I am stumped by the logistics


I honestly tried to give this Netflix movie, Rebel Moon: the Scargiver, a chance. I made it about halfway before giving up in boredom.

It’s a sci-fi fantasy story about a rag-tag group of deadly warriors defeating an empire…prosaic enough so far. But what totally killed it for me, besides the deadly dull characters and ridiculous stakes, was the logistics. There is the gigantic, ultra-powerful galactic empire, you see, and the local governor sends this gigantic starship crewed entirely by psycho Nazis, to collect…grain. That’s the macguffin here, bags of grain. This grain is the output of a small village of maybe 30 vaguely North European farmers who harvest it over the course of less than a week, so we’re not even talking about megatonnes of vital foodstuff to feed a planet or two. Nope, just a bunch of sacks of grain that the farmers can pile into a single building in their village.

An immense starship appears, so large that it looms over the village while hanging in low orbit, and then the stupid slow-mo fighting with swords and clubs and farm implements and a few rifles against a robotic army of multi-barreled tanks and armies of space nazis and I see from the synopses that the peasants win.

None of this makes any sense, but there are two movies in this series and a third threatened. There are also going to be “director’s cut” versions of this thing released, as if it deserves further attention. This is garbage of Hugo Gernsback quality, illiterate hackery. How does Zack Snyder get away with it?

You know, the first thing a good science fiction movie should have is a competent, compelling writer generating the ideas behind its premise and execution. I guess since Star Wars got away with neglecting that component, though, nobody thinks it’s necessary any more.

Comments

  1. chrislawson says

    You’re more resilient than me. I only managed twenty minutes of the first Rebel Moon film.

  2. michaelvieths says

    I watched the first one a couple weeks ago. It wasn’t bad, strictly speaking, but it was yet another ‘Seven Samurai in space’ movie. Village is threatened, someone goes off to recruit a bunch of quirky characters to save them. If you’ve seen Star Wars or Battle Beyond the Stars, you’ve seen this movie. It does not deviate from the formula in any interesting way. It has a lot of nice eye candy in it, especially if, like me, you are a fan of bearded Viking types.
    So, entirely skippable, but not awful. At least the first one.

  3. says

    First film was close to unwatchable, and I imagine the same for this one. The lead actress seemed to think being dramatic is to just yell and scream, and the story was a blatant ripoff of The Seven Samurai/The Magnificent Seven. Roger Corman also made a space opera remake in the late 70s called Battle Beyond the Stars, which, while really low budget and quite cheesy, was still a fun movie with interesting characters.

  4. Rob Bos says

    I guess you could justify the resource use by the “just one ant” problem. Not that they probably went there. If you respond with dramatic overkill to the one village that stands up, you secure all the other little villages at the same time. Word spreads.

    But yeah, it’s a post-hoc justification that they probably didn’t put in. I haven’t seen it. :)

  5. BACONSQAUDgaming says

    The 3 Body Problem is intriguing. It has some interesting scientific concepts, and makes a good attempt at being scientifically plausible. I enjoyed Season 1, but I hope the writing doesn’t suffer in Season 2.

  6. robert79 says

    Yeah, I watched it too… and stopped pretty much in the first few minutes when I saw a horse and plow.

    You’re capable of sending people to other planets for grain, but forgot how to build combine harvesters?

  7. Rich Woods says

    I watched this film for laughs, having seen the first film.

    There weren’t many. It was even worse than the first one.

    I wish you hadn’t said there’s going to be a third.

  8. says

    To be fair: Star Wars is actually more space opera than science fiction. Space opera is way more fantasy but it happens to be set in Space. Not a lot of science involved, unlike science fiction.

    Or, to put it another way: Lion Force Voltron is Star Wars and Vehicle Force Voltron is Star Trek. 😅

  9. birgerjohansson says

    Star Wars is kinda like the SF written by the late Jack Vance – exotic worlds and weird aliens- but adapted for children.

    The less ambitious films are at best fun to watch in the manner of the first Star Crash film (coupled with beer and popcorn).
    Most dreck made under the label SF is more like the dull second Star Crash film. But ‘The Titan Find’ was made endurable by the creepiness of Klaus Kinski.

  10. birgerjohansson says

    Autobot silverwynde @ 8

    There are tons of competently written space opera out there, but aquiring the rights would require money. It is cheaper to have some in-house hack type up a script in a week. Hell, they might just get what passes for “AI” to randomly combine tropes.
    🤢
    My recurring compaint – which I have repeated here so often that regulars probably want me to shut up and die- is that a gang of clever 15-year-old nerds would not only identify plot holes but devise ways to avoid them and make the plots logically consistent.
    Hell, a bunch of nerds might even have devised a way to sort out the ending of “Lost” if given a few weeks and unlimited soda and popcorn.

  11. says

    @9: Loved me some Genesis Climber MOSPEADA. Marlene was the reason why.

    @11: Yeah, between doing it right and doing it cheap, cheap will win every time. If Paramount gave half a crap about Transformers, they could have hired a couple of decent fanfic writers to fix The Last Knight but they would have wanted some actual money and well, studios don’t want to pay people for anything.

  12. ethicsgradient says

    The plot isn’t that far off Douglas Adams’ Flying Party in Life, The Universe and Everything, which roams a planet, and raids the ground below for alcohol and nibbles. But their excuse is the astro-engineers who got the building to literally fly and armed it were drunk at the time, and it was just one of those ideas that only sound good at parties.

  13. says

    You know, the first thing a good science fiction movie should have is a competent, compelling writer generating the ideas behind its premise and execution. I guess since Star Wars got away with neglecting that component, though, nobody thinks it’s necessary any more.

    Now, now, the script for one of the Star Wars movies was primarily written by a Real Writer. (And I do not mean the first name listed.) It’s not her fault that He Who Shall Not Be Named† cut three critical scenes in favor of more spectacle.

    But the other eight in the “main sequence” and the sideshows — yeah, that’s fair.

    † Do not get me started on the retconning-with-Campbell’s-claptrap nonsense. Just. Don’t. Nobody need that much literary theory on a Monday.

  14. whheydt says

    As regards Star Wars as space opera… I’ve read that Lucas wanted to film E. E. Smith’s Lensman series, but couldn’t get the rights, so he wrote Star Wars instead. The Lensmen books are pretty much the definitive space opera series, though one might consider his earlier Skylark series as a first attempt. (The interesting thing about The Skylark of Space, the first book in that series, is that it was actually written before WW1 and when published in the early 1920s was the first SF with an interstellar setting.)

  15. microraptor says

    One thing to remember about the Rebel Moon series is that Zack Snyder originally pitched the script as a Star Wars trilogy. Disney said no, so he went to Netflix and pitched it as a Star Wars knockoff trilogy. And there’s a Snyder Cut release because the Snyder Cut of the awful Justice League movie was popular so he thinks that cutting a movie into an incomprehensible mess in order to release a less cut version later is a winning strategy.

  16. says

    Wow, that sounds like the lamest “empire” storyline ever; and that’s saying a lot — “galactic empires” are a tired, over-used, and under-thought-out trope. In this case, why would “the empire” need to send a big expensive fuel-guzzling interstellar-warfare strike force just to rob a village of grain, when they could have just sent a much cheaper freighter and crew with a wad of cash to just BUY the grain they needed? Even if the villagers manage to haggle their price up to twice the galaxy-wide market rate, it would still have cost less than sending any sort of military fleet/unit out there to grab it by force.

  17. Reginald Selkirk says

    @2: It wasn’t bad, strictly speaking, but it was yet another ‘Seven Samurai in space’ movie…

    Maybe they were just bringing the point home. Cinema afficionados know that Star Wars was based on Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress

  18. chrislawson says

    More on the idiot logistics…it’s clear in the first film that this farming community is just scraping by in barren conditions, barely existing at subsistence level, and yet this is where the evil empire decides to send its huge battleship to commandeer grain. They wouldn’t have recouped the food needs of their own crew.

  19. Alan G. Humphrey says

    “Scargiver” – W.T.F.
    Might as well call it Scar Wars, where unwell-healed individuals spread their unwell-healed wounds through swordplay.

  20. bravus says

    The ‘Weekly Planet’ podcast, which I enjoy and highly recommend, instantly dubbed it ‘The Scaregiver’.

  21. whywhywhy says

    I watched it and almost immediately forgot it. I would have been better off to have forgotten to watch it.

  22. NitricAcid says

    I can forgive Star Wars for having planetary monarchies and galactic empires because I got used to it when I was nine years old when I first saw it. I can’t stand the idea in any other science fiction setting. I don’t think I got more than fifteen minutes into the first Rebel Moon.

  23. HidariMak says

    My bravery for this Snyder/Netflix trilogy was limited to hearing the ‘God Awful Movies’ take on the first one. It sounds like part two is too stupid to even be fun by comparison. Netflix’s take on the classic Cowboy Bebop anime was reason for me to cancel my subscription, and Rebel Moon seems to be keeping that level of “quality”.

  24. says

    chrislawson @19: “Flying Food Supply Squads” didn’t work when Lenin tried them (and still didn’t work when he rebranded it “War Communism”); so the same idea on a galactic-empire scale would be even stoopider.

  25. says

    Imagine the IJN Yamato sailing up to some random fishing village in the Philipines and big bad admiral Yamamoto stepping out to personally bully the fishermen there into giving them a year’s worth of catch the next time he shows up in a month. Does this sound like an even remotely believable scenario? Snyder said YES enthusiastically.

  26. Dunc says

    OK, I’m not going to argue that that sounds shit, but I am going to aruge with the fundamental premise that what passes for economic rationality in the early 21st century is some kind of inviolable universal law like the laws of physics. For one thing, plenty of what we do on the grounds that it’s economically rational actually makes absolutely no fucking sense whatsoever. And for another, once you have the productive capacity implied by the ability to maintain a galactic empire, you can almost certainly afford to prioritise other considerations.

    Sci-fi economics almost never make sense in our terms, but I’m not convinced that’s a particularly compelling argument. As Captain Picard said, when confronted by a thawed-out 21st century businessman demanding a copy of the Wall Street Journal so he could check up on his stock portfolio, “The economics of the future are somewhat different.”

    It’s a bit like an early mediaeval scholar looking at a depiction of a world somewhat like our own, and arguing that it’s completely unbelievable because there’s no way such a system would allow people to fulfil their feudal obligation to render military service to their overlord.

  27. says

    Dunc #29

    Please don’t bother defending the economics of Snyder’s indulgency. In the first part, big bad admiral Noble bullies some farmers on the planet for food which he says he needs…only to then spitefully obliterate a planet with much richer food reserves which he had just seized control of. Snyder never spend any thoughts on future economics. It’s just copying a part of Seven Samurai’s plot verbatim without thinking about how this doesn’t gel with his changes to the setting and the context.

  28. Dunc says

    Please don’t bother defending the economics of Snyder’s indulgency.

    That wasn’t my intention. Like I say, it sounds shit.

    I’m just pointing out that our ideas about economics are culturally specific, rather than universal, and there’s no reason to think that a different society would recognise them.

  29. jo1storm says

    They are culturally specific, but some things stay the same.

    Sending a warship or ten to take over a resource that can’t be found anywhere else is acceptable (Dune’s spice, dilithium crystals, lightsaber crystals, unobtanium, magic potion from Asterix, whatever). Rarity and perceived value is the reason to justify expenditure.
    Sending a warship to take some grain that can be made somewhere else? Wasteful. Now, we could argue that subjugating peasants is a good propaganda motive to spread fear into the population so they stay down but it still needs a valid reason like rarity of the thing. Otherwise they don’t need a reason at all and that in this case might be even better than stupid reason.

  30. rietpluim says

    I started watching the first series on Netflix and got bored after 20 minutes. What a pile of cliches.

  31. Akira MacKenzie says

    @ 10

    Sorry, call me a sexist pig if common decency requires it, but I can’t think of Starcrash without having very pleasant thoughts about 1970s-era Caroline Munro.

    @ 12

    Awwww yeah! As child, riding around on street on my BMX-style bike, I imagined I was on a Cyclone cycle being chased by the Invid. Some of the few happy memories I had as a kid.

  32. Akira MacKenzie says

    @ 27

    Imagine the IJN Yamato sailing up to some random fishing village in the Philipines…

    Sorry to make yet another old school anime reference but… “WAVE MOTION GUN, FIRE!”

  33. Walter Solomon says

    third threatened.

    Exactly my sentiments when I learned there’s a third Alien VS Predator planned.

  34. says

    Now, we could argue that subjugating peasants is a good propaganda motive to spread fear into the population so they stay down…

    We could more plausibly argue that letting peasants profit from peaceful, apolitical trade and government spending is a much better propaganda move — one that tends to give an empire FEWER potential enemies behind their own front lines rather than more. Keep their hearts empty and their bellies full and all that.

  35. says

    I think we can still argue that energetics are universal. Spending the energy budget of a fully crewed starship that has to travel many light years to gather what might be 10-20 million calories of wheat is wasteful, especially when wheat is neither rare nor greatly desirable on other grounds.

  36. Dunc says

    I think we can still argue that energetics are universal.

    Not if you’ve beaten that problem well enough for a galatic empire to even be able exist in the first place. That already implies that you’re able and willing to expend unimaginably vast amounts of energy on dominating people over ridiculous distances for no plausibly rational reason.

    Spending the energy budget of a fully crewed starship that has to travel many light years to gather what might be 10-20 million calories of wheat is wasteful

    So is destroying vast quantities of food to keep prices up, but we do that all the time. It’s “rational” within the parameters of the dominant belief system, even though it’s obviously completely bonkers by any other measure.

    Look, clearly Snyder has utterly failed to construct any kind of halfway plausible in-world explanation, so 0 out of 10 on that score, but civilisations do all sorts of stupid and nonsensical things for all sorts of stupid and nonsensical reasons, from “the Gods demand it” to “this will bump our numbers for the quarterly earnings report”. The fact that this stupid and nonsensical thing can’t be justified by our currently preferred set of stupid and nonsensical reasons doesn’t meant that other stupid and nonsensical reasons aren’t available. Hell, maybe they’re only doing it because somebody filled a 37B/6 out incorrectly… Stranger things have happened.

  37. StevoR says

    @37. Raging Bee :reminds me of the old joke :

    Lancelot : “King Arthur , I have burned and plundered all your enemies in the south!’

    Arthur : What? You fool! I don’t have any enemies inthe South.”

    Lancelot : Er, you do now sire..

    Can’t recall source, some old joke book?

  38. says

    Not if you’ve beaten that problem well enough for a galatic empire to even be able exist in the first place. That already implies that you’re able and willing to expend unimaginably vast amounts of energy on dominating people over ridiculous distances for no plausibly rational reason.

    No, it doesn’t necessarily, because whoever has all that resources and firepower still has to make at least some cost-vs-benefit calculations. (Although I do agree that your statement says more about how implausible and poorly-thought-out the whole idea of a “galactic empire” (or any other sort of multi-solar state for that matter) really is.)

    So is destroying vast quantities of food to keep prices up, but we do that all the time.

    Actually, destroying food is pretty cheap and easy; and if food prices are so low that you have to destroy food to get/keep prices up, that’s most likely because there’s a food surplus, which means destroying that surplus isn’t really such an outrageous or insane idea after all (especially if the food won’t keep). Wrong and inefficient, yes, but not outrageously irrational.

  39. StevoR says

    @ ^ Raging Bee : Notably in a scene or two in Steinbeck’s ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’

    Plus memory serving John Brunner’s ‘The Sheep Look up novel too.

  40. raven says

    I’m already late here as someone has already pointed it out.

    Their mistake was going after wheat.
    Dilithium crystals are far more valuable.

    Without Dilithium crystals, those space warships aren’t going any where.

    Dilithium Crystals

    Dilithium is a precious crystal used in tactical warp drives. It is semi-permeable to both deuterium and anti-deuterium, and provides a natural chamber for a controlled matter-antimatter reaction, focusing the energy so it can be harnessed and used for power.

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology
    https://www.mit.edu › ~locutus › SFB › rules › node12

    If you can’t trust MIT, then who can you trust.

  41. says

    If you have humongous space warships, why not have giant zero gee hydroponic farms? It’s cheaper than a warship (I assume, because generally everything about warships has to be overspec)

  42. Dunc says

    If you have humongous space warships, why not have giant zero gee hydroponic farms? It’s cheaper than a warship

    Exactly! There is no problem that you can solve by galactic imperialism that can’t be solved more cheaply by other means, unless you happen to have an a priori ideological commitment to galactic imperialism – in which case there’s no point talking about whether it’s “rational” or not.

  43. jack lecou says

    It’s a shame, because I suspect there might actually be interesting stories to be told about the logistical difficulties of hypothetical interstellar empires. Or at least stories to be told with that setup as a background. But you would have to spend more than 2 seconds thinking through some of the details to give the setting some depth.

    Rebel Moon definitely doesn’t do that.

    Stars Wars doesn’t do that either, but Rebel Moon is so much worse. Star Wars certainly has its problems — an interstellar conflict where the strategic goals are murky (at best), ostensibly defeated enemies that re-materialize with fleets of thousands of ships and millions of crew apparently from nowhere. Or the enslavement and abuse of sentient droids on an industrial scale by both the “bad” guys AND the “good” guys.

    But at least Star Wars has sort of the illusion of depth thanks to detailed props and sets, interesting-ish characters, and a lot of extended supplementary material.

    Rebel has none of that. And collecting grain over interstellar distances is just impossibly, bafflingly, insultingly stupid. It’s incredibly lazy. That one wouldn’t even take more than 2 seconds to fix — just make it something else the villagers have. Maybe their village is right on top of a valuable vein of McGuffin Mineral. Or maybe it’s the people themselves. Maybe the emperor periodically takes slaves from outlying colonies as a form of ritual tribute. Maybe some people are telepathic or something and are routinely interned as dangerous. Something. Anything.

    And that’s only the first problem with the setting…

  44. killyosaur says

    Favorite comment regarding “Rebel Moon”:
    “I envy those who have not yet seen Rebel Moon I and II. It’s terrible”