NoWo's Reviews
The sleeper should have awakened by now
Lynch brought many personal additions that were quite fantastic, possibly because he was close enough in age to Herbert.
Villeneuve, not so much. He does get a little bit more freaky, with his hairless, B&W Harkonnen aesthetics. Not unpleasant, but short of a success. His overall take is off the mark, as I see it.
He tried to flesh out the Fremen, and I say, why not?
The forced diversity of colour still makes sense only to the leftist, so racist, mind. The Fremen are a brutally homogeneous people, which is one of their main strength. So yeah, multikulti motto of diversity being strength in full action. To be fair, Lynch's Fremen were very white, but probably due to logistics and budget. And well, Berbers and Kabyls, so there's that.
Also, Bardem is the whitest actor, and the natural leader, so yeah, usual lefty racism confirmed. Bardem in one heck of a Stilgar, I have to admit.
On the other hand, a character is only as intelligent as its writers, which is a severe limitation here. Hand-to-hand may look bad-arse, but shields can't be used in the desert, because worms. Meaning it should be a rifleman's battlefield.
Also, shield + laser equals big boom. Patrol ornis use shields, and the Fremen's objective is utter destruction. Why risk your men when one or two fire teams can wreak total havoc on the enemy's harvesters by detonating the scouts?
Since combat is melee, women participate, as in all zeroes of historical examples, and are at least as good as men, because intersectionality of missing dick and heightened melanin.
Zendaya is the main offender; flying arm-lock takedowns may look cool, but how she crosses the distance every time without getting eviscerated is as mysterious as her continued employment in Hollywood.
Speaking of which, she should contractualize not appearing in scene with other females, as all and any other actress has more presence than her. Including incidental, two-lines characters.
And then there's the split between Northern and Southern Fremen (South being for the religious extremists), which makes no sense either (thus the reason for not existing in the books), and feels like modern politics injection. How can it even be stable, with the South being both safe and an overwhelming majority, one would wonder.
Herbert, not Villeneuve, has created a body of work with rabid following, which included quite a lot of effort for logical, sensical world-building. Maybe Villeneuve should learn some amount of humility, and not 'fix' the work of his betters.
All in all, Herbert was famous for his world crafting, Villeneuve can hope for infamy.
Speaking of which, no weirding modules. What Lynch was snorting at the time, science may never uncover.
Zendaya's purpose is uncovered in Part Deux: to spew blank slate, pseudo-egalitarian poppycock mixed with essentialist, hard-core racism. Quite a feat, really. And trying to bring Chani to the center of everything, which is very much neither the story nor the characters.
A lot of time is wasted on 'building' Feyd-Rautha's character. He's cartoonishly evil without the over-the-top campiness of Sting in space panties. "He can be controlled", says the BG mastermind. Yeah. Right. If _that_ is your plan B, you've already failed.
Princess Irulan's role has been puffed up, which is coherent with the books. Madsen was rather bland, but stunningly beautiful. Pugh is just bland.
Chalamet is still struggling with his character, Walken is tired, so is Skarsgard, Rampling has her Gom Jabbar stuck up her arse, and Seydoux fails at her femme fatale attempt, of all things. They're all competently going through the motions.
All in all, a better movie than the previous installment, mostly due to the easier, rising conflict narration, but less and less Dune.
Created: 02-12-2025
Irrevocably suffers in comparison
I'm late to the party, and so shan't be long.
This is a decent movie, with a consequential budget, and it shows in many places. The dragonfly-like ornis, as an exemple.
It looks too flat for my tastes (the curse of digital cinematography), and lacks Lynch's creative rage. Villeneuve is still inarguably competent.
The casting is a weak point. Paul Atreides character concept is a thoroughbred: bred for power, born to power, forged through power. This character does not start off weak, and his journey is not becoming a leader, it's accepting the price of ambition / manifest destiny.
MacLachlan exuded (the expected) arrogance; Chalamet is an emo teenage girl; his character has no emotional restraint nor self-control. The only worse casting decision would have been the ubiquitous Pascal. Or maybe not. Too old, but cries better.
Speaking of ubiquitous: Zendaya. Why? Or how? Or any number of questions. Did she sleep with the new Weinstein?
The rest of the cast ranges from totally adequate to quite good, such as Momoa and Brolin.
I would mention Ferguson, a good actress burdened with a badly rewritten role, and Duncan-Brewster, set up to fail as an obvious gender-swapped diversity hire filling in von Sydow's boots.
She's quite good, probably needed the big profile job, and quite possibly could have succeeded on talent alone. But everything has its cost, and well, obvious DIE hire.
Regarding so-called diversity, ie: skin colour, how can an insular population from an insular planet range from Bardem to Olusanmokun? I mean, a biological reason, not socialist drivel.
Yes, Arrakis is probably bigger than Africa. But there are "millions of Fremen". Millions. Small numbers. Iowa has millions of people. And no distinct countries. Inter-breeding should have averaged the population in time. Unless cultural taboo. And thus probably countries.
Also, feminist angle. Villeneuve wanted "strong female roles". Like maybe an elitist sorority conspiring to influence human evolution across millennia and the known universe?
And turned the basically single Bene Gesserit character in Part One into a parody. And had to gender-swap another character.
Also, good luck with that in the subsequent movies, as Herbert was a staunch critic of "current day" (ie : 80s - 90s) feminism.
As in, the wild offshoot of BG were called Honored Matres. As in bad Latin and mattresses. And deemed dangerous as they toyed with a basic human instinct that threatened humanity itself.
We'll see how Villeneuve spins that in 2028, with a 6 per year per thousand marriage rate.
But hey, Herbert did have good instincts.
Quick mention of the score, which I would rate a tad lower than Lanois' (of which it is sometimes very reminiscent), but it's probably nostalgia speaking.
All in all, this will be yet another worthy attempt to bring Dune to the big screen (who goes to theaters anymore, though?), but certainly not Jackson's LotR.
Created: 02-10-2025
Successful action flick, failed critique of conservatism
As action sci-fi, this works great.
As the devastating denunciation of the dangers of conservatism, which director Verhoeven intended, well, it's the usual leftist fail.
Mostly because Verhoeven is quite ignorant of European history. To his defense, he had been a European for barely 6 decades at the time of shooting.
Of course, as intended, I don't agree with the overly fascistic rhetoric and the obvious Nazi imagery.
And then I remember, Mussolini had been a top-dog Italian Socialist before he went off and founded his own party, and the Waffen-SS were literally the armed branch of the National Health bureaucracy of Germany's National Sozialismus.
So, prescriptive collectivism is the opposite of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Socialism bad? Not quite what Verhoeven intended to say, but what he ended up saying anyway. Pretty much like Showgirls denounced female exploitation by means of round-the-clock naked smokeshows...
Created: 01-06-2025
Pleasant curio
This short-lived series was an attempt to bring the Vampire The Masquerade RPG to the telly, so a different, yet highly syncretic take on the vampire mythos.
This one is not teenage girl heart-throb, angsty disco sucker, and no effete Cruise & Pitt. Although all three could be Clan Toreador.
The main focus here is the Prince of San Francisco, who is basically an arbiter between the clans, as no older, more powerful kindred wants the hassle of the charge, and his efforts to uphold the Masquerade (tm), ie: the continuous effort of vampires to hide in plain sight, as an aware and united mankind could very possibly be an existential threat.
On the plus side, the script is honestly decent, if somewhat lazy in its use of clan tropes, but still pleasant enough.
On the minus side, it is cheaply made. Very cheaply. Clan Toreador is fittingly alluring, Clan Ventrue dignified, and so on, because it's rather easy to find good-looking actors.
The Nosferatu are appalling. They personify the horror of the beast within, the uncontrollable, raging animal instinct. They're ... bald.
Same goes for visual effects. They're bad, even for the 90s. Shape-shifting is awful. Any werewolf movie did it better. Heck, even the abysmal Manimal series did it better 15 years prior.
And yeah, everyone can shape-shift into a wolf for some reason. I mean, who wouldn't want to turn into a 60-pounds canine who can't speak, use a gun or operate door handles?
Also, the script plays fast and loose with the rules, but hey, telly is not TTRPG, so one has to adapt.
All in all, it's short and rather nice, and quite possibly very accessible to a non-player.
Created: 12-14-2024
Curtis is not enough
Curtis does it for me. But not for this movie.
She used to be a smoke show, back in analog times. Also, a scream queen. She didn't have the wherewithal to carry a (real) movie as the leading role.
Also, 80s script. Incoherent, and incredibly contrived, from the get-go.
Silver tries, maybe a tad too hard, but his character is just a mess of dubious writing. Brown is solid, but his character should have found the villain immediately. As in, just exclaimed "I know his name", cue electric guitar.
I got so bored that I actually started doing some light work before the halfway point.
Created: 12-08-2024
Cotton candy, goes down easy
Not Carpenter's best movie, but he knows his stuff, and it shows in this hybrid, half-vampire, half-cowboy movie.
Purportedly a horror movie, it doesn't take itself seriously, and it's a good thing. Nobody in there looks like an elite anything, Woods in his early fifties looks a tad fragile, Baldwin is somewhat well, stout, the squad tactics suck (pun intended), and everybody's been ran over by the Good Idea Fairy.
On the other hand, everything is decided by the rule of cool. Woods looks terminally cool, as he's wont to, Baldwin does a serviceable jaded cowboy and Lee an adorable zombie floozy, winch fishing is impractical as hell, but looks highly fun, and so on.
The result is stupidly rewatchable, hence the high grade.
Created: 12-08-2024
Awkward and badly paced
This could have worked as a 40-minutes episode in something like Kindred (although Near Dark actually predates Vampire the Masquerade by a few years).
As a full feature film, it's stretched too thin, and mid-thirties Bigelow still hasn't come into her own yet.
The movie has some clumsy charm to it; Pasdar and Wright are very pretty, and with Henriksen, Paxton and Goldstein, it feel a bit like an Aliens reunion. Except they are the aliens this time.
The Lost Boys did the romance part better, and Carpenter's Vampires had the inhuman, ruthless killer down to pat. And both added humour.
Near Dark isn't bad. It just doesn't compare favourably.
Fun fact: the movie never uses the V-word.
Fun 80s fact: sense of time was different back then. "Do you miss the days?" asked to the guy who's been 'dead' for 72 hours...
Created: 12-07-2024
Good overall
Somewhat tight (despite the runtime) thriller around the chase for Bin Laden, as seen from the spook side.
Chastain is a solid actress, and still easy to look at in her mid-thirties, which is fortunate considering the amount of screen time she gets, and what little action or growth she show during.
Visuals are very good, but the script could have done with some tightening.
Bigelow apparently caused some controversy at the time by "glorifying torture". Yeah. Right. Cause clean wars sure are a thing. And better escalate into large-scale, civilian-mowing kinetic conflicts than assassinate a few bad agents.
Funny that the muppets touting this luxury belief are usually the same crowd that ad nauseams "by any means necessary" and "if it only saves one life".
Bunch of tossers.
Pratt is in the movie, but hasn't found his stride yet. Also, a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo by Scott Adkins.
And to (somewhat) address a previous comment, Bigelow does not delve into geopolitics here, so yeah, OBL was the publicly designated target at the time.
Created: 12-07-2024
I am not entertained
I am still a fan of Scott’s. Well, was, until very recently. I even trudged through Prometheus. And Covenant. I’m a masochist. I deserve a good spanking.
Scott’s always had a situationship with historical accuracy, at best; see Last Duel, Napoleon. But now he’s gone and ghosted it. And slept with its mother. In its own bed. Live-streamed on Twitch. Because why not.
Female legionnaires? Zombie baboons from Hell? Gladiators riding rhinos shouting lasers out of their arses? (whose arse is up for debate). Football? Seriously?
To be fair, female gladiators had been a (rare) thing, because why not? Gladiator games, especially into the 3rd century, were pretty much American wrestling, if a fair tad bloodier, but mostly kayfabe. So, yeah, women, for the same reasons.
Except by the purported time of this movie, they had been banned because morality.
Washington is a pro, as usual, but out of place. The real-life Macrinus did manage to briefly claw his way into power despite his non-noble birth. But he couldn’t have done it with a black skin.
Pascal plays himself, as usual, so, Eternal Eunuch. Despite the hefty run time, his balls don’t drop. Also, why is he everywhere when that kind of money could hire an actor? And he’s a Roman general, too; who were well-known for general foppishness. General of the Emo Empire.
Maximus Redux is, well, present. He does a fairly good job of shouting while looking like a wet, miserable dog. And breathing, also. He breathes. That about wraps it up. But his character benefits from Chosen One Powers. Surprisingly, he’s not female.
The rest of the cast is better than Pascal, which is neither difficult nor enough.
So yeah, black-washing, female empowerment, so-called progressivism, and heavy recycling of the previous plot.
As anything with Pascal in it, it’s anti-male, smash-the-patriarchy, and much ado about nothing (literally; in Shakespeare’s time, ‘nothing’ was slang for an absence of dick). Polar opposite of the original.
Seats were stiff. Popcorn was crap. An evening wasted.
Edit: regarding the omnipresence of xir Pascal (no gender assumed), rumour apparently has it that it owes to his overt political pandering for the Party of the Ultimate Good (PUG?), but also to his checking of diversity boxes (ie: non-white, non-male) while being "white-passing".
The sheer and very literal racism of the morally superior never ceases to amaze.
Created: 11-18-2024
Could have been good, but lazy
I like Adkins, in a Van Damme kind of way, but let's be honest, he's even less able to carry a movie on his acting chops alone.
The whole movie feels cheap. Sometimes in a clever way, as in the constrained settings, but mostly in a, well, cheap way.
Adkins is pushing 50 now, and it feels as though he's not trying that much anymore. Eve used to be a smoke show, but that was 20 years ago; she's still apparently too expensive to actually appear in more than one scene, though.
Photography is competent if uninspired, music is absent, it could be an OK movie, but the script needs so much tightening!
Characters feel flat, artificial, cookie-cutter, and the actors feel jaded. Except for the actress playing Mona, she gives it an honest try.
The dialog-to-brawling ratio is very unfavourable for Adkins, who also looks fairly awkward handling firearms. The script has more holes than plot, but could have been rather easily fixed, which is all the more frustrating.
Giving Adkins the John Wick training is probably expensive; proof-reading a 50 pages script is probably affordable.
Oh well, Adkins has done worst in the past.
But not often.
Created: 11-13-2024
