Dune Part Two

Harkonnen
The Barbarian

Dune Part Two
Directed by Denis Villeneuve
USA/Canada
2024 Warner Brothers
UK Cinema Print

Okay, so I quite liked Denis Villeneuve’s first attempt to film Frank Herbert’s landmark science fiction novel Dune (reviewed here) and, I have to say, I really liked the second one too. People are maybe over hyping this a little and calling Dune Part Two a great masterpiece. I can appreciate it may feel like that due to the epic scale of the production (although, I think that’s something of an illusion) but, out of Villeneuve’s various films I’d say that some of his others, such as Arrival (reviewed here) are much better.

Nevertheless, this is a pretty entertaining film with an incredibly long running time which, honestly, doesn’t feel like anything half as long. The reason I say the epic scale is a bit of an illusion is because, honestly, the majority of this one takes place just on Dune (aka Arrakis) itself... with the only other scenes being set on the worlds of the Emperor and Baron Harkonnen. But they are brief scenes in the scheme of things and, the majority of the action here follows the plight of Paul Atriedes, played pretty well by Timothée Chalamet (I’ll get to that in a minute) and Chani, played wonderfully by Zendaya. So it’s a lot of running around in the sand with some really great guerilla warfare action scenes and lots of stuff like sandworm riding. And it really doesn’t get dull.

Oh... and about that. The special effects in this are great but, UK readers of a certain age will, I’m sure, know exactly what I’m talking about when I say the sandworm riding scenes are like something straight out of Michael Bentine’s Potty Time. It was all I could think of while watching these sequences throughout the movie. So, I also got a lot of smiles mixed in with the drama.

There are a lot of great actors in this including the almost wasted Rebecca Ferguson (that’s just me... I always want her in more scenes no matter what film she’s in), Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Dave Bautista, Léa Seydoux, Stellan Skarsgård and Charlotte Rampling (who is very underused also, compared to the build up of her role in the first movie). Everyone’s great in this but... I do want to just say something about Chalamet and two other actors in the movie, namely Christopher Walken as the Emperor and Florence Pugh as his daughter. Who are all good in this but, I don’t know, seem a little inappropriately placed, it seems to me.

Okay, so Chalamet is always good in whatever he’s in but, towards the end I don’t think the casting suited him. Lets look at another film series which borrowed heavily from Dune (not to mention a load of other science fiction literature such as Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoomian novels), namely Star Wars. Luke Skywalker in the original trilogy goes through a similar arc in that he goes from being an inexperienced young man who leans into his ‘mystic powers’ and comes out, by the opening of Return Of The Jedi, as a powerful badass who can take down an empire if he so decides. By the end of Dune Part Two, Paul Atreides is in a similar state but, as good as the frenetic fight scene at the end between Chalamet and a psychotic bad guy is... and for all his posturing and ‘using his voice’... well, I just didn’t buy it. It felt undersold to me.

And Christopher Walken, who is absolutely great as always, also felt inappropriately cast... unless the Emperor is supposed to feel like a flimsy old man who doesn’t seem to be able to ever have acquired and held on to the power he has, that is. Why would anyone throw down their allegiance to this guy in the first place, was my main thought in his casting. He was great saying the lines but, like Chalamet, seemed to lack the gravitas his part required... and I’m really surprised to hear myself saying that about the legendary Walken, for sure.

Thirdly... what the heck Florence Pugh? I felt she was being totally misused here as an actress. Literally, from her opening of the film as a kind of a ‘recap girl’ and onwards, she seemed to be just there to provide a narrative clarification for the audience in most (if not all) of her scenes... which is a shame because she’s actually an important bargaining chip in Paul Atreides’ end game.

I also spotted a nice cameo from one of my favourite actresses, Anya Taylor-Joy but, it was literally just a very small scene as a character who won’t enter the narrative properly for another 25 years or so later in the saga. So, yeah, I don’t suppose we’ll be seeing much more of her in the inevitable sequel, to be honest. I looked for her name in the cast list at the end and she wasn’t there so, I thought I’d just imagined it but, no, her own IMDB page confirms her inclusion in this film, for sure.

And, of course, the other big star of the film is Hans Zimmer’s wonderful score, which does provide both atmosphere and gravitas and, honestly, probably makes the film sound more epic than it actually is. I can’t wait to get my hands on a CD release of this one soon (I’m assuming they’ll be releasing one on proper CD... the first movie got two albums, one of which was also a double album, if memory serves). The leitmotif follow through on this one is pretty strong so, at times it does almost feel like they’ve tracked in parts of the previous score... but it works really well and, yeah, hoping to have the opportunity to hear a proper physical release of this one at some point in the near future, for sure.

And I think that’s me done on the quite wonderful Dune Part Two other than to say, the film has something of a cliffhanger ending again so... I hope Villeneuve is called in to direct Dune Messiah pretty soon. I shall be looking forward to it. Also, the film jumps around a bit and, I suspect there was a lot of it cut out from various sequences which, giving Villeneuve’s hatred of showing deleted scenes, I suspect I won’t get to see in my lifetime (although future lovers of cinema might get to see them once the director is dead, is my guess).

Dune Part One

Fremen Popsicle

Dune Part One
aka Dune
USA/Canada 2021
Directed by Denis Villeneuve
Warner Brothers

I remember when Denis Villeneuve was first announced as the director of yet another adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune. I said at the time that if anyone was going to be able to capture the inherent beauty of a sand planet then, given his track record it was Denis Villeneuve. Even though, at the time, I was still angry at him for attempting to make a sequel to the greatest movie ever made (aka Blade Runner reviewed here) and then making a great looking film which was absolutely unlike the spirit of the original in any way, shape or form (which you can find reviewed by me here).

That being said, I was surprisingly uninterested when this film finally got released and it took some hefty recommendations from my friends to actually bother sitting down and watching this one... despite wanting to hear what Hans Zimmer did with the score. I remember seeing the David Lynch version in the cinemas back in 1984 and being similarly disappointed in it, especially since I knew Lynch was capable of making something as brilliant as Eraserhead. I think I also read the book around a similar time frame and... yeah, I liked the novel well enough but wasn’t a huge fan like my father was. I never got around to reading any of Herbert’s sequels and I still don’t feel the pull of it, to be honest.

However, I did sit down to watch the new version, eventually and... yeah, it’s okay. Not too terrible. Better than Lynch was allowed to get away with at any rate. It’s influences on film properties such as Star Wars are certainly apparent and the special effects departments are good enough now to render the necessary nuts and bolts workings of the universe which the characters inhabit as something fairly credible, it has to be said. It also should be mentioned that the personal shields used by the various fighters in the field are in no way an improvement over the big, blocky, Tron-like effects in the 1984 version (I haven’t bothered watching any of the TV shows of the various novels) and I think they still look a bit lame, to be honest.

We’ve got a star studded cast on this one, of course, including Timothée Chalamet as main protagonist Paul Atriedes, Rebecca Ferguson as his mum, Oscar Isaac as his dad, Zendaya as his Freman love interest (seen mostly in visions with a small amount of running time in this version, since this film only covers roughly the first half of the first novel), Jason Momoa as Duncan (although why there are bagpipes on the score because he’s called Duncan is beyond me), Dave Bautista, Stellan Skarsgård, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin and Charlotte Rampling. They’re all as solid as you’d expect from them and help carry the story along at a leisurely pace. There have been comments made that Chalamet is a bit wooden in this... well I don’t know the actor at all but I think he actually plays the role with the suitable amount of gravitas and royal burden a role like that should be played so, yeah, I’ve got no complaints and I think much more emotion might have killed his credibility a little, to be honest. I seem to remember that Kyle MacLachlan was accused of something similar back in the day so, yeah, I think this is the right approach to take with the character.

The film is exquisite to look at, as you would expect from a director like Villeneuve and this gives it a kind of epic feel, like a lot of his movies have, even though it’s obviously been truncated to fit the pacing of his take on the story. There are some nice moments and some suspenseful scenes (such as when the remote, silent assassin comes for Paul) and although it is appropriately slow for the source material, it never gets boring... although I’m not sure I could sit through it again anytime soon.

I should shout out that the ornithopters, machines I’ve been reading about for years in various science fiction and fantasy tales (especially some of those by Moorcock), are beautifully rendered on screen and the absolute impossibility of their movement within the confines of a man made object is neatly transcended by the special effects people at least rendering their mechanics in a visually appealing way. I’m not sure the same can be said of the sand worms though and I think I could have done with seeing them a little bit more... Villeneuve tends to hide them in the sand like they’re on an episode of Michael Bentine’s Potty Time and save the full look at one for the last part of the movie.

Zimmer’s score is absolutely fine and, sounding like a lot of his other scores of late... and that’s not meant to be a slight, I actually like this composer a lot and I think that’s just the power of his personal, musical voice coming out. That being said, the Arabian flavour of some of the score did, at times, sound almost like it was tracked in from the 1982 Vangelis score to Blade Runner, to my ears. Again, though, I think I’m just picking up on the distinctive style of the music in certain parts of the Blade Runner score which obviously shares the same inspirational source.

And that’s really all I’ve got to say about this new version of Dune, in all honesty. It was not as boring or as terrible as I was expecting and, all in all (and without having seen the TV version), I’d say it’s certainly the best cinema release version we’ve had of the story thus far. If you’re a fan of the novel... or even of David Lynch’s neutered version of it... then you’ll probably get a kick out of this version so, yeah, don’t sit on the fence on this one like I did. It’s really, as I said, not too terrible.

Blade Runner 2049

Morphology. Longevity. Incept Dates.

Blade Runner 2049
2017 USA/UK/Canada
Directed by Denis Villeneuve
UK cinema release print.

Warning: I could have written a spoiler free review here but I decided I wanted to address the issues that this film throws up a little more freely. So, fair warning, all the big spoilers will be covered here. If you don’t want to know this stuff then don’t read until after you’ve seen the movie. Lots of spoilerage per paragraph and you won’t see them coming until I blindside you with them so, seriously, if you don’t want to know, don’t read further than this warning paragraph.

To paraphrase another famous movie, this was not the sequel I was looking for.

That being said, I really wasn’t looking for a sequel to Blade Runner at all and I’ve always dreaded, even back in the 1980s when the subject first came up, that anyone would ever get around to doing one. I’ve already made clear my thoughts on the first film, which I first saw at the cinema in 1982 in its most perfect cut (as far as I’m concerned), the original studio cut. You can read my Blade Runner review here where I look at the various cuts of the movie and also detail my personal relationship with the film, helping to keep the movie alive long after it expired as a box office flop by going to see it with my friend at various midnight screenings before it suddenly started to gain popularity again in the 1990s. I must have seen the first movie somewhere between 50 and 100 times by now and so, yeah, I have a lot to be compromised by a bad sequel to a perfect movie which, lets be honest, doesn’t really need a follow up anyway.

So the first and most positive thing I will say about it is... it’s not a terrible movie. It’s actually, in fact, a pretty well made, modern science fiction film which harkens back to the 1950s or earlier for its central themes... themes which writer Philip K. Dick, who wrote the original source novel pillaged by the first movie, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, explored on a number of occasions in his writing career. So, for a nice, adult themed, science fiction movie... yeah, Blade Runner 2049 is quite successful in that sense.

As a sequel to the original film both in look and in spirit though... well that’s another matter and, much as I like Villeneuve as a director, I don’t think he does either of those things justice here.

For example, the film does, indeed, look spectacular but, honestly, compared to the look of the original movie which, it seemed to me, was much denser and more coherent in its portrayal of a crowded, urban environment in meltdown... this film felt a little inconsistent and sketchy. Maybe it’s because none of the establishing shots or fly bys of the various environments are long enough but... it didn’t really hit me the way it should do, I think.

The director eschews the classic opening titles of the first film and cuts to the intro text. At various places in the film we get text highlighting the various locations but, I can tell you, I was sitting fairly close to the front with a giant screen and those titles were so small I could barely make them out. The white type just about but the red type just above them... no way. Goodness knows how this would play in a home environment with a smaller screen. We then get a vista of landscape and, while its set in a different environment and we still get the giant eyeball shot to echo the first movie, it just all feels a bit ‘by the numbers’ to me. I’ve seen the first movie a gazillion times on some great screens and, almost without fail, the opening shots of the city on that old one flip flops your stomach over and dazzles with the sheer spectacle. Alas, this movie doesn’t have anything nearly as close as that opening and... yeah... I really felt it.

One thing this film does have which is similar to the original in terms of positive stuff is a cast of very good actors. Ryan Gosling is amazing (as he pretty much always is), Harrison Ford is... well, he’s Harrison Ford (so that means he’s always watchable), Ana de Armas  is pretty great as Gosling’s virtual companion, Sylvia Hoeks as a ‘bad gal’ replicant is actually more like the ‘andies’ in the original Dick novel than Ridley Scott’s movie (in that she’s actually genuinely evil rather than the like the morally superior replicants of the first movie) and Mackenzie Davis looks stunning as a working gal replicant who slinks about and is dressed similarly to Daryl Hannah’s Pris from the first movie. The film does, indeed, try and echo a lot of the beats of the first film and the gait of this particular character is one of the things which actually works as an homage here, I thought.

And then you have two genuinely outstanding performances which I think were worth the entry fee... although they are both fairly small roles. One is Robin Wright as Gosling’s boss. She really knocks it out of the park here playing an equivalent role to Deckard’s old boss Bryant from the first film in terms of inherent species-ism. She was great in Wonder Woman (reviewed here) and she is truly, old school, hard boiled, tough as nails here. Her final scene in the movie opposite Sylvia Hoeks is pretty memorable. And then we have David Bautista playing a truly sympathetic replicant. He shines in, literally, his only scene in the movie which is the opening sequence. I’m beginning to really like what this actor can do and this is the most interesting thing I’ve seen him perform so... yeah, very impressed with his performance here. So those two were the stand out performances for me in this film, it has to be said.

About that opening sequence though?

Well, it’s something I’ve been half wanting to see since 1982 in that it’s a throwback in spirit to an early draft of Blade Runner, as a way of establishing what the central protagonist does in an action sequence. Here it further serves to establish that Ryan Gosling’s character 'K' is also a superhuman replicant... so it proves useful. It also kickstarts the story when certain ‘clues’ are found on the farm residence where Bautista’s character is working. Instead of pulling the retired replicant’s jaw bone out and revealing a serial number as in that old draft screenplay I am referring to from the first film, Gosling just harvests one of the characters eyes as proof of something he already knows from what amounts to a mini, portable Voight Kampff test replacement he carries in his pocket. It’s actually a pretty good scene and plays with a lot of tension... Villeneuve using that ‘old chestnut’ of the boiling pot in the corner as a way of enhancing the suspense of the scene. And it works really well here. Here’s the thing, though... I remember back in the early 1980s, Phiilp K. Dick complaining about that scene when he read it in the script and saying that it was one of the worst things he’d read (or words to that effect), condemning the tone of the film Ridley Scott was about to make (although I understand that, from what footage was available of the original that Dick actually saw back in 1982 before his untimely death, he really liked the final film Ridley was making and praised it wholeheartedly). However, I can’t help but think that, with the reintroduction of a variant on that opening (which I kinda guessed they would be doing here, to be fair), he would be turning in his grave.

One of the things which I’ve always loved about the original is the fact that Deckard is never portrayed as being a replicant... something Scott tried to change on all subsequent versions of the movie. There are lots of reasons why he actually wouldn’t be a replicant (quite apart from the fact that Philip K. Dick’s original novel explores the same issue more implicitly and categorically states that he’s not an android)... for instance the weakness of him against any other replicant in the film (newer model or not). In fact he actually gets rescued from death by two replicants in that first film... admittedly by one who is trying to, at first, kill him at the end of the picture in the case of one of them. I’ve never believed for a moment that Deckard could ever be a replicant, despite Scott continuing to say he is... because the evidence just doesn’t stack up. My biggest worry would be that this film would paint him as a replicant but the writers are quite clever here. We have a scenario where Jared Leto’s Niander Wallace character... a more evil equivalent of Doctor Eldon Tyrell from the first movie... kinda assumes that Deckard is but poses the question to him because he isn’t certain.

And... I still think he isn’t. And here’s why...

Villeneuve has gone on record that the original studio cut is his favourite (like me) but that he’s made this one as a sequel to the Final Cut. I think not, actually. This film seems to me to be a sequel more to the original studio cut than people might, at first, realise. The story involves Gosling’s ‘K’ hunting the child of Deckard and his replicant lover from the first film, Rachel (played by Sean Young back in 1982 and again... wait, I’ll get to that in a minute). The back story here is that Rachel died about five years after 2019, in childbirth, due to a C-section. So there you go, if I got my timelines correct, already the film is sequelling the original ‘drive off in to the sunset’ ending where Rachel is deemed a special replicant with no built in, four year life span. Secondly, if Deckard was a replicant then how could he have impregnated Rachel? One or the other sex would surely be manufactured as impotent? Especially since a lot of them were destined to be ‘pleasure models’ and engage in sexual activity. After all, if you’re making replicants, you surely don’t want your male replicants running around shooting anything other than blanks in the reproduction department, do you? So, yeah, I’m happy to say that, as far as I’m concerned, this movie categorically proves Deckard is not a replicant. Finally. End of discussion and we can finally return to seeing that original ending with the origami unicorn fashioned by Edward James Olmos’ character Gaff (who returns in a brief scene with another origami animal here), as the metaphor for Deckard believing in a myth, for what it was. Thank goodness.

Okay... so Rachel. Just under a year ago I complained about the bad job the computer graphics guys had done with resurrecting Peter Cushing’s character in Rogue One (reviewed here). Something I still  stick by now. Well, we have a similar disappointment here where Niander Wallace has created a new version of Rachel who looks somewhat similar to what she did in the original (presumably voiced by Sean Young? It doesn’t say in the IMDB). Except, like Cushing in Rogue One, the CGI character looks really dodgy to me and if I didn’t know she was a recreation of a younger character, I would still see that something was really ‘off’ about her here. This just doesn’t work for me and although the way the character bows out of the film is quite dramatic, it kind of takes the edge off any emotional response to the character I might have had, I think.

One last thing...

There’s a scene in Dick’s original novel emphasising the lack of empathy the androids have which is where, after finally saving enough money up to afford to buy a real animal (a sheep which Deckard names Groucho), one of the female androids throws it off the roof and kills it. There’s a similar incident going for the same emotional beat here, where Gosling’s virtual companion has deliberately put herself in a situation where she has become... for all intents and purposes... mortal. The lead replicant villainess destroys her in a similar throwaway moment and this, at least, is something which I think Philip K. Dick might have been able to appreciate. So there’s that.

Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch’s new score is trying hard to be like the Vangelis original but it gets way too overbearing a lot of the time. I would have preferred to hear what Jóhann Jóhannson would have done with the movie before he ‘left’ the project. Interestingly, there’s a moment at the end where, from what I can tell, ‘K’ dies from his wounds. As he lets go of his life, we get a new version of the Vangelis Tears In Rain music from the original movie, which underscored the death of Rutger Hauer’s character. However, since the replicants don’t seem to die from injuries too seriously unless shot somewhere vital, it seems to me that you could interpret this moment as 'K' just having a rest for a while. After all, there’s no visual metaphor like the release of the dove from the replicant’s dying hands as in the 1982 version. So it’s interesting that, unless you know the music, you may not realise the character has died at the end, I suspect. However, I could be wrong and placing too much emphasis on the strength of the original score, to be fair. The soundtrack is filled with lots of similar (and in some cases identical), ambient sound effects as the template movie and sometimes, just like the original, you may have a hard time trying to work out where the music ends and the sound design kicks in.

The thing which the story did really well is to actually fool me with the twist reveal of the child of Deckard and Rachel. I was pretty sure who it was all the way through the movie until this moment it’s spelled out and it gives the character in question a new beat, as it were, in that the person is obviously ‘recruiting’ a replicant army by giving memories to various artificial characters. It’s a nice moment in a film which looks great (although not nearly as good as the original) and is full of nice moments such as this. However, for me, even though it’s trying, it just doesn’t feel anything like a sequel to Blade Runner. It doesn’t quite get there... but it does get close on the odd occasion.

One last piece of symmetry with the original, though, was the audience size. When the film came out and flopped back in ‘82, I remember being in a cinema with my parents and there were literally maybe just over ten people in the audience. Well, quite surprisingly, since this new movie has had such high praise, I found myself in the same situation in a 3D screening on opening night, where there were again just over ten people. Which puzzled me and, I can tell you, I saw two couples walk out of the movie at various points. Which I find quite interesting because, whether it lives up to the original or not (and I’m siding with ‘not’), it’s still quite a nice piece of cinema on its own merits.

My friend, who I have been seeing screenings of the original film with since the mid 1980s, was with me for this performance and I think his reaction to the movie pretty much sums it up the best for me. As we both left the cinema, he looked in about as pretty much a state of mixed irritation and dejection with Blade Runner 2049 as I was feeling. He turned to me and said six words... “What was the point of that?” Other than to point out the studio were going for some cash again, I really couldn’t think of a good answer or disagree with his sentiment. For me, I’m afraid, it’s too bad this sequel won’t live... but then again, who does?

Incendies

Genus Envy

Incendies
Canada/France 2010
Directed by Denis Villeneuve
Trinity Film Blu Ray Zone B

I remember seeing a lot of enthusiasm for Incendies a few years back from Alex Kittle on Twitter (and she reviewed it here). Because of that I had it on a back burner in my mind to keep an eye out for it for a while but it wasn’t until earlier this year that I spotted a Blu Ray version of the film at a film fair for a only a few quid. So I bought it and then, on the way home, found that it was written and directed by Denis Villeneuve, who gave us such films as Sicario (reviewed here) and Arrival (reviewed here). I like that director’s way of expressing himself visually so I was really looking forward to seeing this one and, for the most part it didn’t disappoint. That being said, it does have one glaring problem, as far as I’m concerned but, for the most part, this is buried within the layers of a nice little movie.

So the things I usually associate from the work of Villeneuve, based on those two other films I’ve seen by him, are found in abundance in Incendies right from the start. That being the stunningly beautiful photography which pitches the characters against gorgeous, often naturally lit landscapes and the languid pacing which rarely rushes through the content of a shot unless a certain kind of tension is required. The film is truly wonderful to look at and, like certain moments in the previous works I mentioned, it’s often a bitter or troubled set of protagonists that are caught in the light of his cinematic spectacle.

After a brief opening showing a group of children with their heads being shaved, which will make more sense towards the closing of the story, the film starts off proper with two twins, Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxime Gaudette), who are visiting the notary of the will of their recently deceased mother Nawal (played by Lubna Azabal). However, the conditions of the will means that each of them get a sealed envelope. Jeanne is asked to track down the father she didn’t know was still alive and give him one envelope. Simon is given a sealed envelope for the brother neither of them knew they had. They have to trace their mother’s steps back to a fictional area in the region of Palestine... from what I could make out... and find the story of her life - the atrocities she bore and decisions she made - in order to find the respective recipients of said letters.

Simon is angry and refuses to do this for a while but Jeanne, a 'pure mathematics' teacher, takes up the challenge first... before Simon goes to her aid and completes his part of their combined mission. The film spends most of it’s time in the past, flashbacking constantly to Nawal and setting up a character whose origins she has obviously, in future years in the story, reassigned to someone else. We see her struggle in love, childbirth and the necessity of abandoning said child, flung in protest against political strife and ultimately trying to track down her child before some even more gruelling stuff happens to her... all rendered in such a dreamy, picturesque way which, of course, contrasts to the gritty, raw atmosphere in the same way that the sad lyrics of a song may sometimes be more effective with an upbeat tempo. We see her transformation into The Woman Who Sings and just what that name means to various people caught in the plot.

And every now and then we cut back to Jeanne and, eventually, Simon as they slowly begin to unravel and learn a truth that they really don’t want to hear while, at the same time, learning an appreciation for a mother who they never knew, presumably, had gone through so much incredible pain and adverse conditions in her life. It’s a truly nice piece of work and I can only applaud both Villeneuve and the incredible actors, not to mention composer Grégoire Hetzel whose music, along with some pretty great needle drop songs, really finds the beauty in the story of Nawal and the terrible consequences of her actions.

That being said... okay, glaring problem time. The film has got a big reveal but, as it happens, this director proves once again, just as he did on Arrival, that he’s not very good at keeping the ending out of sight before he’s ready to show and tell. Incendies goes on for just under two and a half hours but, by the time I had gotten to a certain claustrophobic and nightmarish scene with a coach, about 40 minutes into the movie, I had already figured out one important aspect of the father and brother at the centre of the mystery of the movie. And, after a little more information in some of the following scenes, I’d say I pretty much pieced together the whole ending to the movie within the first hour and so... there was a little bit of me waiting around and seeing how long it would take the central characters to catch up with me, it has to be said. So, yeah, not very impressed with that element of the film but, when you have a movie with a limited amount of main characters in it, it doesn’t take long to solve the problem of identity, for sure. Which is a shame.

However, that being said, there are plenty of other rewards contained within the viewing experience, such as when Narwal kind of has a breakdown which eventually leads to her death and you realise that, at that point, not even she knew the full truth of her past. Despite the obviousness of the plot, Villeneuve manages to keep piling the tension on and, although it’s ultimately not nearly as graphic as many thrillers might be, it’s still 'felt' a little more intensely than you might feel in other films. After all, like I implied before, when you have a slow camera taking in all the details of a shot and the paths of the central characters through it, the ugliness which the camera is so intent on recording comes to the foreground and there’s no escaping the grim memoirs of a life well lived.

In all honesty, although the key to the film is quite easy to discover much earlier than you would probably want it to be become apparent, the film sucks you in with its constant flickering between the two time zones in which we see our main characters trying to discover the quickest route to the well hidden branches on their family tree... while we also see the roots of this particular part of their origins slowly beginning to grow and stretch out its dark branches. Ferociously good acting with the camera catching little, shorthand details of their characters, such as the exercise regime of one of the characters at a certain point in her life, helps convince the audience that these are real people who have lived through really bad times, above and beyond what many of us mere mortals are asked to go through during our lifetimes. Incendies is a definite must watch for any passing cinephiles and especially those who are truly enamoured of the beauty one can find in the cinematography of André Turpin and the typically gorgeous, slow burn style of Denis Villeneuve’s cinematic world. Time to track down some more of his movies, I think, before I possibly lose empathy with him on his latest project... an unnecessary sequel to the greatest movie ever made called Blade Runner 2049.

Arrival

Cunning Linguist

Arrival
2016 USA Directed by Denis Villeneuve 
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Although absolutely no spoilers are in here, the fact that I talk about the syntax of the film could result in slight spoilerage if considered for a while.

Arrival is an adaptation of a sci fi short story I’ve not actually read by Ted Chiang called Story Of Your Life... so I can’t say how it is as an adaptation. This expanded (presumably) version of the story is directed by Denis Villeneuve, who directed last year’s movie Sicario (which I reviewed here) and who, since finishing this movie, has started filming a seemingly unnecessary sequel to Blade Runner (reviewed here). On that subject, I guess if I had to name a modern director who could take on a sequel to what is, after all, the greatest movie ever made, I think Villeneuve may be a good one to trust. I wouldn’t trust Ridley Scott after the way he’s ‘revisionist butchered’ the film in subsequent decades and, especially after having seen Prometheus... which seems to take joy in holding up all that was great about his astonishing movie A L I E N and then destroying the memory of it.

Anyway, back to this director’s Arrival. It’s not too long ago since we had a big, conceptual sci-fi movie playing in cinemas but they don’t come along as frequently as some of the other kinds of films made in versions of the genre so this is kind of a welcome change from the plethora of superheroes and space opera movies which have been howling for our collective attention in recent years.

Now, the thing about high concept sci-fi films like this one is they, generally, live or die on the strength of the mystery which is hiding at their core and which is usually revealed at the end of the movie. More often than not, the audience will work the ending out way before they are supposed to on these kinds of event films and this is either because they are too obvious or because the director telegraphs (or is forced to dumb down because of studio pressure) the nature of the ending. Alas, while Arrival is a pretty terrific movie, it’s no exception to this rule but... I’ll get to that in a little while.

Okay, so what’s good about Arrival?

Well, a heck of a lot actually. Villeneuve has equipped himself with some fine actors in this one with the main protagonist being played by Amy Adams, who is very well supported by the always watchable Jeremy Renner. They are both in terrific company as they are backed up by a team of good actors, headed primarily by Forrest Whitaker and Michael Stuhlbarg.

The plot is very simple... Amy Adams plays Dr. Louise Banks, one of the United States’ top linguists, who is called upon by the military, in the form of Colonel Weber as played by Forest Whitaker, to try and communicate with an alien species who have landed twelve ships around the Earth at places where, apparently, Sheena Easton has had hit records. No, I’m not making this up and I did appreciate the odd bit of humour in what is, it has to be said... and this seems to be typical of this director... a fairly dry film. It’s a film that deals with big emotions but there’s something fairly distancing and clinical about the directorial style which mostly tends to render the emotional context as something which needs to be studied and observed rather than felt. At least that’s the way I react to Villeneuve’s work and I have absolutely no problem with this. Louise heads up the languages team and Renner’s mathematician character, Ian Donnelly, heads up another division and, every 18 hours when the ship allows some humans to go inside to make contact, the two are accompanied by military personnel to try and make some kind of breakthrough, for their country, as to what the aliens want and if their intention is hostile.

Of course, the world’s leaders are all conducting their own investigations with their own spaceships and, as tensions rise, Louise has to try and find ways to get the fragmented super powers talking again and to stop them from launching what seems an inevitable attack on the aliens, thus causing major disruption between the nations and possibly inviting death from the aliens. At least that’s what the story at first seems to be about if you are just accepting everything as it’s fed to you. I wasn’t but... yeah, like I said earlier, the film has a flaw and I’ll get to that in a minute.

Villeneuve, once again, gets the most out of his cinematographer by grabbing some really beautiful shots but the colour palette, asides from some strong reds near the start, is kind of subdued and neutral throughout the entire course of the movie. Everything looks very dialled down and flat although, in some shots, I did notice he tends to enhance a small part of the screen with a bright colour or striking object which, although it’s rarely the centre of your focus, does tend to balance the way the shot is received, it seemed to me. I’m not sure if that was a conscious decision to do that but, since these things take so long to light and set up, I can only conclude that it was.

However, despite looking like the cinematic equivalent of a page full of Helvetica, the shots are quite beautiful and, coupled with some very slow and fluid camera movement and less than speedy pacing, I have to say that it’s an immensely gorgeous looking film and it’s primarily on that basis, and the strength of Jóhann Jóhannsson’s riveting score, that I will be seeking this one out on blu ray so my dad can take a look at it at some point.

However, there’s some bad stuff thrown in with the good which I’ve been intimating all through the review and... well... the problem is this.

Arrival places the solution behind its mystery dead front and centre. There’s a pre-credits scene to this movie and I so wish the director had not included this because, even before the title to the movie comes up straight after this, I’d kinda figured out exactly where the ending was going. It was always going to be a possibility that the movie ventures into the territory that it does... and I’m trying really hard to not give away spoilers here people... but the director really tips his hand very early on in the proceedings with the opening sequence, both with the nature of Amy Adam’s voice over to this scene and, even more tellingly, in the way he shoots around a certain something, deliberately not revealing something specific through blurry cinematography. This immediately got my brain thinking about why certain visual clues had been hidden and, of course, once your mind goes down that track it’s not too hard to think of the best logical conclusion... or at the very least, the way the film is really playing out towards a similar conclusion if you’re not caught up in the director and screenwriter’s parlour games.

Villeneuve reenforces his folly in a much cleverer way than, say, M. Night Shyamalan might try and cover his obvious slips in his movies. What Villeneuve does here is structure the film and the frequency of certain styles of scenes so that they play out in a way that the audience will, for the most part, trick themselves into misinterpreting some of the information. It’s my long held belief that the complex series of visual signifiers that make up the syntax of cinema stick in people’s brains as youngsters after watching only a few films or TV shows. For instance with flashbacks (which work slightly differently in some cinematic cultures, I’ve noticed) or other such things such as two shots of people talking and cutting back and forth, making up a conversation, have very pointed interpretations. So, if you screw around with the way they are really as opposed to being perceived, then you can allow the audience to fool itself. The strength of the opening sequence in the amazing film Pleasantville, for example, relies on the audience thinking that two characters are having a conversation before a long shot reveals the punchline that they are both in different places and a conversation ‘with each other’ isn’t happening at all at this point.

The director of Arrival uses another long held cinematic tradition, which I won’t name here, to fool the majority of the audience as to a certain element of one of the characters and I suspect it might work really well on some people. The only reason it didn’t work on me, I suspect, is because I have an unconventional outlook on life and don’t take for granted a certain linear element of people’s lives that they tend to latch onto as a scientific reality. And that’s all I’m saying about that so as not to spoil things for you but, alas, I did find the main conceptual twist to be jarringly obvious right from the pre-credits sequence, I’m afraid.

However, it doesn’t matter. The thing is... Arrival is a startlingly good presentation of a concept that has been done in a fairly different manner quite recently in the cinema and certainly in a more light hearted manner by some films over the last four decades. The pacing might be a little too European for some audience members (which was clearly the case in the screening I attended where people were kicking the backs of chairs or going out for a little walk half way through) but it really is a stunning film and I, personally, didn’t get bored by it once. If you are into conceptual science fiction then you’ll probably want to take a look at this one. It’s a film with amazing cinematography, great music and some interesting performances. And if you do find it as obvious as I did in terms of never quite taking you by surprise, the film more than makes up for it in other ways and ultimately I found it to be an entertaining, if not entirely thought provoking, lollipop of a movie.