Zack Snyder is a talented cinematographer masquerading as a storyteller, kind of like Michael Bay.

I thought act one was actually pretty strong up to the point where Kora and Gunnar left the village.

I think the attempted rape of the farm girl who is definitely just a farm girl and certainly not secretly the princess Kora pretended to kill but actually absconded with and hid on this backwater planet was in bounds in terms of the story as told up to that point.

The village had rejected the idea of rebelling, but the empire tried to do something so horrible that it had to be resisted, the the extremity of that resistance meant the dice were irrevocably cast.

There needed to be something like that to drive the plot, and it made sense.

The issue stems from the fact we never saw that character again for the rest of the film. She served a narrative purpose and then no one so much as mentioned her name afterwards, relegating her and her trauma to a plot device.

My major issue with the movie is that after a pretty decent setup with multiple characters introduced with potential depth were all basically tossed out so we could get action sequences with a bunch of barely defined new characters that did nothing but add runtime.

You could cut the scenes with Nemesis fighting Shelob and the guy whose entire role seemed to be to show his abs as much as possible riding Buckbeak and it wouldn’t change the ending in any way.

Had the movie been about Sam the farm girl, the soldier who defended her who I’m sure had a name(?), and C3PHopkins going on the quest with Kora and Gunnar, it would have been a much better movie.

If we’d seen Sam dealing with the trauma or maybe resolving to learn to fight to prevent that from ever happening again, that might be interesting.

If we saw her say, bonding with the robot and only feeling safe around him, or literally ANY development whatsoever of her character beyond being a plot point I think not only would that sequence land better, but the movie wouldn’t have felt so disjointed and kind of pointless.

And I’m pretty sure the reason they included the cantina scene with Gunnar getting assaulted was specifically to be able to say “We aren’t misogynistic! We show sexual violence against men too and it’s even more pointless!”