-
9 votes
-
My thoughts on Denis Villeneuve's Dune
OK, well. Dune then. Sort of a live review, as I watch. Some more in-depth thoughts at the end. Mildly spoilery, but not if you know the story already. Fair warning, I will not be judging this...
OK, well. Dune then. Sort of a live review, as I watch. Some more in-depth thoughts at the end. Mildly spoilery, but not if you know the story already.
Fair warning, I will not be judging this film on purely it's own merits. It exists in the world and also in the world are Lynch's film (for reference I consider the spicediver fanedit, Alternative Edition Redux, to be the canonical version of that), the Sci-Fi channel miniseries and obviously the books. Yes, even the prequels - the first of which is one of the worst books I've ever read and I've read The Davinci Code. Anyway, on to actually watching it...
Well, it's pretty. One problem is that no matter how good the design is - and the design is VERY good - it's just not as good as Tony Masters and David Lynch building on material from Mobius and HR Giger. This film is obviously heavily influenced by them though.
In my head Caladan is a lush, fertile, welcoming world. It's been colour graded to grey and desaturated. Feels wrong.
He's lifting both shots and dialogue from Lynch's film. That's good. My brain is filling in the missing bits of internal monologing.
Nice implementation of Chakobsa. I like that.
Hans Zimmer can just fuck off with that big stupid honking sound he shoehorns into everything. So annoying.
This film is missing Roger Deakins. I mean you can say that about a lot of films but this one especially. It is beautifully shot but Deakins would have taken it to another level.
Why are people whispering at each other over like ten metre distances? I hate that. Speak up, you're outside, it's windy and you're far apart! It's not moody if you obviously can't even hear each other. Yes, small thing, but things like that which upset your suspension of disbelief are jarring.
You can't put a crysknife away without it tasting blood. Pffft. That's just ignoring lore for the sake of it. Five seconds would be all it took to do that bit. We could have had one fewer lingering shots on the knife itself instead. As an aside, the Shadout Mapes as a means to explain bits of Arrakeen and Fremen lore to the Atredies (and us!) is horrendously under-used.
The ornithopters in this movie are badass. There is an in-universe reason for them that I can't remember.
I wonder how much of this works if you haven't seen Lynch's version (which has much more internal thoughts of characters) or read the books?
Stellan Skarsgard is channelling Apocalypse Now era Brando pretty hard and that is in no way a bad thing. His Baron is absolutely superb, probably the best part of the whole film. Piter de Vries is nowhere near weird/creepy/insane enough. Leaving out Feyd-Rautha is a mistake, he's the anti-Paul and even though Sting did a relatively terrible job in Lynch's film, that doesn't mean he's not important.
Zimmer teasing elements of Eno's original theme is a nice touch as well.
You know what's cool? What's cool is that at certain key moments I get lines from the book appearing in my head, from whichever scene is happening. That's a really good sign. I haven't read Dune for years.
So OK, overall, it's not as bad as I was expecting. It's pretty. It's stylish. It's annoyingly colour graded but what isn't these days? But this film doesn't add much to the telling of Dune over the Lynch's film or even, really, the Sci-Fi miniseries. Villeneuve is obviously a fan of both books and Lynch's movie and what he has made is good. A lot of what he's made is basically just a remake of what Lynch did, and I don't just mean because both films are based on the same book - there are multiple direct lifts straight from Lynch's film, and that is perfectly OK. But it's not about what is here, it's about what isn't.
Because it leaves a lot out - it's shallow where it should be deep, it's straightforward where it should be mystical, simple where it should be weird. It's 8-10 characters when it should be twice that and worst of all a lot of it seems to rely on viewers knowing the lore rather than having time to explain it: and all that is because film is the wrong medium for this story.
It misses out on exploring much about any of the characters simply because nobody has enough screentime to go into their motivations, which are generally multifaceted and complex - I do appreciate Villeneuve not wanting to have characters stand around expositioning at each other (MCU, looking at you), or doing a voiceover of character's thoughts like Lynch did, but that means you really need to spend time with them so they can show us what they're thinking, not tell us. "Show don't tell" is good filmmaking but it takes time.
For example, Paul and Jessica get most of the screen time but we don't really learn much about them. Because you need a lot of lore to contextualise their motivations - Jessica's actions and desires need to be placed in the wider context of her relationship to Leto and the Bene Gesserit and their plans and while Villeneueve does try to do that a bit, it's one or two lines with Leto and one rushed (literally, they're doing a walk-and-talk) conversation in which Helen Moahim mentions the Kwisatz Haderach and little more.
The Guild are barely even mentioned. You see some lower level navigators but you don't know who they are if you don't already know who they are. The Guild's influence is so important to so much of what happens in Dune but if you didn't know they existed already I'm not sure you'd leave this film knowing there was a spacing guild at all. Same goes for the Emperor and the Landsraad, they hardly come up at all. The thing about Dune is that it's not just about Paul. Paul is important but he's really just the pointy end of a lot of long-game players and systems and their interactions. That doesn't really come over in Villeneuve's film. Also it's not really a structural issue but I'd have loved to have seen more of the Heighliners. A Navigation sequence would have been fun too.
The thing is, Dune deserves a TV series. A high budget one like Game of Thrones. I want an hour on Caladan, learning about the Atredies. I want an hour on Kaitain learning about the Padishah Emperors and the Bene Gesserit. Same with the Harkkonens. I want to be 3 or 4 episodes in before I even see Arrakis. Movies are great for telling short stories, maybe novellas at best. But big, long, complicated books need to be on TV where they can spread out, take their time, develop characters and fill in backstory and motivations.
Overall, 7/10 and I really hope the second movie gets funded because stopping here would be even worse. It's worth watching but don't expect a great deal underpinning what is still a very beautiful film. I could have written that same sentence about Bladerunner 2049, thinking about it.
27 votes -
Val (2021)
I watched Val tonight. Its mostly old footage that Val filmed himself. He was quick to have a video camera and seemed to carry it with him everywhere. If you're unaware, Val Kilmer lost his voice...
I watched Val tonight. Its mostly old footage that Val filmed himself. He was quick to have a video camera and seemed to carry it with him everywhere.
If you're unaware, Val Kilmer lost his voice during his treatment for throat cancer. He can still speak, but with difficulty.
Anyway, even if you're a mild fan of Kilmer's work, this is worth a watch. I much prefer this format for documentaries to the talking heads we get with other documentaries like Velvet Underground (2021)
Val is from Amazon Studios and A24.
6 votes -
Why Mulan (2020) didn't work
8 votes -
‘Eternals’ pulled from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait in apparent ban
6 votes -
Sprite Fright - Open Movie by Blender Studio
9 votes -
David Zucker reflects on Airplane!
7 votes -
Lightyear | Teaser trailer
15 votes -
‘Dune’ sequel greenlighted by Legendary and Warner Bros
16 votes -
Alec Baldwin fatally shoots crew member with prop firearm on film set, authorities say
34 votes -
Guns, ammo, accountability: Hollywood munitions experts grapple with ‘Rust’ tragedy
6 votes -
Thoughts on Mulan (2020)?
I just finished watching it (pirated, because I wasn’t going to give Disney money after all the controversy regarding Taiwan). Uhh, it.. was bad? I mean I’m usually pretty positive especially...
I just finished watching it (pirated, because I wasn’t going to give Disney money after all the controversy regarding Taiwan).
Uhh, it.. was bad? I mean I’m usually pretty positive especially about all the Disney remakes, and I liked the general darker mood of this Mulan version. But what’s with the 90s era cgi physics?
Also, and I get the Mulan plot line is entirely about how ridiculous gender-gating is in general, but whew there is a serious case of The Stupids around a lot of the tradition, much more so than in the original. This felt very tropey to me, convenient idiocy. I mean yes okay this takes place 1200 years ago but …
I appreciated not seeing mushu, but the Phoenix could have just been a lot lot lot more subtle.
And I’ve never seen snow look so much like party foam. This is the same studio that produced Frozen?!
Man, this movie felt like it was written, produced and directed in 1998. I would say I watched the wrong one by mistake but the original was actually good for its time.
What happened, did I miss something? This could have been an amazing movie full of great music, awesome choreography, and a super dark take on the original. Instead, I watched the equivalent of a machine learning exercise in turning anime to live action.
9 votes -
Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time | Official trailer
5 votes -
The Batman | Main trailer
13 votes -
Jamie Costa's test footage for Robin Williams biopic
8 votes -
The problem with film criticism
7 votes -
Pure nostalgia: The oral history of ‘That Thing You Do!’
2 votes -
Hollywood crews vote to authorize a strike for better pay and working conditions
33 votes -
Bob Iger’s long goodbye
1 vote -
Hollywood battle lines emerge in simmering vaccine war
6 votes -
Disney and Scarlett Johansson resolve bitter ‘Black Widow’ profits lawsuit
7 votes -
List of Rock and Roll movies?
I’m trying to find movies where Rock and Roll is a character, not movies about the music. Examples I can think of include: Heavy Metal Xanadu Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band Rock and Rule...
I’m trying to find movies where Rock and Roll is a character, not movies about the music.
Examples I can think of include:
Heavy Metal
Xanadu
Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
Rock and RuleMaybe
Streets of Fire
The Hunger
Grease (technically a musical i guess)
Guardians of the Galaxy6 votes -
Licorice Pizza | Official trailer
2 votes -
The Tragedy of Macbeth | Official trailer
4 votes -
Finnish director Jalmari Helander has started principal photography in Lapland and Helsinki on the majority English-language World War II action film ‘Immortal’
6 votes -
Shang-Chi and the perpetual foreigners
4 votes -
Ninjababy | Trailer
3 votes -
Don't Look Up | Official teaser trailer
10 votes -
C'mon C'mon | Official trailer
8 votes -
The birth of Gun Fu
5 votes -
New The Matrix Resurrections teaser trailers use inline dynamic time
14 votes -
The clickbaitification of Netflix
16 votes -
China erases billionaire actress Zhao Wei from history
24 votes -
Enforcement / Shorta | Official trailer
3 votes -
Queen Margrethe II, reigning monarch of Denmark, is to design the sets for a forthcoming Netflix film adapted from a novel by Karen Blixen
6 votes -
Why Mad Max: Fury Road works
8 votes -
Birds of Prey: Looking at Harley Quinn
10 votes -
Spider-Man: No Way Home | Official teaser trailer
27 votes -
Abuse and toxic masculinity: The complex themes of Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2
5 votes -
Cry Macho | Official trailer
2 votes -
Action star Shinichi 'Sonny' Chiba dies at 82 from COVID-19 complications
8 votes -
Former Cult Member Hears Music For The First Time (2020)
6 votes -
How Aladdin changed animation (by screwing over Robin Williams)
7 votes -
Nestflix: The only platform for your favorite nested films and tv shows
16 votes -
How Tony Leung acts with his eyes
5 votes -
Lamb / Dýrið | Official trailer
6 votes -
Hollywood reaps the rewards of becoming more diverse: Films with a diverse cast tend to outperform the rest
9 votes -
A Computer-Generated Ballet (1965) - The first computer-generated animation of human figures in motion
5 votes -
We're in a time loop of time loop movies
16 votes -
The Last Duel | Official trailer
8 votes