Dune (2021) review

I read some of the Dune novels - the first four I think - back in the nineties. I was very young at the time, I'm pretty sure most of the books went over my head, at least as far as subtext or parrallels with history or anything like that. At any rate, I remember very little of the books, and other than perhaps the first book, I don't remember being particularly fond of them. When the movie was announced, I wasn't really interested.

That was partly because I have so little faith in Hollywood adaptations, and in big budget movies in general right now, but also because I don't really consider myself a fan of the books. So I didn't bother watching this when it came out in the cinema. But with my friends excited to see the sequel in the cinema, I finally borrowed the bluray and sat down to watch.

The movie is good. But I didn't enjoy it.

Watching on my PC with the sound cranked all the way up, I still couldn't make out most of the dialogue. So I had to turn on subtitles, and the only English subtitles were "for the hearing impaired". Which meant text kept popping up on screen to inform me that the movie was playing sad music or whatever, which did take me out of it a touch. I didn't get the cinematic experience that this movie deserves, is what I'm saying.

But that wasn't really the issue. Ironically, the fact that the movie was quite faithful to the book was a big part of the problem. One of my favourite things about sci-fi movies is seeing new and fantastical things, exploring strange new worlds. But it turns out I do remember quite a lot of the important events in the first half of the first book, so the movie ended up just being a fairly straight retread of events that I already knew, with very little new added. It was... kind of boring.

I basically spent the whole movie going "Yup, that's the way I remember it. Yup, that's pretty much right. Are they going to explain that little technical detail? Guess not, oh well.". It didn't help that it's a bit of a slow movie. Nothing wrong with that, I'm just saying that I personally didn't find very much to keep me interested. The story and characters were familiar and there wasn't exactly all that much action, at least not until quite late in the film's fairly long runtime.

To be honest I didn't find all that much to look at either. The costumes, locations, vehicles, weapons; they mostly quite very... normal. Grounded and believable perhaps, but not terribly interesting. Yeah, some of the costumes were a bit fancy, but most of the time people wore clothes that wouldn't look out of place on Earth right now. People mostly just fought with knives, for reasons that the movie doesn't really explain very well. Some of the vehicles were interesting, so that's something.

Surprisingly most of the locations were rather boring. Most of the movie takes place on the planet Arrakis; Dune itself. Which is a desert. Now, I'm not exactly a stranger to deserts myself, so I can tell you that deserts can be interesting to look at. Arrakis was not. It was just sand and a few rocks, and EVERYTHING was the same colour. The sand, the stone, the buildings, the vehicles; everything was, well, sand-coloured. We get these panoramic views of a city, that's all just a bunch of basic shapes in pretty much the exact same colour as the surrounding sand and rock.

They could have at least made the city look a little interesting! I enjoyed the shots of Knowhere - even the interiors - in the last Guardians of the Galaxy, and just the views of the city in the Total Recall remake felt worth the price of admission to me. But the city here was just boring; it looked abandoned, with no signs of life. Like a ruin, except without the visual interest of actually being ruined.

It was strange, but there were events that I found harder to accept in the movie than in the book. For example, everyone uses knives; this is weird when guns exist and are shown to work, at least to some degree, and seeing entire armies armed only with knives just felt wrong.

Obviously most of these criticisims are extremely subjective. For the most part I thought the film was objectively very good; it was atmospheric, the acting was great, VFX were perfect, the cinematography was effective, and there were a couple of good action sequences; I liked that the knife fights were cleanly shot, well choreographed and not overly-edited, for example. I also really liked the visual implementation of the shields, and the ornithopters looked great.

Some of the editing did feel a bit weird to me at times however. Scenes would end at what felt like awkward moments, without reaching what I felt was a natural point to stop. Shots would cut back and forth between two scenes that weren't related and didn't need to be shown simultaneously, which I found a touch confusing. None of this was a big deal, it just felt a little strange to me at times.


Objectively I think Dune earns an 8/10. It's a well-executed and faithful adaptation of a very highly regarded novel, if you love the book or you've never read it you will probably like the movie. At least if you have a big screen and a good sound system...




#####SPOILER WARNING#####
I was surprised they never explained how the shields work. That's kind of central to a lot of events; for example in the book Baron Harkonnen's shield is credited with being partially responsible for him surviving the poison gas. They kind of respected it, but never actually explained it.

I wonder how most people interpreted the shields, the blue and the red, the way they sometimes stopped knives and sometimes didn't? I'm pretty sure in the books, when Paul is in the duel and the Fremen ask if he's toying with his opponent, the book explained that he was used to slowing his blade to try to get past the shields his usual opponents had, and that was giving his opponent just enough time to slip away. In the movie, they instead say "he's never killed before". So the makers assumed the audience might not understand about the shields not stopping slow movements.


It might sound weird, but I felt like the movies didn't really capture how valuable water was made out to be in the books. At least I didn't feel it to the same extent that I did in the books.


The scene where the Atreides were betrayed felt rather hard to believe. Like, they all jumped up, grabbed their knives, and ran to their ships? There was no-one on the ships, but the shields were on? The doctor was able to defeat their entire security himself? Again, I never questioned it in the book, but the way it was portrayed on-screen made it seem quite contrived.


I was a bit confused that we never saw Lady Jessica with Duke Leto until quite late in the film. It just felt weird, Paul's parents never being together. I was starting to wonder if they didn't get along or something.


I don't remember if Paul had visions of Chiani in the book, or at least as many as in the movie, but it felt weird that they showed so much of her in visions when she actually ended up doing so little in the movie itself. Also I really don't understand why Jamis was acting as Paul's... "spirit guide" I guess, nothing about him or his relationship to Paul while he was alive would seem to justify it. I mean, he never came across as particularly wise or nuturing - quite the opposite I would say.


I didn't understand why Kynes said the Shai-Hulud, the sandworms, were her master. I don't recall the movie ever saying that the Fremen looked at the sandworms as their masters, or that they serve them, or anything like that. If anything, the fact that they ride the worms, use them as transport, would imply that they don't view them in that way. It felt like a lame attempt at a one-liner to deliver as she died.


Some of the dialogue that was delivered in other languages had subtitles. Some didn't. I assumed the subtitles meant that Paul understood what was being said, but I'm not really sure. Was some of the dialogue translated for our benefit, and he didn't actually understand what was being said?


So Paul's not-yet-born sister is able to have intelligent conversations about current events? Really? Was... was Lady Jessica just talking to herself and saying it was the baby? Because that makes far more sense to me than the idea that the still-developing unborn child suddenly developed an adult-level intelligence and understanding of the world, poison or no poison.


OK, I have to ask: if the spice is so important for space travel, and it only comes from Arrakis, how did they discover Arrakis, and space travel itself, if they couldn't travel through space without it? I assume the spice is necessary for safe space travel, and before it was discovered space travel was extremely dangerous, but that assumption not based on information I picked up from the movie.


I... REALLY hated the expression "Desert Power". And I hated that they kept using it.

Freelance review

Another review, another John Cena movie. He's been busy lately hasn't he? I wasn't expecting too much from Freelance, but the trailer looked OK and there wasn't much else at the cinema, and of course I've enjoyed John Cena in most of what I've seen him in, so here we are.

The movie was not exactly all I'd hoped for. I guess I was expecting more of an action-heavy flick, while Freelance seems more focused on it's characters, story, and comedy. Which is certainly not a bad thing, generally speaking, but in this case it did leave the action feeling a bit lackluster. Action scenes were more about the little jokes they could squeeze in, than the actual, you know, action. It's fine, it just could have been better.

But that's OK, because the comedy worked, I did like the characters (mostly), and I even enjoyed the story. Some people might feel the movie is a bit preachy or something like that, but personally I thought what the movie was saying about politics and foreign intervention was mostly fair - if a bit exaggerated (I hope). Regardless, I found the story engaging, and I enjoyed the movie overall.

John Cena was entertaining as Mason Pettits. I appreciate that they tried to flesh out the character and give him an interesting story arc, but to be honest I felt it didn't quite come together. I wasn't really sure how he felt about his wife, for example, which was a bit of a problem because it was kind of important as far as the resolution of his story arc. Partly as a result of that, I didn't really feel like the resolution of his arc really worked all that well; it didn't quite make sense to me anyway. Still, he was likeable, somewhat relateable, and pretty funny.

Alison Brie's performance as Claire Wellington fit the tone of the movie, but I didn't think the character was very well written. When she's first introduced she's very unlikeable, being quite rude and antagonistic towards Mason for no reason. Yes, she was portrayed in a better light later, but her initial behaviour was never justified; she genuinely just treated him poorly for no reason, while he was nothing but polite and respectful towards her. It didn't help that she never really did very much in the movie other than, you know, demand that other people risk their lives for her story. She didn't really help to solve any of the problems they faced, she never really contributed very much.

Juan Pablo Raba was a lot of fun as President Venegas, who turned out to be a rather surprising character. Something of a free-spirited agent of chaos, my feelings towards him changed a lot as the story progressed and I was quite fond of him by the end.

Christian Slater's role as Sebastian Earle was rather small, but he was great in it. Marton Csokas had his moments as Jan Koehorst, the dangerous mercenary chasing the heroes, but I felt like the movie wanted to give him some more depth but didn't quite commit to it, making the character feel a bit underdeveloped. He was still better off than Alice Eve's Jenny Pettits though; I really didn't get a sense for her character at all.


I'd say the movie is a 6/10, perhaps bordering on a 7. It's entertaining enough, and I at least enjoyed it, even if it could have been better.




#####SPOILER WARNING#####
The movie does sell Mason as pretty competent without making him too hyper-competent, but it kinda felt inconsistent. There were moments where he used a compact handgun to shoot down armed solders who were firing fully automatic weapons at him, and moments when he made incredibly careless mistakes that I wouldn't expect from someone with a decent level of training and experience.

Like after Mason shoots down the helicopter, takes out one of the two soldiers who were chasing them, and then just relaxes and lets down his guard. I think it was pretty clear he knew there were at least two of them, after taking one out he should absolutely have been on his guard for the second. And even if he didn't know, he's still in hostile territory and should probably be constantly checking his surroundings just on general principle.

Or when they snuck into Venegas' office, and Mason was pointing his gun at the nephew, but then the general walked in, stood there for a few seconds, then drew his gun and shot two people without Mason (who already had his gun in hand) doing anything about it. Like, surely the moment someone opens the door any soldier would have their gun trained at them, and the moment they go for a weapon said soldier would immediately gun them down?


On a similar note it was a bit weird the way they kinda hit the big bad evil mercenary guy one time then just forgot about him and walked away, leaving him clearly still alive (he was rocking back and forth in pain) on the floor. This is right after finding out he was the guy who killed all Mason's friends. That's just stupid to begin with, but then nothing happens. We don't see him again. It's really bizzare.


Why did Mason grab the Barett and not any of the other firearms lying around? It's a bit of a specialised tool, and it's a lot heavier than the assault rifles that were lying around.


There was a weird scene that I think was meant to humanize Koehorst, where his daughter is showing off her balet skills and I guess he's supporting her like a devoted father. This is his introduction; I'm not sure why they felt the need to humanize him before we even know who he is, and then try to make him look scary and dangerous (and occasionally pretty much evil) the rest of the time? I just didn't really get what that was all about, I wonder if they intended to make him a more nuanced character and then scrapped the idea but didn't have an alternate introduction ready or something.

Argylle review

These days I like to wait for the reviews to come out before watching a movie in the cinema. But the trailer looked like it had potential, so when Argylle came out in the local cinemas before the reviews really started to come in, I decided to give it a chance.

The movie was very silly, even more so than the trailer had implied to me. Which is clearly not for everyone. Personally I appreciate a movie that doesn't take itself too seriously, so I was happy to embrace that sillyness and I enjoyed the movie quite a bit.

That's not to say I didn't think the movie made mistakes; it did, and the ending especially I felt didn't quite work. Despite this, I was having enough fun with the movie as a whole that I could forgive the rough patches. They were definitely having fun with the action scenes, mixing in a lot of humor. I certainly wouldn't say the action was amazing, but it was fun, with some stylish scenes that were creative and original.

The plot is a mish-mash of spy-movie tropes, a constant procession of twists and turns that kept things entertaining. Despite no specific plot point being particularly original, they were combined in a way that felt relatively new to me. I found myself predicting a lot of the plot twists just before they happened, but that didn't stop them from being enjoyable; I think some movies make a big deal out of their twists, but if you see them coming a mile away you end up feeling disappointed and unimpressed. But since this movie was fairly light-hearted and tongue-in-cheek, seeing the plot twists coming just felt like part of the fun.

The cast was great. I'm not a fan of Bryce Dallas Howard, but she was pretty good here - at least in the first half, towards the end I was starting to feel she might have been slightly miscast, but it wasn't too bad. Sam Rockwell has basically played this role before, so it's no surprise he was in his element. Bryan Cranston was great, and he got a chance to show more range in a single role than I've seen from him before. I could say the same for Catherine O'Hara actually, she nailed her role. Henry Cavill was fun as the exagerratedly cartoonish super-spy, though the role ended up being mostly a physical one. Samuel L. Jackson's role was quite small, but he did a good job with it. John Cena was really done dirty though: we know he can be very funny, but with almost no screen time and about three lines of dialogue, he was honestly wasted here.

Overall I'd rate it a 7/10, at least in terms of entertainment value. I wouldn't say it's an objectively good movie, but I had a lot of fun with it.




#####SPOILER WARNING#####
I didn't get this from the trailer, but while watching the movie I was struck with the sense that the story was written to appeal more to women, yet the storytelling and action felt more like the kind of film typically targetted at men. I guess that makes it a good film for couples?


The cat was a bit of a red herring? It featured heavily in the trailer yet never really did that much in the movie. I'm... not sure what the idea was there tbh.


I did rather appreciate the whole "spies can look like average people, they're not all supermodels" thing with Aiden. Contrasting Argylle acting calm and collected while getting thrown around, with Aidan's more human reactions in the same situations was a bit of fun. Although ultimately it might have been a bit out of place considering how insane everything got towards the end.

Actually, I wonder if that might be related to what some people might have found disappointing about the film. I think the whole "here's a very silly fantasy about spies, but that's not what the movie actually is" thing that the film - and the trailer - present at first, is expected to be contrasted with a more grounded approach to espionage and action. But instead the "real world" in the movie is practically as over-the-top as Elly's "unbelievable fiction" spy novel. It's not what I was expecting personally, but I wouldn't say I was disappointed; I quite enjoyed the over-the-top nonsense.


There's a lot of forced contrivances in the movie, I don't mind that and I'm not going to try to list them or anything. But one that's a little bit interesting to me is the scene in London. When Elly tried to "write the next part of the story", which the movie tells us is basically her recalling actual events, she sees Wyatt - who we learn is Aidan - getting the hacker's address for "Argylle".

So does that mean Aidan already knew where the hacker's place was, and was just pretending not to, to try to help Elly recover her memories? If so, did he not manage to find the journal himself in the last five years - despite being the one who found it this time? If he had found it before Alfie wouldn't have had to break the encryption as they would have done it ages ago. Let's not worry about the fact that there was an explosion in the appartment, and it got renovated with wallpaper later, yet the floors were fine and no-one ever found the journal under the floorboards.

Was Aidan actually not there, as her writing/memories implied? The bad guys clearly didn't know about the place, and the movie strongly suggests that Elly couldn't have found the address herself and needed Aidan for that. Did he not have a chance to check the appartment after the explosion, or did he just assume that nothing useful would have survived? For some reason the more I wonder about this particular plot point, the more questions I have about the plot of the whole movie.

Like why did Aidan decide to make his move just then, despite having been watching Elly for five years? My theory is that Ruth panicked when she found out Elly was on her way to their "house", because Ruth wouldn't be able to make it there in time to meet her, so she ordered the agents watching Elly to kidnap her. I'm not sure what the plan would have been after that, but regardless: Aidan realised the plan, and knew that if they got what they needed out of her they wouldn't need her alive anymore, so he decided to grab her before it was too late as he might not get another chance.

Well, more realistically it was probably another forced contrivance and the writers didn't really think about whether it made actual sense or not. But it's kinda interesting to think about how it might make sense.


When Ritter showed up and started talking about the retinal scan, I assumed they Elly and Aidan had set a trap for him so they could use him for the retinal scan. It made more sense than the idea that these two super-spies were just standing there with their guard down like a pair of morons. But no, they were just standing there with their guard down like a pair of morons. To me that was the point where the movie kind of stopped working.

That scene was followed by the last fight, where a brainwashed Elly was ordered to kill Aidan. I didn't think this scene was well done at all. Aidan just kind of stood there, he never tried to get creative, or, well, try at all really. When he fought back he didn't do too badly (depite having been shot in the heart a few minutes ago), but he never took advantage of the openings he had, never tried to come up with a better solution than "let myself get beat up because I don't want to hurt Elly".

He wasn't exactly hemmed in; he could have easily jumped the railings and tried to outmanouver Elly to get to Ruth - and Ruth would have been forced to send Elly after him, so he wouldn't have needed to worry about Elly destroying the computer console or anything. Or - having seen the brainwashing stop when the music stopped - he could have tried to block her from hearing the music, by yelling or clapping his hands on her ears or clanging pieces of metal together or something. But he didn't, he didn't even try to do anything, he just just put up a brief token resistance then stopped even doing that.

I didn't really understand what what going on with him at the end of the fight. He was acting like everything was OK, telling Elly not to worry, as if she could hear him. But it really wasn't alright, they were pretty much both about to die. He was literally encouraging her to kill him! How about trying to get her to snap out of it? How about trying to bluff Ruth into making a mistake? How about not talking and instead trying to think of a way out of this? How about trying ANYTHING? I dunno, it was just weird.

Another thing, Elly completely failed to fight the brainwashing? That's... I dunno, you like to believe that the protagonist who can take down anyone and everyone can at least try to fight back against some sort of mental manipulation? I mean, it's not like we're talking supernatural powers here. I get that they wanted this big reveal where Keira turns out to still be alive, but there had to be a better way of doing it; the whole scene was just irritating. Also I don't really care that Keira is still alive? Like, she wasn't a character that I had any reason to care about or anything. If they wanted us to actually care about her, they needed to spend more time giving us a reason to care about her.


When Henry Cavill showed up at the end playing some American dude, I didn't really get what the movie was saying when he asked Elly if she had any questions for him. What kind of questions did he expect her to ask? It's not like he knew that Argylle looked exactly like him in Elly's head; we'd only ever seen Argylle represented as a simplistic cartoon outside of her imagination.


The movie did get me thinking about something. There's been a lot of action movies in the last few years with female protagonists. Without getting too deep into the topic of "girlbosses" and "Mary Sues", I will say that I didn't think Argylle suffered from too many of the issues that can plague these movies.