Short thoughts on Dune Part Two

A few years ago I watched Denis Villenue’s Dune adaptation and quite liked it, especially in comparison to the book. That movie only covered about two thirds of the source material, specifically the good parts, so let’s see how Denis can handle the part of Frank Herbert’s book that I really didn’t like.

(Spoiler warning: I’ll be talking about two fairly significant late-stage plot points in both the novel and this movie)

Part Two picks up pretty much immediately where the first movie left off: Paul Atreides has joined the Fremen of Arrakis in order to get revenge against Baron Harkonnen for slaughtering his House and family, his arrival plays into a religious messiah story planted into Fremen culture by the Bene Gesserit (all-female Jedi) as part of a long-term ploy to influence Imperial politics in their favour, Paul attempts to resist the messiah role because his Spice-influenced visions of the future have shown him that if he fulfills the prophecy it will start a galactic holy war that will kill billions of people. But when the Harkonnens bring in weird little freak Feyd Rautha to fight back against the Fremen uprising, not using the Bene Gesserit prophecy to his advantage starts to look less and less viable.

Also he smooches a hot Fremen girl.

In terms of the broad plot, this all plays out basically the same way as it does in the book. I’ve seen some people characterising the movie as a major departure from the original story, which isn’t really true—the major story beats are all the same. But those story beats are cast in a different light, which in some cases alters the tone of the story significantly. One major character serves the same basic role as they do in the novel, but whereas the novel casts their actions in a fairly neutral light, here they’re portrayed as explicitly sinister, to the point of arguably becoming an outright villain.

The same is true of Paul’s relationship with Chani: it plays out basically the same way as in the original story, but Chani’s reaction to what happens has been altered significantly in order to give her a more active role in the story. This is to the advantage of the movie as a whole, for reasons I’ll get into later.

Elsewhere, Part Two continues with the pragmatic adaptation choices that the first movie engaged in. For example, Denis and co clearly realised that the super-genius Twilight baby was never going to work in live-action. The solution they chose to get around this is still a little goofy—I just don’t think “psychic baby pulls the strings of galactic politics” is a concept that can ever not be kind of silly—but it works a lot better than any of the alternatives would have.

The movie also continues the balancing act played with the Harkonnens, where they’re somehow even more cartoonishly grotesque and inhuman than in the book, but simultaneously feel less like cartoon villains. The way both movies do this is by amping up the Geiger-esque alien body horror while de-emphasizing the lazy shorthands for evil that the book uses. The original story leans really heavily on gluttony, ugliness and sexual violence to make the Harkonnens seem evil; while these are all still present in the movies, or at least implied, we’re not expected to hate the Harkonnens solely due to those reasons. The fact that the Baron is fat and slovenly is probably the most human thing about him in the movie version of the character, given how alien his overall portrayal seems, whereas in the book his body and eating habits are used to dehumanise him.

This is not to say that the Harkonnens aren’t over the top. Like I said, they’re even more over the top than they were originally. It’s just that the movies are more thoughtful about which particular dials they amp up to eleven and which ones they take a more subtle hand with.

If you’ve looked up anything about Part Two you’ll have noticed that it’s over two and a half hours long. I said earlier that it’s adapting roughly one-third of the novel, plus a scattering of material from the preceding two thirds that didn’t make it into the first movie. That’s a lot of movie for not a whole lot of book. Is this another Harry Potter/Hunger Games/Twilight case of a movie adaptation unnecessarily splitting itself into multiple parts in order to milk more money out of the source material?

Actually, no. In my post about the first movie I mentioned that the book’s last section—the part adapted by this movie—feels like a rough, unfinished sketch. Part Two takes that sketch and fills out the details. A lot of the action in this part of the book basically happens off-screen, with the characters talking about things that have happened or are happening but not actually living through them on the page. In the movie version, we get to see everything actually play out. Feyd Rautha gets more of an on-screen presence to turn him into an active villain and set up the conflict between him and Paul more, the Fremen’s reaction to Paul and his messianic overtures get fleshed out to create some more stakes and drama, and there’s even some fun action set-pieces added.

All that said, the story follows the same outline as the book, and as such there are still things about the plot that I don’t like. Chief among them is Paul’s big gambit to lure the Emperor to Arrakis. As in the novel, Paul sends him a DM that says “fight me bro”, the Emperor comes down to Arrakis with his entire army, Paul and the Fremen ride in on sandworms and win easily. The only obstacle remaining after that is Paul’s duel with Feyd Rautha, which you know he’s obviously going to win because it happens near the end of the story.

And yes, I know the drama here is supposed to come from Paul and Chani’s relationship and how the choices he makes affect that—and to be fair the movie makes some changes that significantly increases that drama—but the thing is, I don’t care about Paul and Chani’s relationship. I can barely recall a single paragraph that Chani was in from the book; Zendaya’s movie version is a lot more memorable, but it’s not enough to make me give a shit about her and Paul’s love story. At the end of the day they both feel like people who fall in love because they’re the main characters of a fantasy story and that’s what’s supposed to happen.

What I am interested in is what the planned next movie—an adaptation of Dune Messiah—will do with Chani, as her reaction to what happens at the end of this movie is by far the biggest story change and based on what I’ve looked up about Messiah, pretty much guarantees that a hypothetical Dune Part Three will have to deviate significantly from the book. Based on how much more I’m enjoying Denis Villeneuve’s movies than the original novel, that can only be a good thing.

Movies I Didn’t Finish: Significant Other

Recently while browsing the Paramount+ selection, I stumbled on a movie called Significant Other, an exclusive-to-the-platform horror movie about a couple getting menaced by something in the woods. “Sounds neat!” I said to myself, and started watching.

Little did I know that what awaited me would be one of the most singularly memorable horror film experiences I’ve ever had. Not, I hasten to add, in a good way.

Our hapless protagonists are Ruth and Henry, a long-term couple whose relationship is picture-perfect apart from Ruth’s extreme anxiety. Henry has invited Ruth out on a multi-day backpacking trip in a remote forest, ostensibly in order to help her get over her fear of the wilderness but actually to help her get over her fear of marrying him. The proposal does not go well—in fact it causes Ruth to have a panic attack—and the next day the couple find their relationship strained to the breaking point.

Also, they’re being stalked by a shape-shifting alien, which I understand rarely helps relationship troubles.

For the sake of setting up how monumentally this movie trips over its own dick, I’m going to have to describe basically everything that happens up until halfway through, which is shortly before I stopped watching. Bear with me.

So it becomes apparent very early on that the alien is taking on the appearances of other lifeforms a la The Thing. In the opening scene we see it attack a dear with a distinctive broken horn, then Ruth sees the same deer staring at her spookily in the woods, then the next day she and Ruth find it dead with its head split open, covered in some sort of strange fungus-like growth. Obviously, the dead deer is the original and the spooky deer is the alien copy.

After the unsuccessful proposal, Henry goes off on a short walk by himself; when he comes back Ruth reconciles with him and they continue their journey. The next day, Ruth goes off to pee, finds a cave containing a mysterious blue liquid, and then is apparently attacked by something we don’t see. Cut to Henry, who finds her standing creepily in the woods. She acts strange and distant and is seen by the audience to be staring at him in a threatening manner when his back is turned.

Obviously, Ruth has been replaced by an alien imposter. The cinematography very much supports this conclusion: up to this point it had been taking a somewhat artsy tone, but from this point on things get downright trippy in places, signalling the dissolution of Ruth’s character and her transformation into something else. There’s some great tension inherent in the fact that we don’t know exactly how the alien operates, so we don’t know if the Ruth-alien is aware that it’s an imposter or if the copy of Ruth’s personality is struggling to maintain dominance over the alien’s mind. There is a sense that she’s highly unpredictable and could be a danger to Henry at any moment.

This suspicion is confirmed when she lures him to a cliffside and then throws him off to his death, before taking off into the forest and cracking her head against a rock. She’s found by an older couple and proceeds to act in a weird and unsettling manner, which just heightens the tension more.

Now, at this point I was pretty on board with Significant Other despite having had some early misgivings, like the over-reliance on fake-out jump scares. The movie had seemed to be setting up a scenario where Henry would be the alien imposter, even having ridiculously on-the-nose dialogue about him “becoming someone else”, so I was pleasantly surprised by the twist of Ruth becoming the villain. Very interesting. Let’s see where this goes.

Then Henry strolls into the clearing where Ruth and the older couple are camping, uses cheesy badly-rendered CGI alien powers to kill the couple, and explains to Ruth that he’s a scout for an alien invasion.

Oh no. It’s happening again. It’s horror villains who talk.

The double-reverse twist is that back in the cave Ruth found the body of the real Henry, who had been killed and then replaced by the alien on his post-friendzone walk. When she ran out of the cave and “Henry” approached her shortly afterwards, she somehow put together exactly what was going on and played along until she could figure out a plan to kill the alien and escape.

So first of all, that doesn’t make any sense. If I found one of my friends or family members dead in a cave and then shortly afterwards ran into them seemingly alive and well, I don’t think it would occur to me to assume that they had been replaced by some sort of shapeshifter. I would certainly not latch onto this idea with such certainty that I would then murder them without taking any steps first to confirm that my suspicion was true.

There’s just no believable way for Ruth to have put this together. I don’t buy it.

The other problem with the twist is that it only works because the movie cheats. Cutting away from Ruth before we see what happened to her in the cave is fine when it appears that this scene is the character’s death; once we learn what actually happened, it becomes apparent that the movie was just hiding information in order to make the twist work.

But okay, the twist is cheap and kind of silly and it kills the mood that alien-Henry talks and still has real-Henry’s personality, but I guess I can live with it. The movie squandered all that trippy cinematography on a predictable sci-fi thriller, but predictable sci-fi thrillers have their place. The situation is not unsalvageable.

Then the movie turns into a comedy.

To be clear, I don’t think the filmmakers intended for it to be a comedy, but I cannot see how anyone could watch the scene that follows and not view it as a comedy, so I must assume that at some point, someone realised that this Paramount+ exclusive horror movie had transformed into a comedy and was fine with that.  

So first of all, there’s a but where alien-Henry keeps trying to kill Ruth but is unable to due to Henry’s feelings for her surfacing. This is an inherently goofy idea, but it’s made worse by the fact that Henry’s actor plays the scene like a particularly hammy character in a Marvel movie.

Then, after he realises that he’s in love with Ruth, he chases her through the forest shouting “You don’t need to worry! I’m in love with you!”

I am fascinated by this scene. I’m fascinated by this movie, and I honestly don’t know how it flew so far under the radar because it’s rife for film critic dissection. Admittedly, the slower and moodier first half kind of disqualifies it as hate-watch material, but to me the fact that the movie actually seems good, or at least interesting, until it suddenly nosedives is all the more compelling.

Ouija: The Most Baffling Horror Movie I've Ever Seen

Since we’re getting into spooky season, I recently decided to watch a horror movie. Specifically I wanted to watch a bad horror movie, for the content.

I did not know what I was getting myself into when I decided to watch Ouija. This might be the worst horror movie I’ve ever seen.

Produced as part of the same Hasbro multimedia initiative that unleashed Michael Bay’s Transformers upon the world (because remember, Ouija boards are toys that were created for a toy company, not some modern continuation of ancient occult practices), Ouija is a blatant cash-grab that still should have been a lot better than it is. I have to admit, making a Ouija board movie seems like a much easier proposition than turning Barbie or Hot Wheels into films. The pitch almost writes itself: someone uses a Ouija board, ghosts ensue. And since people buy these things specifically to get spooked, this is perhaps the one case where you can imply that your product is going to kill its buyers without losing out on sales.

The story, as far as I can remember it (I watched this movie mere weeks ago, that should tell you something about how little impact it made as it travelled through my brain) is that a teenage girl hangs herself after messing around with a Ouija board, so her friends get their own board and try to Ouija their way into communicating with her spirit. This goes badly because it turns out she was talking to the ghost of a witch, or something.

The witch starts killing the friends one by one via, I think, possession–one of the deaths happens entirely off-screen so it’s a little unclear–which is presented as a sequence of PG-13 Final Destination-esque events, except with a ghost directly compelling the victim to do the thing that kills them. In between these scenes, the witch shows up and goes a-booga-booga at people, except she’s not very scary so it’s pretty anticlimactic. The spirits of her victims also appear with their lips sewn shut, an image that I think was meant to be frightening but is also not very scary.

I know this is getting repetitive, but I can’t emphasise enough how un-scary this movie is. Even the worst horror movies generally tend to pull off an effective jumpscare or two, but not so here. You could play this movie on full volume at a sleep clinic and I don’t think it would affect any test results. There are endless repetitive scenes of the characters creeping slowly through dark rooms and corridors, building up to a completely flat crescendo.

It’s actually kind of eye-opening seeing the mechanics of horror filmmaking revealed like this. All of the elements that in other movies would make for a functional scary scene are present, but they’re put together in such a way that they just don’t work. It’s the cinematic equivalent of Covid taste-loss: you feel the texture of the food entering your mouth, but the flavour never appears.

But it shouldn’t really be surprising that Ouija can’t be scary, because it’s also shockingly incompetent in every other regard. This is one of the worst-made films I’ve ever seen. It’s so bad, I’m not even sure I can explain to you in words how bad it is, but I’ll try.

For starters, the temporal editing is completely off. Way too much time passes than is necessary for the story being told, entire days zipping by with only a brief transition indicating what any of the characters were doing. The movie keeps inserting all of these random, short scenes of the characters arriving at or returning home from school, during which there will either be no dialogue or conversations that are irrelevant to the plot. I think what they were trying to do was to show how the events of the plot are slowly weighing on the characters’ mental states in order to build a sense of impending dread, but it’s pulled off so incompetently that it just makes the movie’s pacing seem delirious.

Again, I feel like I can’t really explain this in text, but picture a sequence you’ve seen from a normal horror movie where it’s established that a character has a reason to go to a spooky house, visits the house and gets spooked, then returns home at night and is visibly unsettled by the experience. You’ve seen these story beats before.

Here’s how Ouija would do it:

• Conversation where the reason for protagonist to visit the spooky house is established

• Scene where the protagonist talks to her friend at school, presumably that same day but possibly not

• Scene (after school?) of protagonist walking up the driveway to the spooky house while ominous music plays

• Cut to protagonist back at home that night, using establishing shot that doesn’t make it clear which house this is because it’s the first time we’re seeing the exterior of their home

• Protagonist has an argument with her younger sister that doesn’t have anything to do with anything else in the script so far

• Another five-second school scene the next day where nothing happens

• Interior shot of the protagonist entering the spooky house

This isn’t an exact description of any particular set of scenes in the movie because I’m not watching this shit again to check, but it really is that choppy and unfocused. Oh, and keep in mind that both the protagonist and her sister are being played by actresses who are clearly fully-grown adults, and the “younger” sister looks older than the main character, just to make things extra strange.

And that’s not even talking about how fucking bizarre some of these individual scenes are on their own. There’s one bit where one of the boys rides his bike down into this concrete sewer tunnel thing, where he gets fake-out scared by a jogging woman before seeing something creepy and Ouija-related. What’s meant to be happening is that this is like a pedestrian access-way, but it was clearly filmed in some sort of storm drain that no one would ever be jogging or riding their bike in. It’s so strange that it’s surreal. You could splice this scene into a David Lynch movie and it wouldn’t feel out of place.

I realise I’m making this movie sound like a wacky hate-watch, but outside of the really strange scenes, for the most part it’s just boring. Even as I write this review, I’m having a hard time remembering anything that happened in the second half, which is in part why this post is so short. I didn’t think it was possible for a movie to be simultaneously fascinatingly bad and also completely unmemorable, but it is in fact the case.

Out of curiosity I also watched the sequel/prequel, which is directed by Mike “Netflix” Flanagan and which I had heard is surprisingly good. This is true, in the sense that it’s a competently-made film with normal editing and directing, but that’s about all it has going for it.