1917

Title: 1917
Director: Sam Mendes
Writers: Sam Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns
Cinematography: Roger Deakins

Shall we talk about the cinematography?

I think we have to. It’s all anyone seems to talk about regarding this movie, probably for the very good reason that it’s the main thing worth talking about.

So as you probably know, but I’ll repeat just in case you’ve been hit in the helmet by a ricocheting bullet and knocked out for the last three months, the gimmick with 1917 is the illusion that the events are happening in “real time” and is shot by one camera in a single “take,” a bit like the Kiefer Sutherland/Jack Bauer series “24” mixed with the showiness of the long shots from “Children of Men,” only stretched to 119 minutes. There are no cuts between close-ups of people in conversation, nor between wide, middle and close-up shots, every scene—with one obvious and glaring exception—flows seamlessly together.

It is a masterful achievement, and obviously took a lot of serious, meticulous planning and preparation to pull off. And by and large, it works, at least at the technical level. The camera pirouettes about men in narrow trenches and through the walls of farmhouses, down shattered lanes and across a field under artillery fire, without loosening its relentless focus on the leads (except that one, really thumpingly noticeable time it does, but shh). You as the viewer are stuck with these guys, just as they are stuck there, and the only way either of you gets out is to see it through to the end.

As a movie-making technique, it doesn’t work quite so well.

In behind-the-scenes featurettes, the filmmakers have said this is meant to be immersive, but let’s admit that no, it absolutely isn’t. This is film-making that draws attention to its own artifice. Look! See how clever we are! It very quickly becomes distracting—You should be down in the trenches with these two guys, but you’re not, you’re thinking about the cameraman, the logistics of the shot, you are constantly aware that you’re watching a movie, an artificial narrative, and spend more time thinking about how Mendes and Deacon were able to film the scene, rather than being engaged and emotionally invested in the action.

The artifice, in other words, prevents it from achieving the very effect it is designed to produce.

The script also contributes to this detached feeling in a couple of ways. First, things off-screen, out of the frame of the shot, seem to suddenly just appear or immediately vanish from existence when we pan away from them. A group of fellow British soldiers in a convoy of trucks materialize out of thin air behind a farmhouse (wouldn’t we have heard them?) When one of our heroes parts ways with these soldiers and is shot at by a sniper while crossing a bridge, the comrades he left not 10 seconds ago do nothing (why aren’t they shooting back?). We just never see them again.

Distances start to feel distorted. The initial scene where the two messengers cross no-man’s land is fantastic in an excruciating way, a nail-biting crawl, slither, crouch and scramble across a nightmare landscape of iron, steel, mud, shell craters and bloated bodies. However, once that is over though, the scenery changes come thick and fast. There’s a truck ride that includes two stops and barely lasts one conversation, but somehow transports us from a lonely farmhouse to the edge of a town. Later we jump into a river which immediately flows over a waterfall and just as quickly ends up lapping at the rear of the British lines.

Finally, the soundtrack is deafeningly intrusive. Just in case you weren’t sure a moment was meant to be tense or not, don’t worry, HERE COME A THOUSAND BLARING TRUMPETS TO REASSURE YOU THAT YES, THIS REALLY IS PRETTY DAMN TENSE RIGHT NOW I CAN TELL YOU. Combined with the evident artifice of the cinematography, all this serves to keep you at arm’s length from the story. Don’t worry, it’s just a movie, and here is a stream of constant reminders to that effect just in case you start to get too into it.

The story itself is bare-bones simple, and probably could have been shown just as effectively, if not moreso, with traditional filmmaking techniques.

If there’s a theme to the movie, it’s how utterly shit the life of a lowly lance corporal was in the year 1917 (and probably still is). Lance Corporals Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman, Game of Thrones’s Tommen) and Scofield (George MacKay) are picked by his NCO for the thankless and probably impossible job of sneaking across German-held territory to deliver orders to another unit, calling off an attack. There’s a perfunctory briefing by the General (Colin Firth), in which responsibility for saving the lives of 1,600 men is unceremoniously dumped on the two lads despite the cockup entirely originating from said General, who doesn’t actually giving them any useful advice about how they’re supposed to achieve this herculean task.

Nonetheless, the two gamely do their British best, moaning and bullshitting their way across no-man’s land, beset by booby traps and crashing airplanes and German snipers. The message is finally delivered in the very nick of time to a pissed off, irate Colonel (Benedict Cumberbatch) who tells Scofield thanks, points out he hasn’t actually saved anybody as this just means there will be a different attack the next day, and invites him to please fuck off.

There’s a vague arc about Scofield going from reluctant partner to fiercely determined to accomplish the mission, coupled with an early resentment of the people at home and ending with him staring longingly at family photos, but Blake and Scofield mostly get flattened by both the action and the juggernaut pace of the story, leaving little time for us to get to know either character. They’re lance corporals, nobodies, could be anybodies, and who they are isn’t really the point. They’re every soldier, and they just want to survive and go home.

Together with Chris Nolan’s “Dunkirk” then, we seem to be building up a new direction for war movies, moving away from tales of heroism and questions of morality or immorality, towards a tighter focus on the unheroic experiences of the individual soldier, whose goal is nothing more noble than To Not Get Killed. The enemy, if they appear at all, are just one more thing to be survived, and the only “victory” is survival.

In the end though “1917” ends up being far more about the craft of the story than about the narrative itself. It’s a good movie, an impressive accomplishment, but it’s all about its own impressiveness, not really about the two poor sods at the center of the story. Though you get the feeling the lance corporals probably used to being overlooked until it’s time to do something nasty.

Canadian Fantasy Two-fer: Guy Gavriel Kay

Titles:   Children of the Earth and Sky

              A Brightness Long Ago

Author: Guy Gavriel Kay

Publisher: Berkley

 

I’m reviewing two books at once here, a feat made possible by Kay’s transformation of himself into a kind of brand, much like Stephen King, Dan Brown or John Grisham, a reliable if predictable producer of a very specific type of fantasy fiction. Although the details differ, the two books—and indeed pretty much anything published by Kay after about 1998—are more or less interchangeable.

 

The world in both books is a mildly fantastical version of our own, with events, places and people existing in more or less a 1:1 correspondence with things in the real world: Byzantium becomes “Sarantium” and Rome, “Rhodias,” Christians, Jews and Muslims become “Jaddites,” “Kindath” and “Asharites,” Sarantium falls to the Asharites just as Byzantium did to the Ottomans, and so on.

 

The protagonist (as always) is a male artist, a painter in “Children of the Earth and Sky” (2016), a bookseller in “A Brightness Long Ago” (2019). He exists at the periphery of and observes the lives of the great—the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in “Children…” and Italian mercenary captains Frederico and Sigismondo in “A Brightness…” In this, the main character is aided by spirited and independent women, often doctors or healers, and returns home, burdened with wisdom and bittersweet experience.

 

Everybody emotes with apocalyptic intensity. Kay is not an author to use one emotion when three would be more dramatic. They are perhaps best thought of not as novels, but the modern prose equivalent of Shakespearean plays, with characters striding about the stage, loudly declaiming their motivations and desires to the audience. They love! They hate! They beat their breasts and weep!

 

American author Elmore Leonard famously advised that “If it sounds like writing, rewrite it.” Kay’s works exist as a shining beacon for all of those who curse such advice as the basest, vile calumny. I keep half-expecting Kay to start referring to me as “gentle reader…” Every sentence here practically deafens you with the writing-ness of its writing.

 

The theme in both books is the one Kay started expressing in “The Last Light of the Sun” (2004), the idea that there is nothing predictable or inevitable about the course of history or people’s lives, and that both events and lives are changed by split-second decisions taken in moments of rage, panic, fear or ecstasy.

 

There is, at least, a unity between the prose and the theme then. Both are infused with melodrama and a kind of mournful, weeping acceptance that the world is a cold, cruel, capricious place whose grey is brokenly only intermittently by beauty or art.

 

After about half a dozen novels like this though, all the emoting feels more polished than passionate, like a veteran musician playing a well-known piece, technically proficient yes, comforting in its familiarity perhaps, but not especially innovative or surprising.

 

To an extent, I suppose this is just the realities and necessities of the publishing market. With so much choice out there, an author needs to carve out a recognizable space for themselves in order to win recognition and repeat readers.

 

Pretty much everyone does it. I recently downloaded a sample of Joe Abercrombie’s latest, “A Little Hatred,” and it’s exactly the same kind of thing as he was writing in “The Blade Itself,” in 2006 (If I had to sum up his style in a single sentence, it’s be something like: ‘“Fuck, I’ve shat myself,” swore the princess.’) You always knew what you were getting in an Iain M. Banks Culture book or Terry Pratchett Discworld novel.

 

Still, while a recognizable style is standard for any author, I do think that Kay has carried this even further, going as far as to make his characters and their arcs and themes more or less identical each time. I miss the inventive Kay of books like the “Fionavar Tapestry” (1984-86), “Tigana” (1990) or “A Song for Arbonne” (1992).

 

And yet as a marketing strategy it’s undeniable effective. I scroll through my Amazon dot com recommendations these days and I’ve no idea who most of these authors are, what their books are like and whether or not they’re any good (Amazon further muddies the waters by inserting its “promoted” books into searches, but that’s a gripe for another time). So I end up retreating to the familiar, to Kay, Abercrombie, William Gibson and a couple of others who may not surprise and delight, but who are at least guaranteed to deliver what I expect.

 

I’ve you’ve read one Kay book then, you know what to expect from these two. It’s more of the same, emotionally overwrought, purple of prose, well-crafted but eminently predictable. But you know, sometimes that’s not a bad thing.

Agency

Title: Agency

Author: William Gibson

Publisher: Berkley Books

I find it hard, in this the year of our Lord two thousand twenty, to take seriously any novel in which President Hillary Rodham Clinton is painted as a hero who will avert nuclear catastrophe.

No, I didn’t like this much, which is a shame, for although I find the plots of most recent Gibson novels a bit limp, he’s always been an interesting writer at the level of word choice, sentence structure, paragraph and chapter. A master stylist, if not a masterful storyteller. But his latest effort I found just a bit drab, filed with recycled plot elements from his better books and without any of his linguistic flair, where characters do very little but go around in circles while the plot resolves itself for them. For a book titled “Agency,” pretty much nobody exerts any, which might be the point I suppose, but makes for a dull read.

“Agency” revisits the world of 2014’s “The Peripheral,” in which people in the 22^nd century have discovered they can digitally contact people in the past, but only in alternate or parallel realities (since such contact didn’t occur in their own past). A group of such future-humans then begin to manipulate the course of these realities, some for shits and giggles, others to try to make them “better” by avoiding the disasters the “main” timeline endured.

While alternate reality in “The Peripheral” was a late-stage capitalist version of the USA, in which the only jobs are fighting in America’s imperialist wars or selling drugs, “Agency” is set in an alternate 2017 in which Hillary Clinton won the Presidential election and the UK voted to remain in the EU.

A woman in alternate 2017 named Verity is supposedly an “app-whisperer”, which is the kind of unspecific but cool-sounding technological super-ability we saw in “Pattern Recognition” yet which is never mentioned after the first chapter making you wonder why Gibson bothered, but anyway, this Verity is hired by a tech start-up to field test a responsive virtual agent (hence Agency, geddit), which turns out to be a stolen full-blown military intelligence AI.

What follows is pretty much just the emergent AI creating the circumstances for its own birth (giving her “agency”, geddit) plot that we saw in “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” only told with much less verve or invention.

Verity and a small cast of characters (including many from a people-following Agency, geddit) spend the entire novel driving around in circles in LA and San Francisco at the direction of the AI while being menaced rather unconvincingly by shadowy operatives whose objectives aren’t especially clear, other than to menace the main characters from time to time. As in, I’m not really sure why these people keep trying to kidnap a woman just for talking to a stolen AI—it’s not like she physically carries it around or anything. 

Anyway, in the end the AI is okay, no thanks to any of these people.

Meanwhile, the threat of nuclear annihilation looms in the background as Russia and the US come to blows over the Middle East. This plot line, as mentioned above, is also resolved without anyone doing anything, thanks to President Clinton.

Yet a third strand involves the future humans in the 22^nd century, who apparently (and off-camera) instigated the plot by getting the start-up to hire Verity. In their own time, they are threatened by a Russian oligarch pissed that their meddling in past realities tends to be aimed at creating conditions where Russian oligarchs have less power. This plot line is resolved by someone going to an all-day breakfast restaurant three times for 10-minute conversations.

As I think I wrote in my review of “Zero History,” I like Gibson less the more he writes about the present-day. Back then, it was the brand name-dropping that irritated. Now, it’s the overt focus on modern US politics, especially his support for Clinton and evident disdain for Trump (though he is never mentioned by name). To be transparent, like most non-Americans I find Trump to be a patently corrupt, vain, narcissistic, sub-moronic windbag whose presidency effectively annihilates any claim Americans might ever make to moral superiority about pretty much anything. So I agree with Gibson’s assessment, just putting it into the story so baldly seems crude. As I wrote in yesterday’s braindead thinkpiece on here, it feels like part of a trend towards incredibly literal moralizing and messaging in SF. Nothing is allowed to be metaphor and interpretation, there’s only text, no subtext.

What are we to make of the characters’ odd passivity and inability to influence the plot? If this is by design, it comes across as fatalistic, suggesting there’s nothing people can do to avert nuclear war or climate catastrophe other than pray a Strong Leader like, hum, er, Clinton, or else some benevolent AI will rescue us. Which might well be true, but doesn’t really fit the triumphant and uplifting tone of the end of the novel, where the AI reveals itself to the world (yes, spoilers, go fuck yourself). That sounds like a recipe for apathy rather than activism to me.

The other sour note I found was Verity’s ex-boyfriend, a mega-rich tech maverick named Stets, whose enormous wealth is essential in arranging all the complex gadgetry required to help Verity stay one step ahead of the bad guys. This man is unfailing portrayed in a positive light, charming, intelligent, perceptive, flaunting the law to help his friends, all for the greater good!

Contrast this to the Russian oligarch subplot, in which those nasty rich Russkies try to trip up our heroes just so they can stay rich and, er, Russian. Now, to me it feels like pure American exceptionalism to suggest there’s anything different between Stets and the Russian oligarch. One happens to be using his inordinate wealth and influence to help the protagonist, the other to hinder, but in each case we’re talking about a class of people whose wealth has effectively rendered them above the law.

As with the emergent AI line, it feels like I’m being asked to celebrate something that strikes me as deeply, deeply disturbing. The only people capable of exercising agency in this world of ours are the mega-rich or artificial intelligences. Luckily ours are nice and not nasty at all. Hooray, I guess?

It’s a bit like “Waiting for Godot” if Godot showed up in Act II, announced he was actually an immortal all-seeing God, but a nice one, and all the characters went hope happy. 

“Agency” has a strangely positive ending for a book apparently about our powerlessness in the face of technological and socioeconomic change. All of that, I think, encapsulated by the bit at the end where the characters celebrate World War III being averted by that benevolent God, Hillary Clinton.

The Witcher (Netflix series)

Title: The Witcher
Created by: Lauren Schmidt Hissrich (based on the novels by Andrzej Sapkowski)
Network: Netflix

3.6 (Not great, not terrible) / 5

In the first big fantasy series since the end of Game of Thrones, monster-hunter-for-hire Geralt of Rivia (Henry Cavill) finds his simple life increasingly complicated by a relationship with restless, anarchic sorceress Yennefer (Anya Chalotra) and Cirilla (Freya Allan) a princess fleeing the invasion of her homeland. 

Overall, this show felt more frustrating than anything else, as there's gold here but it keeps getting smothered in dross. It's more Lord of the Rings than Game of Thrones, more Dungeons and Dragons than Lord of the Rings, cheaper than either though thankfully not quite Shannara Chronicles cheap. Despite some elements that work rather well--Cavill's swashbuckling especially--I don't think it does enough to really establish its own unique voice or presence and differentiate itself from other fantasy properties.

The action, as I said, is great fun to watch, both kinetic and balletic, and the big fights in Blaviken in episode 1, as well as at the court and with a monster called a "striga" later on, are collectively the high points of the show. Cavill does the brooding tough guy shtick with just enough charm to make him likeable, and Joey Batey as the bard Jaskier makes a good foil despite sometimes teetering over the line from amusing to annoying. The female leads are less well-served by the script, and I found Yennefer's motivations in particular seem to change about twice per episode.

The set, prop and costume design is competent if unspectacular, some of it good, some of it feeling plasticky and as thin as a Young Adult romance. The dialogue is worse, often opaque and gnostic (a line about flowers dying gets repeated N times but I still haven't the faintest what that's all about) or else jarringly anachronistic, such as when a queen refers to a formal ball as a "shindig." 

The structure is another area that needed a bit of honing. The adventures of the Mandalorian with a sword were fun, but honestly I felt too much time was wasted on Yennefer's backstory and Ciri's adventures, without the writers giving either character enough to do. The show cross-cuts among these three plot lines, without telling you they are actually happening at completely different times, which can be a bit baffling until about episode 4 when things fall into place. While it's nice that the show trusts the audience to pay attention and figure things out, even just a small hint, a line ot text like "five years later..." or whatever would have helped keep things straight.

Thematically, it's a bit vague. At first, I thought we were going to get a kind of rebuttal of Game of Thrones' theme that you have to be a bastard to survive in the real world: Geralt lives in a grim, grey world, yet still manages to be both practical and moral. But a lot of the stories feel lobomotimzed. Many of the adventures are drawn from "The Last Wish" collection of short stories, a series of deliciously twisted fairy tales that reflected on our relationship with myths and monsters. While the basics of the stories have been kept, most of the flavor has been lost. 

For example, in episode 1, Geralt is caught between a wizard and a vengeful bandit leader, each of whom try to hire him to kill the other. We see him refuse to take sides, then at the end he suddenly goes on a murder spree for no apparent reason. In the original short story, we learn that although the bandit is a good person who has done some terrible things, and their quest for vengeance is actually pretty justified. The wizard, by contrast, is a fairly awful person, but currently not harming anyone. That's an interesting dillemma, a sort of "trolley problem, but swords". But in the show, nope. It's just suddenly time to do some stabbing.

Similarly, in another episode Geralt is captured by fugitive elves who have been persecuted and driven from their homes by humans. In the original story, there's some soul-searching about the fact that yes, what happened to the elves was a crime, but murdering innocent humans is also a crime, and in any event no amount of fighting will ever make things the way they used to be again. Here? Wisecracks and abortion jokes, and then the elves let Geralt go because shrug. 

This narrative incoherence is capped by the climactic battle at the end of episode 8, where none of the geography works and I have no idea where any of the characters are in relation to one another from scene to scene. What the start of Last Jedi was to the end of Force Awakens, the end of the season was to its start. A rousing climax that truly made the audience say, "What?"

There's a fateful reunion that should feel impactful, but instead falls kind of flat. It just happens. Huh.

To me, this is kind of the killer, because without a theme or thrust or direction, you're kind of left wondering what the point of it all is. 

So I think the bones are good, the foundation is solid, I just wished Netflix had been able to construct something a bit more solid on top of it. 

The Rise of Skywalker

Title: The Rise of Skywalker

Directed by: J.J. Abrams

Story by: Derek Connolly, Colin Trevorrow, J.J. Abrams, Chris Terrio

Nine movies and 40 years later, does it stick the landing? Well, I watched this movie less than 24 hours ago, and let me be honest, I’m struggling to remember a single thing about it. I came home and promptly watched a couple episodes of The Witcher series on Netflix (review coming soon). Stick the landing? Buddy, it barely registered before it skipped off into nothing. This movie is its own Force ghost.

The most fun I had with this movie is probably watching people online use it as an excuse to re-litigate The People vs. Rian Johnson for the billionth time in two years. And yeah, in many ways The Rise of Skywalker feels like it’s trying to escape The Last Jedi’s shadow, to the movie’s great discredit and detriment.

With one director helming parts 1 and 3 and another steering part 2, now more than ever the trilogy is a bit of a meandering mess. Online commenters either take this as vindication or insult to whatever stance they had regarding The Last Jedi, but honestly to me looks more like a multimillion dollar version of the joke writing assignment where one wants to write about a woman drinking tea and the other about a space invasion.

New elements from The Last Jedi that promised a different course for the series (anyone can be a hero), are either quietly dropped or waffled. Rey’s parents were nobodies so anybody can be a hero but wait, she’s the Emperor’s grand-daughter so no it’s all about ancestry BUT WAIT AGAIN maybe Finn (John Boyega) can use the Force so let’s just hint at that and never do anything with it. I don’t know if the series needed a single director or writer, but at the very, very least, the absolute barest minimum, it needed some kind of agreement about what Star Wars actually is.

Admittedly, the plot of the original Star Wars trilogy is not without its obvious cracks and flaws as writers constructed the story while it was being built—Darth Vader being Luke’s father still feels like an ass-pull, as does Luke miraculously being Leia’s brother. But if nothing else, the series at least felt tonally and thematically consistent. Take what you want--youthful aspiration, the lure of adventure, the redemptive power of friendship and love--the core was always there.

Well, the sequel trilogy is hollow to its core. While The Last Jedi certainly had something to say (perhaps too much), all The Rise of Skywalker wants to say is “Wheee!” and occasionally “Remember this?”

The plot is a bit like listening to a breathless five-year-old playing with his action figures: This happens and then this happens and then THIS happens and BAM! BOOM! but then THIS happens and then... Everything is bigger! Louder! Better! What if Force lightning, but more?! Cuts between scenes come at you at lightspeed, with barely a chance to register before we go hurtling off to the next scene. Nothing has any consequence. People appear to die but don’t three or four times, then one major one does actually bite the Force irretrievably, but nobody refers to this moment ever again. New characters are introduced then promptly disappear, there are a series of magic things that are needed to find other magic things which are lost but then immediately retrieved.

It’s not a movie capable of withstanding a single “Why?”

It’s all of the narrative incoherence of Abrams with very little of the visual verve. Abrams used to be good, at the very least, at imparting his goofy space adventures with some spectacle, but this time even shots that should make you go “Wow!”—skipping among planets at lightspeed, an underground ice cavern chase, a massive fleet waiting in shadowy fog, the arrival of the cavalry—don’t because they’re barely there on the screen for three seconds. The final climactic showdown takes place on the Death Star and space battle er, on an evil planet that is eternally night with bursts of lightning, and sadly pitch blackness isn’t really conducive to delivering impressive visuals.

There is an effort to impart the action with a sense of weight and finality, but as with much of this movie it is all text, zero texture. The reborn Emperor declares “I am ALL of the Sith!” and Rey counters with “And I am ALL of the Jedi!” and I don’t believe either of them because there’s no reason for me to. I don’t know what those words even mean. People agonize about killing this one mass murderer, but then happily mow down armored Stormtroopers we’ve established are actually brain-washed slave-soldiers. 

The one stab at a theme appears to be that all it takes is a courageous few to stand up to evil, that even just one voice of dissent can rally millions, but we’re just told that. Repeatedly. The actual rallying appears completely off-screen. In a straining effort to tie the nine movies all back together, it ends with a shot of one character on a planet she’s never been to, with talismans from one character who always wanted to leave it and another who was a prisoner there.

But for all that, I didn’t hate The Rise of Skywalker. It’s unoriginal, brainless, ephemeral, far too overstuffed to properly show off its own spectacle, but I didn’t hate it.

Maybe all that Star Wars movies can be anymore is vehicles for nostalgia, and maybe I can live with that. It was kind of nice to see Mark Hamill again, however briefly, and Carrie Fisher, however awkwardly, and even Harrison Ford, however gnostically.

As Ben Solo/Kylo Ren, Adam Driver remains one of the best things in the new series, imparting a bit of the Han Solo cockiness into his character. The new trio of Daisy Ridley, John Boyega and Oscar Isaac have glimpses of energy and chemistry, despite their scenes being kind of Death Star cannoned by the runaway plot. I just wished they had been better served by the story and edit. Boyega in particular I could have watched an entire movie about—he’s got the only interesting backstory, and the actor oozes fun, charm and charisma. I would love a story about ordinary people in the Star Wars universe rising to the moment to become heroes.

But if I never get it, that’s okay. I didn’t think I was getting any more Star Wars after Return of the Jedi, but then the prequels happened. I didn’t think we were getting more after that, but then Rogue One, Solo and this trilogy. I’m okay if we don’t get any more. I’m okay if we do.

The Rise of Skywalker doesn’t especially feel like the end of anything. That’s okay, too.

“Remember this?” I sure do, movie. I sure do. I probably won’t remember you, movie, but the feeling of Star Wars? I’m never going to forget.

Liveblogging Dune (1984)

Been a while since I've done one of these. In anticipation of the upcoming two-part remake of Dune by Denis Villeneuve, let's go back 35 years ... my god, 35 fucking years ... and revel in the many famous faces who graced this beloved SF classic's first strange and wonderful appearance on the silver screen.

0:08 Even the studio logo is in space. Very immersive. 

0:37 EYES

You know, there are lots of ways you can subtly deliver infodumps as part of the narrative without boring your audience: Make it organic to the scene; embed it in the action; make it matter to what is happening on the screen.

Or you could be director David Lynch, and have a giant space princess's disembodied head just fucken hammer you with that shit for two minutes straight while maintaining incredibly uncomfortable eye contact. Fuck you, cinema conventions.

0:52 "A beginning is a very delicate time" -- which is presumably why I'm going to freak you out by giving you this background in the most awkward and ham-handed manner imaginable.

1:18 Oop, looks like we lost the Starz+ Premium channel there for a sec. Whew, she's back again. 

1:48 "Oh yes, I forgot to tell you..." NO YOU DID NOT. Nobody believes you're ad-libbing this robotic little speech, princess. Quit straining for casualness when we can see your eyes scanning the space teleprompter. 

2:26 lol, I'm reading YouTube's auto-generated captions: "The planet is Arrakis, also known as Julie." 

Smash cut to the movie title: 

J  U  L  I  E

3:65 Well, those were some lovely credits, featuring the entire extended De Laurentiis clan. Must be time for another infodump. At least this one has pretty space planet graphics.

4:35 We travel to the space emperor's space palace, which appears to be somewhere on the set of the original Blade Runner. 

6:14 What's in space fashion in the galactic capital in the year 10,191 AD? Ah, black plastic garbage bags! 

7:22 See kids, this is what happens if you overdo the spice. Turns you into a floating scrotum. Just say no to life-prolonging, mind-expanding, time-and-space-altering drugs! And to floating scrotums.

8:57 We're on infodump #3 and counting, but this one's handled ever so marginally better by having two characters at least speak to each other. Of course, one of them is a vagina-mouthed ballsack, but still. 

10:32 lol again with the captions: "We must look at Paul Atreides. To Canada!" Always knew the messiah would be one of us. 

Side note: the space guild dudes are all bald and wear black, the space witches are bald and wear black ... Why does everyone in the far future look like goth Hare Krishnas?  

Anyway, the Spice Girls head to Waterworld, with a brief stop for infodump #4.

12:26 This looks like the setup for the funniest joke in the galaxy: "Captain Picard, Dean Stockwell cosplaying as an Indian woman and the winner of the 10,191st Annual Bushiest Eyebrows in the Galaxy walk into a bar... "

... and the punchline: "I'd know the difference!" (Cue laugh track, because it's the 80s)

13:21 Oh boy, you know you messed up bad when even Captain Picard wants to cut you.

13:32 A titanic fight breaks out between two rejected CG graphics from the original TRON movie.

17:43 Of all the changes to the original story that this movie made, "The Atreides secret weapon is screaming at things" is easily one of the most biz ... actually no, this is pretty par for the course. 

19:04 Duncan Idaho! Book fans will remember him as the man who gets cloned like a billion times so he can have sex with all the Atreides descendants. Movie fans will struggle to remember who the hell this guy is.

19:25 The captain from Das Boat, looking much more chipper now. 

28:02 THE PAIN. You know, if all it takes to prove you're the Superman is putting up with a nasty sunburn for 30 seconds, boy, imagine what a man who can step on a Lego without crying could be capable of. 

29:28 Captions are at it again: "A man will come, the wizard Cedric." 

Yes, the Canadian wizard Cedric, from the planet Julie.

30:53 It's Grima Wormtongue after he licked an electrical socket. Seriously though, the number of famous faces in this movie is phenomenal. 

33:03 So this movie took out the complex politics, planetary ecology and ruminations on fate and eugenics, and instead gave us: Sting in a latex codpiece. 

A fair trade, I suppose.

37:08 Pug dog.

38:01 PUG DOG. I've known of this dog's existence for less than a minute, yet I would die for it. Kill for it. 

38:27 Ahhh, the Spacing Guild spacing ship has a wonderfully baroque sense of scale to it. Obi-wan: "That's no cigar, that's a space station!"

Also: Pug dog.

40:00 So the floating larva-slash-brain thing spits up a planet or two and that's how to travel across the galaxy. Wait a sec though, if that's only possible because of the spice that's found only on Julie, how did humanity ever explore the galaxy far enough to find it? Guess that's why it took 10,000 years or so.

Speaking of time, good lord it's been 40 minutes and we aren't even on Julie yet. 

41:26 Fun fact: I think this woman is also a De Laurentiis. They're everywhere. They could be anyone. It could be you!

42:04 Pug dog.

43:46 I love this scene of the elite, crack squad of Atreides troopers lining up to fill their water bottles like spectators at a sports stadium. I've never empathized with background extras more in my life.

44:37 Another famous face--this time it's the bad guy from Strange Brew! I think Max von Sydow may have done some other stuff, but I hope that's the movie he'll always be remembered for. Either that or Conan the Barbarian. Max, I salute you! (Weird: I was thinking "Oh he looks much younger in this movie" then checked his bio, and my gravel-voiced man was already 55 back then.) 

I'm being a sarcastic ass here, but love, love, love the visual style and design work on this movie. The H R Giger gimp suits are just wild. It's going to be interesting to see how the Villeneuve movie is going to establish its own look, since this is just so original and iconic and whoah.

46:12 "Urine and feces are recycled in the thigh pads" and now I'm just thinking about the galactic superman drinking his own pee, thanks.

56:52 When the edible kicks in. 

59:07 It's so cool they were able to turn the weird little gadget woman from The Incredibles into a real human being. 

1:04:53 Did the murder-doctor really just stick a new tooth in that man's mouth using only his bare, unwashed hands? Oh, he really is evil. Somehow, being bugged about not flossing doesn't seem so bad now.

1:05:34 Oh no, the palace is being bombarded. No, not puggsly! RUN, PUG, RUN!

1:06:32 BattlePug to the rescue! Oh, it's all over for you bitches now.

1:09:07 I think the guard Piter is talking to is supposed to be deaf (to stop Jessica using her Jedi mind tricks on him) which means he's using an incredibly efficient sign language in which *touch ear lobe* means "take them to the desert so the bodies won't be found." 

Hyper-efficiency in communication is all well and good, but could lead to all kinds of miscommunication: 

Piter: *sneezes*
Guard: Detonate the atomic bombs? Very good sir.

1:15:34 The Peter Pan remake is wild.

1:24:35 It's the mark of a strong mother-son bond that you can take the time to discuss things. Such as the aroma produced by a 500 ton homicidal earthworm trying to battering ram its way into your hideout.

1:25:05 I know it's 1984, but the effects for Paul "falling" are just embarrassing. Flail your arms out a bit, Kyle. Thanks, fantastic. This will look great.

1:27:31 Jessica captures the Fremen leader Stilgar using the "Weirding Way." Part of her "Bizarro Training" by the "Looney Tune Sisters" on the planet "Shit's Whack Yo". 

1:30:44 Sean Young then shows up, confirming my theory that Dune is set in the Blade Runner CU. 

1:32:29 And there it is. The most famous crossover codpiece in music-cinema history since David Bowie jumped into a pair of tights. 

Serious comment time: We're about 2/3 of the way through this movie and we've only just finished Act I. While I'm tempted to blame Lynch for the idiosyncratic pacing and front-loading all the worldbuilding into the first 10 minutes, I think this is also the challenge of Dune as a work of filmic entertainment: All the tension comes at the beginning. Once Paul becomes an omniscient superman leading an army of invincible desert savages there really isn't much drama. 

1:36:22 Milking a cat and then you drink the milk? It's like someone read a cat owner's manual back to front.

1:36:57 Ah, Paul in love with a woman he met 7 minutes ago. See, this is the problem with pacing. 

"He who can destroy a thing controls it" is rather a dark philosophy isn't it. 

1:41:39 Ah but now, this is a cool shot and I can see why they put it on the posters: Paul walking down a dune, a line of Fremen watching silently behind. No joke there. It's just cool.

1:47:04 Montage with Voice Over: "And then the other 66% of the story happened." 

1:47:57 While we're all happy to see Picard again, WHERE IS THE PUG? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH THE PUG TELL ME IT WAS OKAY

1:50:15 "I have to drink the water or I'm dead!" Very true, Paul. Absolutely. Stay hydrated.

1:55:05 "The sleeper has awakened!" he shouts but I'm not buying it. This is supposed to be a climactic character moment before the final showdown, but what does Paul achieve? What did drinking the water actually do or change, why was it necessary? Right now it looks like he had a nice drink and a nap, had a weird dream and then declared everything was different. But he was already the messiah, already had an entire planet of fanatic soldiers under his control. So. What gives?

2:05:49 Climactic battle somewhat undercut by never having the opposing forces in the same effects shot. 

The sound weapon thing is odd, too. I think they invented it to avoid having to explain Herbert's idea that the elite forces of history have often been bred through severe environmental conditions (though I'm not convinced... the Greek phalanx, the Roman legions, the Mongols, the British redcoat all owed more to tactical innovation and training than to be raised on the rough). But the net result is a very detached and uninvolving battle, capped by a bizarre death for the big bad baron.

2:09:29 The final showdown is a duel with Sting's Feyd-Rautha, but without the background provided by the book (Feyd is also a potential Kwisatz Haderach) it's hard to see how the guy has any chance, or why he should be the final boss when he hasn't really done anything evil all movie. 

Unconvincing fight choreography too. Very stilted, awkward. They're supposed to be doing the "slowly edging the knife closer" trope, but Kyle's got his arm in the wrong place and you can see Sting should be able to easily knife him in a second. 

And the climax: FOR HE IS THE WIZARD CEDRIC! 

Hm. Visual design impressive, iconic, original, all that great stuff, but pacing is just awful, very drawn out intro and rushed ending, plus lots of weirdness thrown in to avoid explaining any of the finer points of the book. Like I say, I think the challenge for Villeneuve will be to make the second half interesting--how do you make a story about an all-seeing messiah engaging? In the book, it's most about Paul's internal struggle to chart a path that won't be TOO monstrous, but I wonder how they'll put that on screen.

6/10 though 5 of those points go directly to the pug

The King

Title: The King

Directed by: David Michôd

Written by: David Michôd and Joel Edgerton

Shakespeare’s plays about the life of English King Henry V receive an updating in this Netflix-produced movie, and you know, I haven’t the foggiest why.

It’s as though the writing team of the suspiciously foreign-sounding David Michôd (jk, he’s actually Australian) and Joel Edgerton sat down and thought, “What’s the one thing nobody remembers about Shakespeare—the language, right?” So they dumped all the flowery verbiage and settled on having the characters say “fuck” every once in a while.

The Saint Crispian Day speech? Well, who really wants to hear one of the most stirring battle speeches ever set down in the English language, right? I mean, look at this fluff:

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

Who needs that, right? I’d much rather hear the actor who played Tommen in Game of Thrones (Dean-Charles Chapman) say the “f” word.

Revisionism is the order of the day in this retelling, extending not merely to stripping away 90% of the language, but also to major character changes.

The declaration of war upon France by Henry V (a very pale and fey Timothée Chalamet) is portrayed not as a transformation, not a boy learning the brutal necessities of power, but rather an extension of the selfish, impulsive, prickly self-indulgence of his youth. John Falstaff (Joel Edgerton) is no longer boozy has-been put aside as Henry learns responsibility (“I know thee not, old man”), but becomes instead Henry’s sagacious and war-weary councilor, in a move which by pure coincidence gives the movie’s co-writer a far longer and juicier part. The wooing of Catherine of Valois (Lily-Rose Depp) is no longer played for laughs, but instead becomes a chance for Henry to get a reality check when Catherine not only proves completely fluent in English, but also schools Henry on how he has been manipulated into war by the Chief Justice (Sean Harris).

I wish I could praise some of the other elements of the film-making, but honestly after watching things like the “Outlaw King,” this feels like more of the same: Dim interior lighting, faintly silly haircuts and mud. Lots and lots of mud. There is an attempt at grittiness by slathering the combatants in a battle in the stuff, but honestly despite the commanders spending the previous 10 minutes discussing strategy, it’s filmed like a class of 10-year-olds playing rugby. Everybody sort of runs into the middle of the field and falls down. Nobody wears any heraldry, so I can only imagine the horrific slaughter the two sides must have inflicted on their own sides in this chaotic free-for-all.

The only bright spot I could find was Robert Pattinson (of “Twilight” fame, or infamy if you like) as the Dauphin, who clearly thought he was appearing in some kind of Pink Panther style farce. His accent and acting are both so wonderfully over the top, it’s the only pleasure in this otherwise dour and rather lifeless exercise. (I giggled every time two characters started speaking in French, only to say “Let’s continue in English.”)

While I also find blind hero-worship of The Leader mildly disturbing at best, an invitation to dictatorship and tyranny at worst, good ol’ Hal feels like a very odd target for deconstruction. I don’t think people out there chanting jingoistic slogans are quoting Shakespeare, you know?

What’s more, I find the “every hero you ever knew was actually a turd” school of film-making no longer terribly insightful or thought-provoking. As fans of swords’n’slaughter we’ve been through this already with Game of Thrones, and found at the end of it there was nothing, just cheap spectacle, sound and fury signifying nothing, all the while hypocritically dressing itself up in pacifist clothing while drenching the screen in 30-minute battlefests. It’s hollow, empty storytelling whose point has already been made several times by better productions.

At the time it was first staged, I’m sure Henry V was intended as a bit of nationalistic rabble-rousing, but Shakespeare is celebrated today for his poetry, not his patriotism, and sucking the language out of his plays sucks the life out of them.