Dune 2 (2024) directed by Denis Villeneuve

 

There will be some spoilers in this one. 

Starting immediately where the first film left off, Denis Villeneuve hits the ground running with no recap of the previous film and manages to make a film that looks like it filmed at the same time as the first part. All of that is to the credit of this sequel which had a lot to live up to after the huge critical and financial success of its predecessor. 

I am a long time Dune fan I could say, I reread all three of the books in the original trilogy before part one came out and that was maybe the fourth time for all three. I was not a huge fan of the Lynch film in the 80s while liking some things in and thought the SciFi channel miniseries was OK. Neither really captured the story but that is a tall, if not impossible order for such a complicated and galaxy sprawling story of political intrigue and complex cultures. I am a Montrealer and have been admiring Villeneuve’s films for a long time and was excited to see how he would handle Dune and was not disappointed. I would not expect a word for word recreation of the book and didn’t get that. As a filmmaker myself I know that sort of thing isn’t possible or even a good idea. That said this second film strays pretty far from the text in ways I would not have expected. sometimes this worked for me, Lady Jessica switches from concerned mom to villain which takes three books to happen and I can see the reasoning for that. The story is compressed into month when it should have taken place over years and this is a detriment to the story telling. Jessica is pregnant at the end of the first film and still is at the end of the second meaning one of the book’s best moments and most intriguing character, her daughter born with generations of past knowledge, doesn’t really appear and worse, (spoiler warning again) doesn’t kill the Baron and that crucial scene is given to another character leaving her role in future films nebulous. 

This is not the say the film doesn’t work, while losing my favourite part of the book is annoying it didn’t kill the movie for me. Its a HUGE beautiful film and the almost three hours past before I knew it. I think Timothy Chalamet looks the part but lacks the charisma Paul Atreides should have. The rest of the cast is fine to great and the film does a lot of interesting cinematography that might have failed in a lesser production. 

Incendies (2010) directed by Denis Villeneuve

Budget 6.5 million$
Box office 16 million $

Based Wajdi Mouawad's play of Incendies stars Lubna Azabal, Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin, Maxim Gaudette, and Rémy Girard.

Denis Villeneuve production schedule for this move was only an amazing 40 days with most f it being shot in Montréal and only 2 weeks in Jordan. The story of fraternal twins uncovering the terrible history of their mother and the search for their until now unknown brother and uncle is not for the light hearted. It is well filmed, deliberate and heart breaking. I don’t want to give too much away as seeing it unfold is the beauty of this film and even though its release was ten years ago, its a sure bet not many of the readers here have seen it. 

Performances are understated and fantastic and while I am not a big fan of Rémy Girard, he is great as the family’s notary. The connecting elements at the pool visually bring the various storylines together in a way that hits an emotional cord few movies pull off. 

I won’t lie, this can be hard to watch. Honour killings, rape and violence are important elements in the screenplay but they are handled in ways that add to the story being told. The limited budget and short shooting schedule are not apparent in any way during the runtime, its just proves a good story, with great actors and a careful director can pull off something meaningful and as high quality as any film with ten times the resources.

Blade Runner 2049 directed by Denis Villeneuve 2017

So as not to retread things everyone has already read elsewhere, I’ll assume that by now most readers are familiar with the original movie and this sequel. 

One of the things the original Blade Runner fit had in spades was the  believability of its world building. It did so by giving you just enough information to keep you from being lost while at the same time giving you the mystery of looking into a new place where not everything is handed to you in a silver platter. The sequel does the same and I appreciated that. it did a great job of introducing new things and how they function without techno-babble. The world looks lived in and the people in it know how things work the same as we know how things work in our world. It all looks very natural and sells the idea you are in a real place. 

The scope of Blade Runner 2049 (I so wish the original had not put a date at the start of the film - it never works out well as that date comes and goes in the real world) is pretty large. Instead of taking place just in Los Angelos, it goes to a few other locations we had never seen. Sadly, we don’t get the feeling of an integrated world - the locations seem unrelated to each other in a grand sense, at least they did to me. Still, the visual beauty of all can not be over stated. It looks amazing. 

Much has been made of the run time of this movie and I’ll agree it’s long, but not boring or too slow. I liked the pace and never lost interest in what was going on, even if what was going on didn’t get me anywhere in particular. The choice to have it told from the point of view of a replicant and follow his investigation that leads him to look for a human (Harrison Ford from the first film) was a flip from what we had seen before and it worked out well. Ryan Gosling is a little too human maybe in the role but everything is the film supports and helps him keep the story progressing.  Jared Leo’s role as the eccentric creator of new breed of replicant workers which was to go to Bowie before he died was sparse and not as over the top as I was led to believe, he was pretty dialled back, but also a weak link as a character. I wasn’t sure he was really needed. 

The most interesting thing in the sequel to me was the relationship between humans and replicants and replicants with other technologies. Society has decided to « retire » the older models and replace them with less autonomous newer versions. Leo’s character seems to want to make replicants that can breed and everyone has opinions after realizing that that trick had already been done. Gosling’s blade runner is sent to find and kill the baby (which was fathered by Harrison Ford and his replicant lover Rachel after the first film ended) and begins to suspect that HE is that child. His boss (Robin Wright) wants to sleep with him (who doesn’t? it’s Ryan Gosling) and his holographic girlfriend and he seem to developing a real emotions for each other. In a way, the humans have to figure out if he is a real being and he has to figure out if his holographic sweetie is real - it’s turtles all the way down. When Gosling’s character see a giant hologram ad for the his holographic girlfriend and she says many of the same things to him - we are left as unsure as he is if her AI gave her a real conscious or if it all just part of her program. How much of him is programming - how much of us is? 

As the story progresses we discover the answers to some mysteries but not others. Wether Ford’s character is a replicant is still unknown and the film plays with us (unfairly, I think) in that regard, Gosling’s character discovers he isn’t the child he is looking for but has a memory lifted from her, leading to a really confusing reunion between her and her father which opens ups lot of plot questions that never get answered. As a story, this film is not very satisfying. It’s fascinating to watch but we don’t learn about this new version of the Blade Runner universe. Too many of characters are far too underdeveloped and too many plot points are as well. 

Overall, is it worth seeing? I would say yes. The visuals alone are worth spending almost 3 hours watching but this movie shows us, it does open conversations. Even if those same conversations were opened by the first film, we still don’t have good idea where they are going decades later. So not the classic the first one was but not a failure artistically either. Box office-wise, both were failures on release and maybe this film will find a cult audience and more meaning over time.