Rebel Moon Chapter Two: Curse of Forgiveness Director's Cut Movie Review (2025)

An hour into watching the Director’s Cut of Rebel Moon Part Chapter 2.2(you can(not) cut any scenes) you might have an epiphany.

All this time, you’d been thinking it was about an intergalactic war. But Zack returned with a vengeance to remind you how wrong you were.

After the conclusion of the first part, which was a first skirmish and, at best, an Act 1 finale, the second part - notwithstanding a slew of new-and-old flashbacks, is all about the farming. Yes, now we know a big BIG battle is on the way (in, like 2 hours time) we sure need to prepare. What does preparation involve? Well, good you asked, because unlike most cliched battle prep sequences, Snyder has given us something different. A group of untrained farmers who actually get to do what they do best AND train their highly skilled saviours to do it too: grain farming. It’s super important, you see, because we’re told they can use the grain to barter with, or use it as a hostage.

Hostage grain. So, no, we’ve been thinking about Rebel Moon all wrong, this isn’t some grand, epic space opera, this is Grain Wars: The Movie (Part WHATEVER).

Already an infinitely worse chapter than the first part, Grain Wars Part Deux had an even bigger hill to climb towards a director’s cut redemption. So, knowing that, it just doesn’t bother, choosing instead to slide right down that hill further into a pit of… you guessed it. Grain. Like, a silo of grain. Where you will choke and die.

The structure of the second movie is, somehow, even more inexcusably awful than that of the first movie. Zack, you’ve already spent three and a half hours introducing these characters, what do you mean you’re going to spend the another one and a half hours of the second movie introducing them some more, while they farm? There were a lot of red flags in the script, but presumably nobody was allowed to read it. All two words of it (cough *grain wars* cough). Because surely someone somewhere might have had something to say about how this plays out?

an infinitely worse chapter than the first part, Grain Wars Part Deux had an even bigger hill to climb towards a director’s cut redemption

By the hour point, around the time you’ve seen that giant bird and bird-riding-chesty-man wearing a ridiculous hat, and have that “Oh, I remember how stupid this scene was last time I watched this shit” moment, and you’re confronted with a group of people, having reminisced over their backstories and talked about their inner fears about the upcoming battle YET STILL return to… farming in the next scene, you have to flip your mindset into comedy mode. This grain is important, dammit, stack the grain, respect the grain!

There’s another long sex scene for Boutella, and an extended barn dance. An extended barn dance. Let’s just let that sit there for a second. A. Barn. Dance. And the farmers have woven personalised cloth banners for the warriors who arrived to protect them. So there’s a whole ceremony about that. Where they get told about how great they are. At… farming?? Because they haven’t been in battle to protect the farmers yet. Yes, so it must be about them also being great farmers. “Good job, have a piece of cloth. I probably could have learned how to fire a weapon in the time it took to sow this, but who needs to know how to shoot? Not like we’re supposed to be preparing for a big battle WINK WINK!”

SEVENTY FIVE minutes into this second film, Farmer Titus - sorry, General Titus, calls the villagers in to tell them that “today’s the day we start preparing for battle”. His first order? “Move the grain.” Yes, they’ve already spent a scene or two stacking it, now they’re going to… stack it in a different place. Because the soldiers won’t shoot the grain. Hostage grain, remember?

For the absolute legends, the true survivors, the dedicated few, the worthy few - long may we be remembered - who make it all the way through all of this, the second half, which racks in at over 80 minutes, is mostly the battle the whole movie should have been. And, yes, it's got more exploding bodies, more bloody and hacks and slashes and violence. But it's just as - if not even more - incoherently edited as before.

It's as if everybody involved in the battle is on their own little Chris Nolan time-line, operating on a different plane to everybody else. Nemesis' unforgivably savaged 'epic' 60 second battle now takes place over a 20 minute period. Titus and Bird Man now enter the battle 20 minutes after it kicked off (long after the ships have left the planet), for no apparent reason, and immediately celebrate the victory too soon. Watching such haphazardly structured - but visually impressive - action is headache-inducing, frustrating as all hell. Yes, you can enjoy moments, scenes perhaps even, but there's zero coherence. And throwing everything at the screen for a solid hour is really quite exhausting. And after ninety minutes of grain, unforgivable.

it doesn't end, of course, because when you think it's over, they spend 20 minutes talking about what the next film could be about

There's more Hopkins, and more from his excellent but massively overpowered and ridiculously late-entering robot knight (who patently could have killed everybody and saved the whole village single-handedly). But don't worry, he's nowhere near as late to the game as the fighter pilot numpties (who also could have saved the entire village), who waited until after the battle ended for no reason whatsoever. There's more crying giant naked, utterly ripped, glowing energy medusa woman, finally balancing out Snyder's Watchmen: Director's Cut, and Hawkman still doesn't figure that an axe is a crap weapon until way too late in the day, but there was never any fixing that. And it still builds towards a huge, grand anti-climax, very end-of-Winter-Soldier, only without any kind of sense of stakes at all, without a single character you care about. And it doesn't end, of course, because when you think it's over, they spend 20 minutes talking about what the next film could be about. Thankfully, not grain, but that's a hell of a tiny sliver of a silver lining.

Ultimately where Rebel Moon 1, the director's cut, was slightly better on a few counts, the same is not the case here with 2. All that good will, all that hope that we've may be done with the terrible character intros, and that we're actually going to get into the meat of the saga, comes crashing to a halt when faced with the first half of the second movie's director's cut. It takes an unforgivable length of time for them to stop stacking grain. Half the runtime of a three hour movie. And no grain war is worth that, certainly not this one. So if you can't give it up because you're a completist, there's only one answer - like was recommended in the original AVF Rebel Moon 2 review - the sensible option is to skip to the halfway mark, and watch from there. And there's no chance of a higher score, it should consider itself lucky it doesn't drop a point. What an exhausting waste of 11 hours of life. Please let that be the end of it. Pretty please with grain on top?

Rebel Moon - Chapter Two: Curse of Forgiveness - the Director's Cut of Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver, lands on Netflix in 4K Ultra HD Dolby Vision HDR and Dolby Atmos on the fateful Judgment Day of Friday 2nd August 2024 for those foolish enough not to have learned their lesson by now.

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