Tag: Rebecca Ferguson

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Dune: Part Two

Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya are star-crossed lovers in Dune: Part Two

When I recently rewatched David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation of Dune with filmmaker Mars McKay, we agreed that Lynch had omitted one of Frank Herbert’s most important themes. In Lynch’s version Paul Atreides, a nobleman from a decimated great house, is in hiding from his enemies on the desert planet of Aarakis. When he’s rescued by the nomadic Fremen, they discover that he is their prophesied messiah, and he leads them to victory over their Harkonnen oppressors, and in the process, they install him as emperor of the galaxy. It’s a standard Chosen One narrative, like King Arthur or Star Wars. 

But in his 1965 novel, Frank Herbert makes it clear that the whole situation is a setup. Paul’s mother Lady Jessica is a Bene Gesserit, an all-female order of space witches who are the power behind the throne on hundreds of worlds. Over the course of centuries, the Bene Gesserit spread a belief in a coming messiah on many worlds, while they secretly manipulated dynasties in order to breed a psychic superbeing called the Kwisatz Haderach. When their demigod is finally born, he will have an army ready to serve him no matter where he goes. 

Paul knows this, and wants no part of it. He has visions of billions of people killing and dying in his name, and tries desperately to avoid his fate. His victorious ascendence to the galactic throne is actually a defeat. 

Denis Villeneuve understands that Paul’s interior conflict is central to the emotional impact of the story. The mounds of burning bodies from Paul’s visions are the most indelible image of Villeneuve’s 2021 Dune, and the creeping dread of jihad hangs over Dune: Part 2 like smoke from the funeral pyres. 

Paul Maud’Dib rallies the Fremen in Dune: Part Two. (Courtesy Warner Brothers)

The first installment ended with Paul and Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) joining the Fremen tribe led by Stilgar (Javier Bardem). Part Two begins light years away in the palace of Emperor Shaddam IV (Christopher Walken), who is starting to think that helping House Harkonnen ambush House Atreides was a mistake. His daughter Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh) writes in her journal of rumors that Paul survived the massacre. 

Meanwhile, on Arrakis, Stilgar’s band fights off Harkonnen attacks as they head for the relative safety of the deep desert. Paul’s guerrilla war in the desert — which Lynch’s version all but omits — provides some of the most thrilling sci-fi action in recent memory, even before Paul becomes Muad’Dib by riding a giant sandworm through the desert. 

Bardem’s magnetic performance proves crucial. Stilgar steps in as a jovial father figure to the grieving Paul. But he’s also a Fremen fundamentalist who takes the prophecies seriously, and Lady Jessica makes sure he sees Paul as the “voice from outside” who will lead them to victory and make Dune green again. Chani (Zendaya), the beautiful warrior who takes a shine to Paul, sees the would-be Mahdi for what he is. “You want to control people? Tell them to wait for the messiah to come,” she spits. 

Paul and Chani’s love story is heartrending. They cling to each other as the currents of history threaten to pull Paul away from his humanity. If they can kick the Harkonnen off the planet without calling millions of Fremen religious fundamentalists to jihad, maybe they could make a life together in the aftermath. But when Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard) replaces Harkonnen commander “The Beast” Rabban (Dave Bautista) with his more competent cousin Feyd (Austin Butler), the Fremen are backed into a corner, and holy war becomes the only way out. 

Sandworms attack in Dune: Part Two. (Courtesy Warner Brothers)

Dune is the product of Herbert’s very 1960s obsessions with religion, desert ecology, and psychedelic mushrooms. Nevertheless, it has only become more relevant over the 60 years since its first publication. One need not look far to find leaders cynically using religion for political gain, or sparking savage wars of extermination by appealing to ancient scripture. The clarity Villeneuve brings to this multilayered story is its own kind of miracle, and he’s able to do it without sacrificing the visceral action blockbuster cinema requires. 

None of this heady stuff would mean much without the human element. From Dave Bautista’s petulant manchild Rabban to Josh Brolin’s crusty warrior Gurney, everyone in the sprawling cast delivers. Rebecca Ferguson is especially creepy as she whips believers into a frenzy while mumbling conversations with her unborn child. 

But Zendaya and Chalamet are the beating heart of Dune: Part Two. It ain’t easy to draw real human emotions out of such fantastical material, but these two movie stars make it look like it is. Like Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, they try to carve out a little solace in the midst of war, only to find out the problems of two little people ain’t worth a hill of beans in this crazy galaxy. 

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Dune

Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) face their fates in Dune.

Science fiction claims to be about tomorrow, but it’s really about today. Predicting the future requires seeing the present clearly; if the artist gets it right, their vision will last. That’s the secret of the success of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune. It’s set about 8,000 years in the future, but underneath all the sandworms and psychic messiahs, the human dynamics still feel spot on. Competing interest groups recognize a chokepoint in society, and battle to control it. The decidedly Arabic intonations of the Fremen, the indigenous population of the desert planet of Arrakis, is no accident. Eight years after Dune’s publication, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, instituted an oil embargo, which severely disrupted the economies of the West, destabilized the colonial world order the great powers had been building for 400 years, and set the stage for the conflicts that have dominated the 21st century. 

In Dune, the equivalent of oil is spice, a psychedelic drug that enhances the psychic abilities of its users (it was the ’60s, after all), allowing specially trained addicts to navigate faster-than-light spaceships, thus enabling the development of a sprawling interstellar empire. Spice can be found on only one planet in the Imperium, so Arrakis (aka Dune) becomes the focus of great-power politics, war, betrayal, and rebellion. 

Harkonnen harvesters deliver the spice.

The political complexity of the text is only one reason why it has long been considered unfilmable. Long passages take place entirely within the minds of the characters. The galaxy lacks intelligent computers or cute robots, because of an ancient jihad. There’s a thousand-year eugenic breeding program by the Bene Gesserit, a cabal of space witches, to produce the Kwisatz Haderach, a psychic super-being who will access the genetic memories of the entire human race and impose “benevolent” rule on the galaxy. That’s a lot to explain to a 10-year-old squirming in a theater seat. 

Not that filmmakers haven’t tried. Watch the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune for the story of the first attempt. In 1984, David Lynch got a crack at it, and failed spectacularly — the best way to fail. In 2000, the SyFy Network produced the most successful Dune screen adaptation by spreading out the sprawling story into a miniseries. Now, it’s Denis Villeneuve’s turn in the barrel. 

Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin), Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaacson) and mentat Thufir Hawat (Stephen McKinley Henderson) await the arrival of the Emperor’s delegation.

Going in, Villeneuve looked like the best person for the job. Arrival is one of the best science fiction films of the 21st century, and Blade Runner 2049 is a mesmerizing, minor classic. To do Dune right requires a big bet and patient hands. At $165 million, this pandemic-delayed epic is much cheaper than the average Pirates of the Caribbean installment. 

Unlike Disney’s Depp-driven wank-fests, every cent is on the screen. This Dune is one of the most beautiful sci-fi films ever made. Villeneuve looks to Lawrence of Arabia for inspiration (David Lean turned down Dune in 1971), and riffs on other cinematic fence-swings like Apocalypse Now and Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps. The production design, from mountain-sized spaceships to the dragonfly-like ornithopters, is immaculate.

Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) goes native in one of Paul’s visions of the future.

None of the actors are just collecting paychecks. Timothée Chalamet plays Paul Atreides, the deeply conflicted revolutionary leader, as the callow youth of Herbert’s novel. He’s mostly along for the ride as galactic events unfold around him, until he embraces the bloody destiny he knows he can’t escape. Rebecca Ferguson gets the juiciest role as Lady Jessica, the concubine who forces the hand of the Bene Gesserit out of love for Duke Leto (a pitch-perfect Oscar Isaacson.) Josh Brolin and Jason Momoa play Paul’s military mentors, while Javier Bardem comes in late as Stilgar, the Fremen leader who will join Muad’Dib’s jihad. Zendaya is Chani, Paul’s future Fremen consort. She features prominently in Dune’s advertising, and will play a vital part in the story’s future, but for now she’s mostly relegated to swishing around like a Ridley Scott perfume ad.

Zendaya as Chani, a desert nomad destined to conquer the galaxy.

Dune is an epic 156 minutes long, but only covers about the first half of the first book. That’s a lot of table-setting, but the story’s complexity needs room to breathe — especially since Villeneuve tells it without the dozen layers of voiceover Lynch required. It’s engrossing enough to sustain attention, except for one thing: Hans Zimmer’s score is awful. I like ambient music as well as the next guy, but Zimmer’s whoopee cushion subwoofer schtick gets old quick. The story would have been better served by a traditional symphonic score — or even the prog rock Toto made for Lynch — to shape the emotional peaks and valleys. 

Music aside, the spectacle is unparalleled, and Herbert’s story still resonates. Two of Villeneuve’s images swirl in my mind: Duke Leto striding down a spaceship ramp to the tune of space bagpipes, confidently leading his family — and the empire — to ruin in the desert; and Paul’s recurring vision of his future, where piles of burning bodies stretch to the horizon. Dune is a different kind of blockbuster, a rare feat of cinematic virtuosity. 

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Doctor Sleep

Stephen King famously hates The Shining. To be clear, he hates the 1980 Stanley Kubrick adaptation of his 1977 novel, despite the fact that it is widely considered to be one of the greatest movies ever made. I’ve never really understood why. I’ve read The Shining, and sure, it’s a lot different from the movie. But different things work onscreen than work in print. That’s just the way of the world. Both the film and the book work great for the medium they’re presented in.

Maybe that’s the gist of King’s distaste. Writing is such an intimate medium. A writer can literally make you hear voices in your head. I’m doing it right now. King’s book wasn’t just a Psycho-type horror potboiler, it was about his own struggles with alcoholism. Seeing it abstracted into the third person had to be uncomfortable, especially given Kubrick’s cold, analytical style.

Ewan McGregor (above) plays an older Danny Torrance plagued by alcoholism and PTSD.

In the sequel, Doctor Sleep, which King released in 2013, the writer explored the implications of the end of The Shining. Jack Torrance, the alcoholic writer driven murderously mad by the spirits of the Overlook Hotel, has frozen to death, leaving his wife Wendy and son Danny alone. They move to Florida, and Danny tries to come to terms with his psychic powers and PTSD. Thanks to the help of the ghost of the ill-fated Overlook Hotel employee Dick Hallorann, Danny gets a handle on his shining. Not so much on the PTSD.

The film adaptation of Doctor Sleep is something unusual in the world of the Hollywood studio: an auteurist work. Mike Flanagan scores the remarkable triple bill of writer, director, and editor, something rarely seen outside the low-budget indie world. The older I get, the more skeptical I become of auteur theory, the notion that the director always puts his personal stamp on a picture. I think the interplay of talent on the production team is more important in the long run. But with Doctor Sleep, Flanagan makes a good argument, at least for the notion that he knows what he’s doing.

Kubrick’s work on The Shining was transformative, while Flanagan seems content to be translative to the text. And that’s okay. His visual style is attractive and well designed, but not flashy. King’s strengths in plotting really shine through. Every action is motivated and logical, even to a fault. Danny is played as a child by Roger Dale Floyd, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Danny Lloyd, Kubrick’s Danny, and then as an adult by Ewan McGregor, who brings a satisfying depth to the performance.

The film’s second act takes place in 2011, when Danny is taking after his alcoholic father, drifting from job to job, pounding shots and running lines on a weeknight. When he is drawn to a small New Hampshire town that seems to be perpetually bathed in autumnal night, an act of kindness by Billy (Cliff Curtis) convinces him to go to AA and clean up. He takes up residence in the town, and gets a psychic pen pal, a tween girl named Abra (Kyliegh Curran). But the pair discover that they’re being stalked by a clan of psychic vampires called The True Knot, led by Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson).

The funny thing about Doctor Sleep is that it is not so much a horror movie as a good, old-fashioned supernatural thriller. It’s more Dark Shadows than Halloween. It’s also pleasingly retro in its structure. Flanagan takes his time introducing all the players before they start bouncing off each other. Its three acts take place in three different time periods, but within the acts, there’s a lot of craziness.

King has always excelled at bringing supernatural-tinged horror down to Earth by setting the action in the most mundane of places. Hitchcock liked to set the climax of his films in recognizable landmarks, like Mount Rushmore and the Statue of Liberty. King puts a climactic set piece in a crappy little New England state park. He has a knack for finding the haunted spaces in our collective imaginations: lonely highways, abandoned factories, musty attics. Flanagan is at his best when his characters are digging up bodies in a dusty wilderness, lit by truck headlights.

Doctor Sleep is not an all-time classic, but it is a solid genre piece for horror fans that will hold up to repeat viewings. At 152 minutes, it’s long, but it doesn’t feel self-indulgent. Flanagan adds to King’s legacy and does no damage to Kubrick’s masterwork by not slavishly imitating it. Yes, during the climactic scene in the crumbling Overlook Hotel, he recreates the elevator blood-flood gag. But come on, given the opportunity, would you be able to resist such temptation?

Doctor Sleep

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The Kid Who Would Be King

Late in the summer of 2017, a 7-year-old girl named Matilda Jones was swimming in Dozmary Pool in Cornwall, England, when she saw a glint of metal on the bottom. With the help of her father, she pulled a four-foot sword out of the lake. Coincidentally, Dozmary Pool was where King Arthur returned Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake.

In times past, young Matilda might have either been hailed as the new Queen of England, or promptly assassinated by minions of the actual royal family who did not care to have their divine right to rule questioned by watery tarts lobbing scimitars at peasant girls. As it was, Matilda only got her picture in the Daily Mail, accompanied by a quote from her dad.

Louis Ashbourne Serkis (above) wields Excalibur in Joe Cornish’s The Kid Who Would Be King.

The new British/American production The Kid Who Would Be King takes the premise of Not Quite Queen Matilda to its logical conclusion. What if a kid in modern Britain found Excalibur? We’re talking the real sword King Arthur wielded, not the one from Excalibur, John Boorman’s 1981 retelling of Le Morte d’Arthur.

Director Joe Cornish is certainly familiar with Boorman’s fever dream version of England’s foundational mythology. At one point, he gleefully lifts a gag from Excalibur to show the sword’s mystical powers — simply shining a green light on the sword’s shiny steel surface, then cutting to the awestruck face of his hero Alex (Louis Ashbourne Serkis), who is also painted with a green spotlight. Presto! A glowing sword, without any expensive post-production work.

Aside from that cheeky reference, Cornish’s purpose in making The Kid Who Would Be King is far removed from Boorman’s animating spirit of “Let’s all take peyote and play Knights of the Round Table!” Instead, he has taken the long knives to Arthurian legend and carved out a myth suitable for 21st-century sensibilities. Alex and his best mate Bedders (Dean Chaumoo) reside at the bottom of the social hierarchy at his stereotypically stifling English private school. The pair’s primary bullies are Lance (Tom Taylor) and Kaye (Rhianna Doris). One day, Alex is chased into a construction site, where he falls and is left for dead by his pursuers. When Alex wakes up, he sees a sword stuck in a half-demolished pillar and, being a 12-year-old boy, he naturally takes it home with him.

The one thing Cornish and Boorman’s movies have in common is Patrick Stewart. Boorman cast the not-yet-bald actor as Queen Guenevere’s father, while Cornish puts him the role of Old Merlin, who shows up when the exposition needs a little gravitas. Young Merlin (who is actually old Merlin, because the fey wizard ages backwards) is played by Angus Imrie, channeling Nicol Williamson’s psychotically eccentric performance from Excalibur. Merlin tells Alex and his “knight” Beddars that they have four days to stop the evil enchantress Morgana (Rebecca Ferguson) from using the occasion of a solar eclipse to return to Earth and do lots of bad stuff.

The Hero’s Journey has proven to be a popular and malleable template for films since George Lucas applied its refined form to Star Wars. But the Hero’s Journey in general and Arthurian legend in particular can be problematic in its emphasis in holy bloodlines and “chosen one” mythology. Cornish, who deconstructed alien invasion tropes while launching John Boyega’s career in his debut film Attack the Block, sets out to do the same thing to King Arthur that Rian Johnson did for Star Wars in The Last Jedi: identify and magnify the good parts of the Hero’s Journey while leaving the regressive elements behind. Cornish doesn’t have Johnson’s budget or sweeping vision, but he manages to make the story palatable for post-Potter tastes. Serkis’ performance as a nerdy kid called to kinghood reaches its apex when he recruits Lance and Kaye to his cause, pointing out that Arthur conquered not by force, but by converting his enemies into friends.

Cornish has devoted his subtext to speaking to the fears and animosities of Brexit Britain. The text is inoffensive, all-ages fun that defaults to the lightweight and pulls punches, lest it scare the kiddies too badly. (Say what you will about Harry Potter‘s shortcomings, at least characters died and the stakes felt real.) But did the world really need another blowhard Arthur and a Round Table of gritty, humorless fanatics? The Kid Who Would Be King‘s good-natured positivity seems much more appropriate to the moment.

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Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation

It’s been 19 years since Tom Cruise first portrayed Ethan Hunt in an adaptation of the hit spy show Mission: Impossible. That’s longer than the show had been off the air when the Brian De Palma-helmed reboot hit theaters with the now-iconic image of Cruise hanging over a computer terminal, suspended by impossibly thin wires. Since someone born on the first film’s premiere date would be college-aged by now, it’s likely that there are many people in the audience who don’t know the self-destructing message sending spies off on an elaborate and dangerous mission is a callback to the show’s weekly cold opening. But it’s the formula Desilu Productions developed for TV that has allowed the Mission: Impossible franchise to outlive the Cold War. A highly trained team of agents working for a shadowy, quasi-governmental agency undertaking missions so sensitive and difficult that their government will “disavow” all knowledge of their existence if they fail works just as well in the age of terrorism as it did in the days of KGB vs. CIA spy-jinks.

The latest installment, Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation, is nothing if not formulaic, but the movie is self-aware enough to preemptively ask if it’s still relevant. We first meet returning player William Brandt (Avengers‘ Jeremy Renner) defending the Impossible Mission Force (IMF) before a congressional committee as CIA director Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin) successfully argues that they are redundant and dangerously out of control. Hunley puts the IMFers, including computer wizard Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), on desk duty, but their first assignment is tracking Hunt, who has once again gone rogue. Hunt thinks he’s on the trail of yet another shadowy, elite force of spies called the Syndicate, but almost no one else believes they exist. Hunley accuses him of making up threats to justify the IMF’s funding with one of the film’s best lines: “Hunt is both arsonist and fireman.”

But since Tom Cruise is both star and producer, we know that the Syndicate is real, and it includes stock characters like the strangely cold, vaguely European mastermind Soloman Lane (Sean Harris), a Russian sadist named the Bone Doctor (Jens Hultén), and British double (or possibly triple) agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson). Hunt gets the old team out from behind their desks — and in the case of Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), out of retirement — to stop the Syndicate from — well, doing something that’s probably real bad. Details like the bad guy’s motivations and the exact nature of the MacGuffin (It’s a list of agents! No wait, it’s a list of bank accounts! No wait, we’ve got to rescue Benji!) are not Mission: Impossible‘s strong suit.

What Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie are all about is crafting high-quality action, and judged by that metric, they succeed. The “gain access to an impossibly secure computer system” sequence is set underwater this time, to spectacular results. But the best part of the film is the second-act set piece in a Vienna opera house that references Hitchcock’s climax to The Man Who Knew Too Much.

While the Daniel Craig/Sam Mendes team has taken James Bond into more serious character territory, Cruise and J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot production company have taken the opposite approach. Rogue Nation plays like a fond memory of Roger Moore-era Bond films such as Live and Let Die, only without the misogyny — or sexiness, for that matter. Even though Ferguson, a British actress making her first foray into the action genre, is captivating onscreen, she and Cruise share only a single extended hug.

Like Adam Sandler, Cruise’s wealth and status remove the usual motivations for doing a movie: He doesn’t need the money, so why bother? In Sandler’s case, the leaked Sony Pictures emails allege his films are little more than ways to get his friends and family free vacations. Cruise, on the other hand, appears to be motivated by the desire to perform increasingly over-the-top stunts. Rogue Nation‘s big moment comes right off the bat, when Hunt, trying to recover a biological weapons cache, clings to the side of an Airbus military transport as it takes off and flies away. At least that’s more fun for the viewer than watching Sandler yuk it up on a waterslide.