DUNE: PART TWO***

DUNE: PART TWO is probably about as good a film as one can make about Frank Herbert's iconic religio-sci-fi book. The flaws I found in this film are mostly down to how distasteful and uninspiring I find the source material - with its superficial embrace of Middle Eastern and North African culture and the fact that its female characters are almost entirely reduced to breeding vessels. I understand that I am not perhaps the appropriate demographic for the books. But Denis Villeneuve has taken it and created two films of arresting visuals and a stunning score.  Greig Fraser's IMAX cinematography is bold and beautiful and truly envelopes us in Arrakis. And Hans Zimmer is at his finest combining sandworm-commanding drums, rock guitars, and menacing prophecy-reciting choirs.

As this instalment opens, we are mere days after part one. Paul Atreides and his mother Lady Jessica have survived the massacre of their House on the desert planet of Arrakis.  Paul has proven himself a fearsome warrior to the indigenous Fremen, some of whom think he is their long-awaited messiah.  This delights Lady Jessica and Atreides loyalist Gurney Halleck, who believes the Fremen will be a powerful fighting force. But Paul's lover Chani has it right - these prophecies are just stories being used to control the Fremen.  The narrative arc is powered by the choice that faces Paul. Will he be swayed by his prophetic dreams of devastating interstellar war and reject being a messiah. Or will he exploit the Fremen for revenge on the Harkonnens and seize the imperial throne?

There is so much to love in how Villeneuve brings this to the screen. He wisely leaves the sandworms as barely seen epic creatures. The production and costume design of the Harkonnen's world and of the Baron and Na-Baron in particular are arresting. 

But the performances veer from mediocre to weak. I found something almost comical in Timothee Chalamet's petulance as Paul and was unfortunately reminded of THE LIFE OF BRIAN - "He's not the Messiah - he's a very naughty boy!" Once you see the film through that lens - "the gourd!" - there's no turning back. There was zero screen chemistry between Chalamet's Paul and Zendaya's Chani which is odd as they seem to be constantly low-key flirting on the red carpet. Christopher Walken is hopelessly miscast as the Emperor - totally bringing me out of the film with his unique American accent. Only Javier Bardem stood out as Stilgar - petrifying in his increasing religious fervour.

I suspect that performances aren't really what interest Villeneuve. He is all about spectacle. Script and character are somewhat beyond the point for him. But this leads to weird choices around narrative. 

Most obviously, Villeneuve's choice not to allow the narrative to unravel over several years problematic. It felt as though Paul's journey from young pup to Emperor had taken place over a few weeks! Is it really so easy to seize power?  And how is this going to impact the timeline around Alia, who we see as a grown woman in Paul's dreams.  Another choice I disagree with is to minimise the influence of the Guild and put all of the machinations onto the Bene Gesserit cult. 

But perhaps the biggest macro issue I have with both books and film is that there's no-one to really root for. On the one hand you have a decrepit Emperor who seems flaccid and pointless. Then there are the comically evil and therefore uninteresting Harkonnens.  The Bene Genesserit are nuts and seem to have no endgame. The Fremen are religious extremists. And Paul is a self-acknowledged harbinger of mass genocide. It's like watching Succession but without the comedy swearing.

DUNE: PART TWO has a running time of 166 minutes and is rated-PG-13. It is on global release. 

DUNE (2021) ****

Frank Herbert's iconic ecological sci-fi/fantasy series, Dune, begins its first book with our hero, a young aristocrat called Paul Atreides, being yanked off his luscious home planet to travel with his family to an arid desert planet called Arrakis. The evil Emperor has lured them there with the promise of Arrakis' riches - the ability to mine "spice" - a drug that makes interplanetary travel possible. Really, the Emperor is jealous of Paul's father's charismatic power and is backing House Atreides rivals, the Harkonnens.  But Paul's father feels he can mount a challenge if he can form an alliance with Arrakis' indigenous population of Fremen....

Dune is notoriously unfilmable and yet it feels like every film-maker who read it as a teenager or somehow got their hands on Jodo's epic designs (see Frank Pavich's superb documentary JODOROWSKY'S DUNE) has somehow filmed it without acknowledging it openly.  To read Dune is to realise how much everything from Star Wars to Game of Thrones has borrowed heavily from its tale of political infighting, inter-galactic warfare, and mystic religiosity. This means that anyone who ACTUALLY films Dune risks looking like they're ripping off later works who themselves ripped off Dune.  (Tatooine, Saarlaks and the Force anyone?!)  And then there's the terrifying experience of David Lynch in the mid-80s, creating a Dune that was a commercial failure, where he didn't have final edit, and where despite flashes of design brilliance the whole thing feels like a pantomime ghoulish mess. (See my DVD commentary here). 

So it takes a real fanboy to have the balls to actually film Dune, and that fanboy is Denis Villeneuve, most famous for his superb sci-fi film ARRIVAL and the recent  moody but unnecessary BLADE RUNNER sequel. It tells you a lot that despite his commercial track record, the studio was not willing to finance both films that would've covered book one of the series, wanting to wait and see if part one actually found an audience.  Hollywood scars run long and deep.

Villeneuve's DUNE is, I am relieved and happy to say, a visual and aural triumph.  From his creation of Caladan in the Norwegian fjords, to his stunning depiction of shifting sands in Arrakis, this is a film-maker with a keen sensibility who leaves us with instantly iconic scenes.  I also really loved his design aesthetic - with beautifully rendered space-ships and palace interiors and ornithopters that actually look like flying insects.  Where Lynch leaned into the grotesquery of Baron Harkonnen, Villeneuve realises that what lives in our minds when we read a book can look absurd when visualised on screen, and so he uses that character sparingly and in a very pared down design. Indeed, all the costumes and make-up feel sleek and and as modern as possible. Finally, behind the lens, Hans Zimmer's score is another triumph, and I am unsurprised to learn that he's another fanboy. 

The acting is by and large fine - with Charlotte Rampling's Bene Genesserit Reverend Mother the standout cameo. Timothee Chalamet - well he looks young enough as Paul - almost pre-pubescent - but it's just another Chalamet role where he plays a brooding kid.  He has zero range - or at least no range that I've seen. Let's see if he can actually look like a leader as and when the next film is made.  Javier Bardem is fun as Stilgar, but we see very little of him.  Where I started to have problems was the use of humour in the film. Herbert's book is really dour and unfunny and the insertion of a couple of deliberately funny scenes around Josh Brolin's Gurney Halleck sat awkwardly with the film's overall tone. And then there was the problem of the audience i watched this with laughing at Zendaya's Chani as she mocked Paul.  And again, given that she needs to take a much larger role in any sequel, that may prove a big problem.

Overall, my feeling is that I enjoyed being in Villeneuve's world and fanboys will be happy that setpieces such as the fight with Jamis make the cut. BUT - BUT - I did find myself looking at my watch a lot.  It's a really weird decision not to film the whole book and because of that not much actually happens, there's no real narrative drive, and it's all just set-up. That's fine for me - I'll happily wait for another film, but is a mainstream audience going to wait? And if not, is this film going to make enough money to warrant a sequel?

DUNE is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 155 minutes.  DUNE played Venice and Toronto 2021 and opens in the UK on October 21st and in the USA on October 22nd.

ARRIVAL - BFI LFF 2016 - Day 7

ARRIVAL is a handsome, intelligent sci-film with stunning visual and aural design and great performances. It's a little bit lit down by thematic and plot similarities to some other recent sci-fi films, but remains a superb film.

The film stars Amy Adams as a linguist called in by the US government to interact with aliens that have landed 12 spaceships all over Earth.  As the movie opens, each host country is co-operating with the other and sharing research - learning that the Heptapods communicate visually and slowly translating their non-linear speech.   But pressure is on - the Chinese is leading a group of nations who interpret their messages as threatening - withdraw from co-operation and are potentially about to launch a first strike.  This leaves Adams' character in a race against time to have the spirit of scientific co-operation trump that of nationalistic belligerence. 

This straightforward plot is complicated by a thesis about the nature and power of language itself.  In an early scene, Adams' character hypothesises that the specific language that we learn affects not just the way in which we think, but the actual neural wiring of our brains.  And so, by extension, to learn a new language could be to rewire the brain.  Accordingly, we have an intellectual idea being explored here - one that posits that by learning the aliens' non-linear language - one that exists outside of conventional time - that Adams' character might herself learn to think, behave and experience life in a non-linear fashion.

ENEMY

You can listen to a podcast review of this film here:




Jake Gyllenhaal is Adam, a university lecturer in Toronto stuck in a repetitive job, alienated from society, and married to a woman who refuses to fuck him.  One day, despite his contempt for film, Adam watches a film and sees movie that apparently stars an actor who is his exact doppelgänger.  It starts off as an innocent infiltration.  Adam picks up Anthony's mail at the film studio.  And then he calls him up. He has a boyish excitement about finding someone who sounds like him.  It feels harmless. Except it isn't.  Meanwhile a freaked out Anthony starts googling Adam.  Anthony's heavily pregnant girlfriend thinks he's having an affair and ends up meeting Adam.  And this leads us into very murky territory indeed. Does Anthony exist? Does Adam?  Is this the story of one man with two lives?  Or is this two people deciding to escalate a battle of extreme disruption at the expense of the women in their lives?

London FIlm Fest Day 12 - POLYTECHNIQUE

POLYTECHNIQUE is Canadian film director, Denis Villieneuve’s, fictional retelling of the Montreal Polytechnicque masssacre in the late 1980s. A disaffected student, angry at feminists studying mechanical engineering who apparently wanted the best of both words, entered a classroom, split the girls from the boys and shot the girls, before walking through the rest of the university, shooting at random, before committing suicide. In dealing with this material, Villeneuve chooses to take a formal approach, establishing the motives of the killer and its impact on the students by recreating the events of that day rather than in essaying the journey to that place. Villeneuve takes accounts of the massacre and creates a killer and a composite male and female student. The male is shown being ushered out of the room before the girls, his friends are massacred, and then takes us with him for the rest of the day. The movie then cuts back to the classroom and shows us the shooting from the perspective of the female character and shows us the impact on her life.

The film is well-made and has moments of real impact, but I have a few problems with it. First, I think that Villeneuve makes a wrong choice in taking the killer at his word at being angered by feminists and following up this theme in the struggle of the female character to be taken seriously in the male-dominated world of mechanical engineering. This is, I think, pandering to the killer’s twisted view of the world. And after all, aren’t all these psychopaths just using whatever particular beef they have as a justification for a more basic need to cause hurt and gain attention? The other reason I think Villeneuve makes a mistake in focusing on the feminism theme is that it leads him into mawkish territory - particularly in the final, cliché ridden monologue of the female character.

POLYTECHNIQUE played Cannes 2009 and London 2009 and opened in Canada in February.