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 36 – Everything Everywhere All At Once

Watched: 14th May 2022

Rating: 5/5 stars

tl;dr – if “shaking crying screaming shitting throwing up” was a movie. I loved it!

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   I can honestly hand on my heart say that Everything Everywhere All At Once is the first movie I’ve seen in the cinema this year which has not only received consistent acclaim from basically every direction in which I look (except The Guardian, though we all know how they like to be contrarian), but which, when actually viewed for yourself, manages to knock all that acclaim out of the park and somehow deliver a result that’s even better than what you were expecting. I try not to look at reviews or ratings for films before seeing them, since I don’t want to risk being unfairly swayed, and while the vibes for Everything (NB: smack me if I ever write anything so pretentious ever again) were already very good even before going in, I was genuinely quite fearful that a part of me was going to be too harsh on it when I finally saw it, as if I needed to justify its broad acclaim by holding it to a (probably unfairly) high standard.

   What a joy, then, that the Daniels resolutely told me to get over myself. Everything Everywhere All At Once is an absolutely ridiculous film, in every sense of the word. Its humour is a smorgasbord of disparate influences crammed together into a frenetic kaleidoscope of hots dogs for fingers, butt plugs that make you a martial arts master, and racoons that secretly turn people into world-class chefs. It’s the kind of comedy that you might expect from two college graduates fresh out of film school who think that Sausage Party is the pinnacle of cinematic art, but the Daniels are able to elevate silliness into something genuinely entertaining, something that makes you laugh because of how well the humour works rather than just laughing at how cringe or paradoxical it is. True, a lot of the laughs do come from WTF moments, okay, but there’s a balance there, a dexterity that keeps the film firmly on the side of exhilarating without ever tipping over into tiresome. It pays tribute to too many films and genres to ever keep effective count of, but its impressive that the Daniels manage to blend kung fu and comedy and science fiction and drama together so seamlessly – and in only their second full-length feature too!

   Where everything really does stand out, though, is the cast. Michelle Yeoh delivers an absolutely incredible performance, sad and joyful and angry and hopeful in equal measure, and her scenes with Joy/Jobu Tupaki (played very well by Stephanie Tsu) in the film’s second act are some of the best in the whole movie, and indeed, some of the most engaging mother/daughter scenes I’ve ever seen. Ke Huy Quan is equally as hilarious and heartbreaking, and though they only play supporting roles, James Hong and Jamie Lee Curtis both very easily find their moments to shine. Each character gets to grips in their own way with the film’s search for a meaning of life, and while they may come to wildly different conclusions, it’s the sharing of their perspectives – and the joint arrival at an even more profound conclusion – that had me honestly sobbing in my seat by the end. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film that’s as funny and as sad as this one, but I’ll be damned if Everything Everywhere All At Once doesn’t live up to its title, hell for leather, and deliver what genuinely might be my favourite film of the year so far.

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Originally posted on Letterboxd 21st May 2022: https://boxd.it/2Q5lTF

Film Review 1 – The Matrix Revolutions

Watched: 1st January 2022

Rating: 4/5 stars

tl;dr – Neo vs one hundred Agent Smiths all by himself? greatest action sequence of all time I think

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Honestly, I don’t really see why people don’t like The Matrix Revolutions. I enjoyed it a lot more on the first watch than I did when first watching the first film (that’s one too many firsts in this sentence, I fear), and as a conclusion to a franchise that is arguably one of the most influential in science fiction history, I don’t think it falls particularly short. Okay, the bigger budget, as I said in my review of Reloaded, expands a universe that originally felt rather claustrophobic into something a hell of a lot more epic – which has pros and cons. The fight sequence in Zion is incredibly impressive, even if it does feel like something we’ve seen many times before in other films, and the stakes are higher than they’ve ever been, which means that character development does sometimes feel like it’s slipping into second place, although at least the film is never boring.

There is a lot of philosophical posturing, and I can see why this might be off-putting to some people, but I really enjoyed it. The culmination of Neo’s becoming a messiah (great to finally see Keanu Reeves actually show some emotion, by the way) feels like a story of real sacrifice befitting of the saviour of humanity, though it does leave a lot of questions remaining about what exactly free will and choice are in a world where freedom – or at least what we think is freedom – is controlled and dictated by forces beyond our ken. Can we thus ever truly be free, or do we only think we are? Is freedom having all the choices we want, or only the choices that we really need? One for the philosophers, perhaps, but it’s nice to see a blockbuster where half the scenes are people beating the crap out of each other still try to engage with things on a cerebral level.

I do think part of the reason why I enjoyed this film more is because it deconstructs a lot of the issues I had with the ‘chosen one’ narrative in the first film, and does a great job of showing that destiny isn’t as linear as some of us may like to believe. It will be interesting to finally go and see Resurrections, now that I will actually be able to understand what’s going on, though given how complete the story feels in Revolutions, part of me wonders if it would have been best to leave it here. However, if there’s one thing we can count on a Wachowski for, it’s providing visual entertainment, so as long as there’s plenty of gratuitous physical violence, I’m sure I’ll be at least somewhat happy.

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Originally posted on Letterboxd January 8th 2022: https://boxd.it/2qnC8X