A- | The surviving members of House Atreides integrate themselves with the Fremen of Arrakis and seek revenge on House Harkonnen. Directed by Denis Villeneuve Starring Timothee Chalamet, Zendaya, and Rebecca Ferguson Review by Jon Kissel |
As big-budget filmmaking finds itself at a crossroads, where the cash cows of the past have been put out to slaughter and no one knows what the next billion dollar film will be, every film that smashes expectations creates a possible future where movies like itself will one day be the next exhausted fad. Will it be historical biopics with all-star casts, weightless video game adaptations, satirical toy tie-ins, or jingoistic advertisements for the military industrial complex? Denis Villeneuve imagines the possibility that the wave of the cinematic future is superficially opaque space operas, where invented terminology like kwisatz haderach and lisan al-ghaib are made to sound meaningful instead of ridiculous. His two Dune films, with a third on the way, use the bludgeoning effects of size and scale to make the theater experience a must, but Villeneuve also remembers the human element, even moreso in Dune: Part Two. Frank Herbert’s novel is a recognizable hero’s journey, partly because it’s a classic story and partly because so many subsequent stories have imitated it, but the specific influences of the book and what Villeneuve chooses to embellish and focus on makes Dune into a hopeful harbinger of a better cinematic future.
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Some of the best documentaries of the 21st century have incorporated some kind of meta element into their storytelling. The Act of Killing got its Indonesian government-backed murderers to consider their actions through filmmaking, while The Witness and Tower took innovative approaches towards recreating infamous events from the 1960’s. Dick Johnson is Dead and Procession got their subjects involved in acting out their own fears and traumas, or those of the director. Kaouther Ben Hania’s Four Daughters is in this tradition, breaking up a standard talking head format by casting actors as two of the four titular women. This serves to make the subjects more vulnerable in telling their complicated and affecting story of patriarchy, abuse, and fundamentalism in pre and post revolutionary Tunisia.
There’s a certain kind of black pilled 20/30-something that I come across on Twitter every so often. It’s not a new phenomenon that unseasonably warm Februaries, ocean temperatures that approach that of a hot tub, and looming environmental catastrophe make people contemplate what the rest of their lives are going to be like. Combined with a difficulty in imagining the big adult milestones of home ownership, marriage, and children, there’s a distinct strain of pessimism in our cohort. In 2021, Bo Burnham received raves for his fatalist lockdown standup special, in which he resignedly sang the lyric ‘20,000 years of this, seven more to go.’ With that kind of built-in mindset, there won’t be movies like The Eternal Memory up for awards at the 2055 Oscars. Having spent their youth contemplating suicide and when it isn’t worth it to continue, everyone who might’ve suffered through Alzheimer’s would have plugged into the euthanasia machine at the first signs.
A podcast that has shaped a lot of my thinking over the last few years is You’re Wrong About, where two journalists examine some piece of cultural ephemera and unpack the many ways it was misunderstood in its time. Your Tonya Hardings, your Lorena Bobbitts, your Satanic Panics. They occasionally do survivalist stories, like the plane crash of a Uruguayan rugby team in the Andes. I don’t particularly go for these kinds of stories when they’re at their most harrowing, as in movies like Jungle, The Revenant, or Rescue Dawn, and this is a particularly harrowing story of survival. However, what made the Uruguayan rugby team into a good podcast episode was the difficulty of what happened to them after, where a media circus spun around them when it was discovered they had no choice but to resort to cannibalism. This is what I was hoping would be offered in Juan Antonio Bayona’s Society of the Snow, as its name suggests a kind of brotherhood that would only be understood by those who made it through together, plus a complicated survivor’s guilt that gets exacerbated by the media. Instead, what Bayona offers is boredom, turning this story into little more than a series of struggles endured by barely distinguishable characters.
One of the eureka moments to come out of the MeToo Hollywood revelations was that so much of how the public approaches male-female dynamics is informed by the creations of sex pests and rapists. Hollywood romances seep into brains, convincing people that they’re the protagonists in their own sunny representation of love lost and found on the sidewalks of a Canadian city masquerading as New York. Once it’s discovered that the executives, producers, and directors who sculpt these stories have exploitative approaches to women in their own lives, one has to consider what they’ve been putting into the world for popular consumption. Richard Curtis does not belong to the gross fraternity of MeToo villains, but the depiction of women and the male pursuit of them in his movies could easily have come from the jaundiced mind of a serial abuser. The sentimental drivel of his films combined with aw-shucks protagonists whose clumsy obliviousness doesn’t stop them from getting the girl makes him one of my most hated writers/directors, and his high-concept About Time is yet another example of what makes Curtis such an irritating figure, albeit not a criminal one. |
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