Say what you like about Rebel Moon Part One: A Child Of Fire (and Lord knows the critics did…), but at least it had a variety of galactic locations and striking set pieces. Odd, then, there is so little ambition to be found in the second half of Zack Snyder’s Seven Samurai-riffing space yarn, a battle movie beyond the stars that eventually dissipates into a deafening and deadening muddle.
The setting is Veldt, a peaceful moon populated by wheat-growing farmers who have recruited a troupe of freelance renegades to stop their crops being seized by the forces of the malevolent Imperium. Evil Admiral Noble (Ed Skrein) and his dreaded Death Star… sorry, Dreadnought, are only days away, so there’s not much time to a) bring in the harvest and b) turn farmers into fighters – tasks laboriously enacted in an opening hour of montage-heavy preamble.
