Sci-fi and Fantasy Movies and Series Reviews, Part 45

Dune: Part Two

With the House Atreides defeated on Arrakis, Paul Atreides and Lady Jessica work to win the favor of the native Fremen to push back against the Harkonnens.

I liked this even more than Part One, if that were possible, because I think the runtime here is a little more justified. Part One ended on a high note of the second act of the source material, with Paul’s defeat of Jamis. But it wasn’t much of a high note overall, because Paul and Jessica were fresh off of getting reamed by the Harkonnens. In Part Two here, Paul, even though he passed that first test to gain the Fremens’ favor, he and Jessica spend most of the remainder of this second act winning them over for real, albeit through different means. Jessica’s path was more plainly laid for her when she took over the Fremens’ Reverend Mother role. Though she but Paul had to learn their ways in a different manner and pass further tests. As an resident alien, mistrusted by some and a possible messiah to others, Paul stewed in a completely different culture and environment, and not giving that experience enough screen time would do the story a disservice.

The acting was average to superb, and the superb parts were by thankfully performed by the larger roles. I honestly had doubts that Timothée Chalamet could portray a young pup Paul forced into a position of possible power, but the guy really pulled it off. His speech to the southern Arrakis tribes was well-performed—you really got the feeling he wasn’t quite a kid anymore and was just beginning to know how to (cautiously) claim authority and exert influence. Rebecca Ferguson as Lady Jessica in Dune Part One, like Paul, came off as unsure of her position, but she embraced her Bene Gesserit side early in Part Two, which required her to be something of a neutral but conflicted religious schemer.

About getting immersed into the Arrakis tribal desert cultures: two things really kicked me out of the universe, which I think were the biggest drawbacks in the story. One was that the Fremen were racially ambiguous, except that they were all various people “of color.” The modern western idea of dividing people into the whites and the browns is a horrendous dichotomy to bring over into a fictional culture that doesn’t have a similar, explained history of politics or level of technology that Earth has enjoyed in the last few hundred years. A secluded, nomadic desert tribe would likely be of a highly non-cosmopolitan, monoracial makeup, not a grab bag of various non-white, tan races. If somehow the Fremen became multicultural, they would likely split into different tribes, sorting by race primarily. That’s just how humans act. It’s not as though there are a shortage of real-world desert cultures to draw from. For the northern Fremen, Villeneuve could’ve looked to the Middle East’s Bedouin people for inspiration for appearance and fashion (human cultures everywhere have fashion). Since there’s a large equatorial divide between people living in the north and south of Arrakis, I would expect the southern tribe to look very different. For the southern Fremen, Villeneuve could have looked to the west African Hausa people, or if he wanted to get even more creative, there are the European-looking Berber/Amazighen people in the Maghreb, or Pakistan’s Kalash people. The idea of whites being desert-inhabiting culture is rather foreign (hah) to western audiences that inserting Arrakis tribes based on these latter two peoples would be too expensive for a director to sell.

The other element that brought me out of the universe came with a bit of passing dialogue from Chani, when she was talking to Paul (I think) about the Fremen. She said something about the Fremen being “all equal, men and women.” Oh, starry firmaments and infinite galaxies above—no, never, not in a million plus one years would a tribal people with severely limited resources and zero mass media influence would not have a strict hierarchy, nearly certainly a patriarchy. Entering into decades-long guerilla warfare with an occupying force would only make such a social structure even more severe. Yes, you could in theory make the Fremen an equalitarian society, but the writer would have to show how it got that way. Without even mentioning the existence of Mentats and the eradication of computerized technology, we can infer that Thufir is a “specialized” human…and because we don’t see any computers or robots anywhere in the Dune universe, only dumb machines. As a filmmaker, that’s all you need to do to communicate the situation to an audience. But we get no such opportunity to infer Fremen egalitarianism. It’s just kind of assumed that we would just accept it, which I suppose is a safe assumption for most of us watching. Maybe it’s a thing with people that think like me. For a half minute after that line, I was searching back in my memory for a quirk in the Fremen culture that would justify the assumption. I ended up just a little annoyed, because the assumption is that we already knew the Fremen were the good guys at that point, so naturally anything different than egalitarianism would mean they were not the good guys. Or at least not as good as we thought. My fragile American psyche was reassured that those various dirty brown extraterrestrial Muslims weren’t doubleplus wrongthinkers.

Left Behind (2014)

A pilot, estranged from his wife and daughter, must deal with some of his passengers disappearing in the blink of an eye during a flight.

Distinct from how the mediocre Kirk Cameron Left Behind from 2000 treated this story, this 2014 version ignored most of the source material in favor of focusing on one party of characters as they experience the inciting incident.

It’s been a while since I read the book itself, which was also mediocre, but filled a yawning hole for fictional accounts of what the Dispensationalist rapture might be like. This 2014 version was just as bad, maybe even worse, but Nicolas Cage had to pay his back taxes somehow.

Those few films that depict evangelicals in a positive light only appeal to evangelicals, and repulses nearly everyone else, but I believe it’s for reasons you might not think. Controversial opinion: nearly every character in a movie is either an extrovert, or an introvert being placed into extrovert-friendly situations where they must act the way an extrovert would. In films, that act would be speaking, but not just speaking, but speaking their way through a situation to come to conclusions, to communicate information. This has to be done in film, because a character speaking their thoughts is how the audience knows about them in the first place (voiceovers and inner dialogue are rare, and it’s often expositional), but it’s also how evangelicals qua evangelicals enter into narrative conflict with other characters. It’s a hard sell for a writer to depict a normal-thinking/skeptical character hassling a quiet evangelical and have the audience sympathize with them, unless the evangelical wanders haplessly into a college science class taught by a jerk professor; at that point, blaming the victim for being a dumb believer is acceptable to many sensibilities, perhaps even those of evangelicals. So, writers have to make the evangelical make their retarded, pushy sales pitch at some point to spark the conflict. The evangelical in the audience thus has something to latch onto when they imagine themselves as the protagonist, and non-believers (who was probably dragged there by their evangelical friend) can feel justified in having a nice unspoken Two Minutes Hate during those Jesus sales pitch scenes.

A lot of the religious sales pitches from the mom/wife in the movie had already happened before it started. The husband and daughter were already done with her in large part because of it. There’s no telling if there really was a sales pitch at all, but the way it’s described by the husband and daughter imply it was of that nature. Not to fear, because right in the opening scene you’ll get a real juicy pitch from a tertiary Loony Fan character.

On a positive note, I thought some of the treatment of what might happen if millions of people just disappear were well done. There’s immediate rioting and looting, traffic jams, etc. One great touch happens when the daughter returns home after her mom and brother got vanished, with the phone call jumpscare. It was an automated emergency service call, triggered by the home alarm system, saying something like “we noticed the alarm in your house was set off, but we are experiencing massive customer wait times currently…” Nice world-building touch.

If you really want to, you can watch the whole movie here.

Battlefield: Fall of the World

A deserter who left a battle against alien forces helps a ragtag team of soldiers.

Incomprehensible plot, but maybe that had something to do with the localization and the fact that Roku can be pretty bad with their subtitling. The words can sometimes disappear too quickly and I can only rewind so much before I feel like I’m creating my own miniature Groundhog Day. Movies are linear, not repeating.

What’s worse than that, though, is not only the tactical stupidity of the soldiers, but also the strategic stupidity of Earth’s armed forces in general. Half of the screen time is devoted to the protagonists shooting at the hellhounds with near-infinite ammo, when they know it won’t stop them at all. Not even explosives harm them. The movie starts late in the war with the aliens, so the militaries around the world would have known this well-enough in advance, yet they hadn’t developed weaponry to fight them?

As always, when I encounter narrative boneheadery, I need to fix it, so here’s what I would do. The alien forces attack earth, etc., but the hellhounds aren’t deployed until much later in the war, as a “seek and destroy” weapon that runs on instinct and pure physical strength, to mop up stray resistance. This is how the hellhounds are treated in the story anyways, because they are big dumb monsters roaming around, not strategizing, methodic soldiers. After a enough threat analysis data comes in, the remnants of the world’s armies come up with some weapon that works against them, but imperfectly, like some battering ram vehicle or mech that can actually bypass their electromagnetic armor. A different weapon has to be developed to really be effective against them. That’s where the protagonist can find his redemption when he joins the team after his desertion: the one soldier lady who figures out the goofy-named MEMP weapon near the end.

Another small annoyance: the muzzle fire and discharged bullet casings were probably all CGI, and the kickback from their firearms was simulated by the actors, usually not very convincingly. They kind of just jiggled or shook the gun back and forth, and sometimes they’d forget to wiggle the gun, and the whole procedure of handling a firing weapon just looked off.

The Last Witch Hunter

Kaulder, cursed with immortality since the Late Middle Ages by the Queen Witch, fights a force that has cursed his former priestly guide, Dolan the 36th.

I liked the premise, but the tone was too predictable, though Vin Diesel’s Kaulder wasn’t not as grim or gritty as you would have expected. That’s where I would have changed the tone more. A story centered on a human with an eternal curse is going to be pretty dark on its face, so this is the time to weave levity into the mood (at the risk of Marvelizing the story). If done properly, you could end up with something like Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 1, one of the best Marvel movies. I would think a human who is faced with the prospect of living forever on Earth as an indestructible policeman of the supernatural would learn incorporate frivolity into his psychology.

For that matter, why not switch up the casting, the members of which all played to their type, to reinforce the new direction? Have the new Dolan, Elijah Wood, as the determined but lighthearted Kaulder, and Vin Diesel as the stumbling, inexperienced but dutiful assistant. Or why not Michael Caine as Kaulder, old and wizened on his façade, but as physically capable as he needs to be, and place Wood in the experienced, cursed Dolan role than Caine had? These ideas make for a very different story, but that’s the point of this mental exercise.

I saw the betrayal early enough—in any story, when the Catholic Church is involved with the protagonist, one of their representatives is going to turn out to be not what he seemed. That’s too good of an setup for a left coast writer to forgo making a jab at traditional religion. But I suppose that’s a hedge in this case? The story’s universe places witches the chaotic region of moral alignments…usually not the most sympathetic side of the chart.

Mira

A teenage girl tries to survive the fallout of a meteor bombardment, with the help of her father working on a space station.

I could only find this movie on YouTube, and there were two choices: one with the original Russian dialogue and Indonesian subtitling, or Spanish audio with Spanish subtitling. As somewhat knowledgeable of the Spanish language, you would think that the Spanish version would be easier, but the dubbed audio was so off-putting that I settled on the Ruskie-only version.

I could piece together what was going on without knowing a thumble-ful of vodka of what they were talking about, except sometimes I could tell they were talking about meteors. I also figured out very easily that the protagonist girl had some embarrassing body issues and trauma relating to fire, which turned out to be mostly correct. There were really some obvious parallels between the girl’s situation on Earth and her father’s situation on the space station, as there were few scenes where the scenery from the space station blends seamlessly into whatever dilapidated building the girl was exploring. Context clues can really give you a lot of general information where explicit words fail.

The big thing I really don’t understand is why the girl and her guy friend with the metal arm snuck onto the damaged industrial ship near the story’s climax. Throwing two normal teenagers into an dangerous environment when they seemingly didn’t need to is insanely stupid, and they didn’t seem to be doing anything worthwhile there to round out the plot. Character-wise, the girl learned to overcome her fear of fire, but stories need practical reasons for crazy decisions; the character transformation should be an accompanying consequence of resolving the big conflict. I’m chalking it all up to the language barrier and not writer negligence.

The meteor-strike scene is easily understandable in any language, but man that girl has some really solid plot armor.

Old (2021)

A handpicked group of vacationers are brought to a secluded beach where they age rapidly.

Interesting concept, but the delivery wasn’t ideal. Some interesting, unorthodox, swiveling camera shots—ones where the camera simulataneously trucks and pans, to maintain one actor in the shot while the background slides behind them—or shots where things that you would expect to be fully in view are cut off slightly. It works to mirror the mental breakdown of everyone while they are under the beach’s effects. There were some shots where the softly unnatural rock of the cliff face was prominent, even though it was obviously background scenery, which was a nice visual touch.

Not much else really stands out positively, other than that. I thought it was insanely stupid for the resort/research organizers to allow anyone with a law enforcement background to actively vacation there. It would be too much of a security risk, though I get why a solution for the beach escapees had to be provided.