Film Review 162 – Dune: Part Two

Watched: 8th March 2024

Rating: 5/5 stars

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   The spectacle of watching this in IMAX format was frankly incomparable. I watched the first one in a normal cinema when it came out, and still found myself blown away by the effects and sounds – but last night took the biscuit. Dune 2 is nearly three hours’ worth of unrelenting spectacle, a tour-de-force that ducks and weaves, charges and feints, pushes through everything in its path without ever losing a single second of its own momentum. I hate sand as well, but it’s never looked so good on the silver screen, those wide shots of desolate dunes (see what I did there) haunting in their beauty beneath the pre-dawn sky, or else the blistering open desert at high noon, where earth and sky seem to melt into one. And then you contrast this with Giedi Prime, the unsettling glamour of its fighting pits, everything in a monochromatic, otherworldly glow that only highlights the inhumanity of its inhabitants, their almost-human faces and expressions. Dune 2 is a feast for not just the eyes, but all the senses.

   What of its story though? A problem I found with the initial Dune, that it sacrificed some of its heart in order to build its world (a necessary evil, to be sure), is all but gone in its sequel. Timothée Chalamet’s descent from hero to anti-hero, as Paul Atreides begins to resign himself to the destiny he has long tried to resist, is sobering to watch, but what is equally as gripping is the effect it has on his relationship with Chani – and how Zendaya captures the character’s natural sharpness and softness, the love she has for Paul tempered with the fear she has of him becoming someone unrecognisable. Meanwhile you have Rebecca Ferguson giving another scintillating turn as Lady Jessica, all notions of Bene Gesserit planning and plotting cranked up to 100 as she endeavours to make a messiah of her son. Dune is a space opera whose story rests not on grand, intrinsic moral notions of good versus evil, but instead on the dynamics of power, family, prophecy and truth. Is Paul really the long-awaited saviour? Does that even matter, when so many around him – and he himself – believe it? This is a parable against the dangers of extremism, of religious fervour and how imperialism do nothing except to decimate cultures with centuries of history. Watching Zendaya standing alone – quite literally – against this oncoming storm is almost sad, though I can’t wait to see how it turns out in Dune Messiah.

   Likewise, now that the story is fully on its way, the closing chapter of this trilogy has a lot to live up to. Florence Pugh hints at moments of Irulan’s iron will, but I’m still waiting to see her blade fully brandished. Likewise, if I could ask for something of this film, it would have been slightly more of the imperial court, slightly more of the Bene Gesserit. When you’re adapting something so dense, changes are necessary though, and Denis Villeneuve shows that his hands are more than capable at holding this delicate balance.

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Originally posted on Letterboxd on 21st March 2024: https://boxd.it/60pvWj

Film Review 58 – Don’t Worry Darling

Watched: 24th September 2022

Rating: 3/5 stars

tl;dr – I’m glad Florence had fun at least

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   Don’t Worry Darling could have been a train wreck. In all honesty though, if you have been living in a bubble and stayed off social media for about roughly the last six months or so, you wouldn’t be able to tell – too much – of all the drama going on behind the scenes. In fact I think a train wreck would have rather fun to watch, if nothing else, but I’m glad for all those involved that it stopped itself from swerving off the tracks at the last minute and delivers a relatively enjoyable watching experience. One that definitely does lose some of its proverbial steam as it goes along, for some (God I’m so good at unintentional puns), but we shall get to that in a minute.

   This film is like Lost if you took it off the island and instead trapped them all in a city in the desert with their memories wiped – great premise, you know there’s something going on, but it seems like they didn’t quite know what it was until about halfway through. Florence Pugh delivers one of her best turns as a woman slowly losing her mind (or is she?) and I could literally have watched her verbally spar with Chris Pine for half an hour longer than they actually do. She’s definitely the highlight of the film, but when you expect that, even though it’s nice to have your beliefs affirmed, it does make everything else pale in comparison. Chris Pine is a fantastic villain, Gemma Chan is criminally underused, Olivia Wilde is Olivia Wilde – I assume – but Harry…poor poor Harry. It’s not that it’s necessarily the worst performance by an actor-cum-singer that I’ve ever seen, but when his screen partner is Florence, it’s like putting a goldfish in a shark tank.

   Anyway, performances good and bad side, Don’t Worry Darling has some interesting ideas that lose their focus by how much Wilde insists on pointing them out to us. Like yes, we get Harry is an incel, we get Florence is going insane. Don’t need reminding of it every five seconds! Also, and I didn’t even realise this until a week later (thanks Twitter), but what the hell was with the plane? Wilde really thought she should over-explain some things and then completely drop others, and while the latter isn’t inherently bad, since a little bit of mystery is always appreciated, in Don’t Worry Darling it just feels unbalanced. We’re drip-fed various things and force-fed others, and I won’t even TRY to discuss that blue balls of an ending since I’ll just get very mad about it. If you just enjoy Florence’s performance and the delicious cinematography, you’re in for a pleasant time – but don’t try and overanalyse it, since once you do, the carefully constructed house of cards might come precariously close to crashing down.

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Originally posted on Letterboxd on 21st October 2022: https://boxd.it/3gAV7D

Film Review 10 – Lady Macbeth

Watched: 3rd February 2022

Rating: 4/5 stars

tl;dr – Florence Pugh put the boss into girlboss with this one tbh

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Lady Macbeth makes its apparently subtlety rather obvious, actually, but lucky never in a way that’s innately overbearing. Scenes of its title character – and we’ll get to how Florence Pugh plays her in just a moment – sequestered in her room, sitting pretty and doll-like on a pristine couch with her pristine hair tied up and her pristine hands on her pristine skirts, are intersected with her roaming the wild moors of Northumberland, hair whipping with wild abandon around her face and a shabby shawl wrapped around her as she marches on, applauded by the wind and thunder, like one of the witches lifted straight out of a certain play itself. Okay, perhaps that last bit is a bit of a stretch by me, but the point still stands. It’s like watching Catherine Earnshaw in reverse, a woman desperate to be free of the shackles of petticoats and afternoon tea, to return to the wilds of her childhood and to a world that doesn’t try to make her into something she’s not.

Like I say, the visual metaphors are pretty hard to miss, but I do think they’re made more effective by the film’s reliance on them as indicators of how Katherine (okay, I hope the Brontë estate doesn’t see this) actually feels, since she rarely ever indicates it to the audience directly. What we see is given in snatches, made all the more elusive by the lingering suspicion that she’s never quite telling us the whole truth. Some scenes that suggest a kindness to her – asking Anna to sit down to breakfast, or telling Teddy about birds in a moment that is almost reminiscent of a mother with her child – are later completely undone by moments of savage cruelty that genuinely had my heart in my mouth. And what’s even more engrossing about this behaviour is that she never once shows repentance for it, never once tries to change who she is. Katherine Lester is a force all unto herself, and the icy chill which Pugh brings to her, the smouldering embers behind the eyes, the knife’s edge glinting in the sleeve of her dress, is absolutely mesmerising to watch – which helps when a lot of the film is just her sitting or walking about in silence.

The rest of the cast, particularly Naomi Ackie as (poor, poor, poor) Anna, give fine performances, but let’s not kid ourselves on, they’re only every mirrors for Katherine, either reminders of the forces that seek to restrain her – almost comically exaggerated in how nasty they are – or good, decent people whose humanity only shows just how depraved she is. But, as dark as the film is, there’s just something about it that kept me engrossed, beyond just Pugh’s acting. It’s something in the reimagining of Lady Macbeth herself, in its refusal to uphold gender norms (though class prevails as always), in its brooding atmosphere that feels like the tension of roiling clouds about to explode at any moment. Silence is the prelude to noise, never quite the absence of it, and Lady Macbeth is good at keeping you on your toes as to what its heroine, if we can really call her that, will do next.

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Originally posted on Letterboxd on 10th February 2022: https://boxd.it/2y0Dlp