? And, I'm not privy to why there seems to be such a food shortage - whether that be pestilence, overpopulation, over farming lands, or perhaps poisoning of soil. Do they need to go into all this exposition? Perhaps not.
- There didn't to seem to be much urgency when they were harvesting their crop which was the one thing which would keep them from being destroyed from low orbit. However, you need some downtime in a movie to make the action sequences seem mover powerful - to pop. Plus, this gives you more opportunity for subtle emotional impact such as Doona Bai having a connection with the villager boy. Things like this allow characters to show you in part why they are fighting to protect this village without explicitly saying so. This has to be a hard balance to achieve for any film.
- How is it ever a good idea to take a tomahawk into a large open battlefield against several platoons of soldiers with laser rifles and tanks and expect to come out unscathed? I get wanting to make the battle feel more dimensional, but why oh God why? Perhaps having 2 tomahawks made more sense to the director...geesh. Having Doona Bai, however, choose to stay back and protect villagers within a confined space with her laser swords makes much more sense. In a confined space she may have the upper hand against soldiers with guns.
- Their attempt to give backstory to all of the supporting main characters fell pretty flat with the round table scene. Seemed pretty forced to me. They did flesh characters out a little more in Part I but evidently felt the need to drive it home in Part II. Do we need to know the backstory for everyone? You don't want your main characters to be one dimensional. I get that. But, Han Solo didn't really have much of a backstory in the movies other than being a somewhat sketchy smuggler who inadvertently got caught up in the rebellion. He just was. Again, that's got to be a hard balance to achieve when you want your characters to be memorable. Better to be memorable for what they do in the moment than to have flash back sequences in my book.
I'm just fine with
Rebel Moon keeping their version of the lightsaber. In fact, Blood Moon's laser swords look cooler, although loose out with the absence of the fantastic lightsaber sound effects. I'm good with the use of slow motion to help you appreciate a really cool action sequence. True originality is a hard thing to achieve in film. Everything seemingly has been done before. Choosing what works and what's cool and weaving it within your story makes good sense to me.
Speaking of originality, Zack Snyder has revealed how he crafted a new camera lens using four different pieces of technology to create a "distorted retro" look for his new film
Rebel Moon. If you don't like the effect, I can appreciate that. But, this is an attempt to give this series a certain look that may not be found in other films.
@Lorddarthvik: Surely, for the love of Yoda you can find at least 1 worse sci-fi flick in the below link:
@Aramsolari: I'd be curious to hear your opinion. I believe that you work/worked in the film industry and have some interesting insights.
Thank fuck we got Rogue One instead. That is the best thing to have come out of Disney SW imo.
You enjoy what you enjoy, I do not intend to change your mind on it!
I do appreciate that you can recall enough of the movie to criticize it so thoroughly, I sure as hell can't. I just watched and it went right through me. And that is my point really. It's the nothingness of it all. This second one felt even more hollow somehow. I guess the only reason I'm a little bit upset about it is that there was some potential in the universe and setting, and it got wasted on these movies.
I heard something about two more movies already made/being made, and each of them is again in 2 parts? So we are getting 2x2 films still?
Mr.
@Aramsolari has some good takes and insights on movies and the industry, even if we tend to disagree on some things sometimes.
I'm a freelance VFX artist/CG Artist/3D generalist/compositor/onset VFX, I had many names and tasks over the years, and now work 99% on ads cos it's just more varied and pays better and I found some really good people to work with. I worked in local movies and TV shows, thankfully not anything you have ever seen cos oh boy, those weren't great lol.
So I can say with confidence that the CG/VFX work in these movies is perfectly fine quality, and it shows that a shittonn of work went into them. It's not OMFG jawdropping, but it's a ton a work with seemingly all shots of the movies at least needing some sort of small touching up or background inserts or such. So that is the one aspect I will give to them, that was done right.
Oh yeah now that you mention it, I heard Snyder came up with some lens...yeah, nah. It wasn't worth his trouble. That looks aweful. Unique, sure, but also just nah. Why would I want half the screen to be blurred and distorted? It's distracting, looks like an artifact in the compositing, an error, more than an intentional style. As at least 50% of the environment is CG all the freakin time, I don't think it does anything either, cos they replaced what was filmed. So I think it's totally pointless to have it in the first place. And it's even more pointless cos I've seen the same effect pop up in Fallout in a couple of shots! I didn't like there either, but at least it was used very sparingly.
For me, the action is just soooo mehhh. It's just another Zack Snyder superhero movie, with the total absolute zero stakes to every single action sequence, and they are so dumb. Lots of waiting around, lots of pointless flailing around, no impact whatsoever. They would look okay, sure, if this was the second or third time I saw action like this, but after countless superher movies, these carry no wheight. There's a reason why anyone I personally know including myself and my mother, can rewatch something like the Matrix lobby scene or the disco sequence in JW1, or Vader fighting ObiWan on the Death Star, at any point in the day, and be hyped about it.
I can't remember a single action sequence from this movie, apart from the one in the first movie with the spider lady which was soooo badly thought out but at least looked like something new (even though the premise of it was basically a worse copy of the spider alien mission from Mass Effect).
Yes it is exceedingly rare to see originality because everything was done before, to some degree at least. My issue here is that I can pick and choose scenes and just intercut them with the original they are copying and it would match, like shot for shot in some cases, but the original would stand out as the much better one. It takes a bit from everything, from Aliens through the Marvel/DC movies, from Gladiator to Star Wars, from video games too, and just makes it worse. I have no issues with their superheated? swords, they look cool at least but as there's no interesting story (like the Jedi) tied to those, they make little sense when you have guns that blow holes in anything. Especially with how one moment they can't be handled by mere mortals, the next you put a kitchen towel on your hands and you can pick em up just fine. All the mystery gone.
Yes, you can certainly find truly aweful movies that are worse in the sense that the acting is worse, the story has bigger dumber plotholes, or it objectively looks like crap compared to this. You can ofc, but my point is, that with those, you can at least remember how awful they were. You can even laugh at it they are so bad. I think that is a better experience than watching this hollow shell, which does everything in the most mediocre way that is humanly possible.
Recent example, Fallout has some really dumb plotholes and stuff (how the fuck in LA, which got nuked into fine dust, you have everything connected up to the observatory still, and half the buildings having intact lightbulbs which were left on in the middle of the day.... The ghoul empties two mags into Finn's T60 for no effect, yet oneshots like 7 or 8 paladins wearing the same T60 armor... How the hell is it possible that non of the elders recognize the raiders if the vaults meet up every 3 years... Knight Titus dies from a slap and a fall inside the armor, 5 minutes later Finn crashlands the same armor face first at 200mph into hard soil yet is unbruised...) but I can ignore those things, because the show is self-aware enough, and has a tone that matches the sometimes silly action. Which also looks better with waaay less CG, and lots of chunks flying.
Zack takes his movies way too seriously, just like he did with justice league, and allows for no fun, yet fails to deliver on any of it. The drama isn't there, the characters despite their backstories have the depth of a bottle of windex, and there are no stakes to anything. Big evil empire man wants grain (like you mentioned, the reasoning is kinda hollow), we now have to care about random badass woman in random village because?... Ofc she will come up with a magical way to win it all. We have seen this a thousand times before. Non of them are likable enough for me to worry about whether they live or die, and he had over 5 hours by now to make me care about at least one fucking character! But nope, couldn't do it.
Anyways, I ranted enough about something I don't really care about that much. I wanted to enjoy these movies, and I just can't find anything to enjoy in them sadly. I'm glad at least you did though.
Wait, I just remembered one moment that I enjoyed! When in the first movie the super important superhero we got introduced to and had a backstory with and he is our hope and savior and we should care about sooo deeply, the one I call the dumb aquaman copy, does a running jump that is pixel by pixel the exact same slowmo jump from aquaman, onto the turret on the enemy ship and surprisingly, doesn't pull off any miracles, instead the movie has a single standout realistic/as it would happen irl moment, and he promptly gets blasted by the no-face no-name extra sitting at the turret controls! That, that shit was funny as hell!
Too bad the moment got ruined by his "sacrifice" still working out in the end, I would have given some props to Zack if he went ahead and just wiped the floor with all of our supposed heroes. That could've made things interesting for this next movie...
