Rebel Moon 2's Rotten Tomatoes Score Reveals A Harsh Reality For Zack Snyder's Entire 20-Year Career

Summary Rebel Moon 2: The Scargiver's abysmal Rotten Tomatoes score reveals a sad truth about Zack Snyder's filmography.

Dawn of the Dead remains Snyder's best-rated film, showing a decline in quality over the years.

Splitting Rebel Moon into two parts hurt its critical reception due to lack of depth and character investment.

The abysmal Rotten Tomatoes score for Zack Snyder’s latest opus, Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver, reveals a sad truth about the polarizing director’s entire filmography. The first two-part Rebel Moon movie was supposed to launch a massive sci-fi franchise that would continue for at least another two two-parters, resulting in a trilogy that would bafflingly consist of six movies. However, after the first part was widely panned by critics and the second part was met with an even worse reception, it seems unlikely that this six-part Rebel Moon trilogy will come to fruition.

The second volume of Rebel Moon is far from the first Snyder movie to be eviscerated by critics. His well-received films are much rarer than his poorly received films. Snyder does have some pretty great movies to his name, from a delightfully intense remake of Dawn of the Dead to a visually stunning adaptation of Watchmen, but they’re few and far between, whereas the bad ones are a dime a dozen. The critical reception to The Scargiver has confirmed a harsh reality about Snyder’s entire 20-year filmmaking career: he peaked with his first movie.

Zack Snyder's First Movie, Dawn Of The Dead, Still Has His Best Rotten Tomatoes Score

Movie RT Score Dawn of the Dead 76% 300 61% Watchmen 65% Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole 52% Sucker Punch 22% Man of Steel 56% Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice 29% Justice League 40% Zack Snyder's Justice League 72% Army of the Dead 67% Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire 21% Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver 15%

Snyder’s first feature film, his 2004 remake of George A. Romero’s zombie-infested horror classic Dawn of the Dead, is still his highest-rated movie on Rotten Tomatoes with a “fresh” score of 76%. The fabled Snyder Cut, released under the title Zack Snyder’s Justice League, is a close second with 72%, but that one benefited from having a previous version butchered by the studio to compare it to. Any movie would seem great if it was preceded by a version of the same movie that was influenced by corporate interests, market research, and focus-group feedback.

Snyder’s movies have gradually gotten more and more negatively reviewed as time has gone on. Three out of his five “fresh” movies were made in the 2000s: Dawn of the Dead with 76%, Watchmen with 65%, and 300 with 61%. (The other “fresh” one is Army of the Dead with a surprising 67%.) His most recent movies, on the other hand – both parts of Rebel Moon – have received his lowest Rotten Tomatoes rating: Part One has a miserable 21% and Part Two has an even worse 15%. The overwhelming majority of critics hated these movies.

Zack Snyder's 2000s Movies Were Slightly Less Polarizing On Rotten Tomatoes

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Snyder’s movies from the 2000s were less polarizing amongst Rotten Tomatoes critics than his efforts from the 2010s and the 2020s. This makes a lot of sense, because his movies have only gotten more and more, for lack of a better term, pure Snyder as time has passed. It wasn’t until Snyder brought his unique edgelord style of filmmaking to the iconic characters of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman that there started to be more widespread discourse around his work, with some declaring him to be a genius and others declaring him to be a hack.

After the discourse around Snyder’s work got more passionate, his movies leaned more and more into his worst stylistic hallmarks: saturated colors, excessive slow-motion, pseudo-intellectualism, and bloated runtimes. He used to make B-movies that were aware that they were just dumb fun, but now he makes B-movies that are delusional about being some artful, auteur-driven, Fellini-esque masterpiece. Movies like Army of the Dead, a zombie heist movie set in post-apocalyptic Vegas, suffer from taking themselves too seriously. It’s interesting that all Snyder’s ‘00s movies were at least fresh (albeit with two in the 60s), while they’ve been mostly rotten since.

Why Rebel Moon 2 Has The Lowest Rotten Tomatoes Score Of Zack Snyder's Career

Image via Netflix

If the two parts of Rebel Moon had been edited down to a single cohesive feature film, then critics might have been kinder to it. But splitting it into two separate two-hour movies essentially forced critics to sit through an indulgent rough cut in two halves. Rebel Moon has one-note characters and a simplistic plot that’s already been done in dozens of other movies; it didn’t have the depth or scope to warrant a two-part split. Part Two is arguably a slightly better movie than Part One, because it jumps right into the action and isn’t painfully repetitive.

But Part Two had to pay for the sins of Part One, because the two-part split made this whole Rebel Moon ordeal an exhausting experience. Critics hadn’t enjoyed Part One and had no real inclination to see where the story went, so they felt like a captive audience in Part Two. Neither volume of Rebel Moon gives the audience any reason to care about the characters, so the consequences they face in the second part have no impact. Screen Rant’s two-star review decried Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver’s “refusal to invest in its characters.”