DUNE (2021) was Denis Villeneuve’s shot at adapting the supposedly unfilmable novel (though I think Syfy did a good job with their miniseries), which I caught to prep for TYG taking me to Part Two, below. The story of Timothee Chalamet’s Paul Atreides following his family to Arrakis — an indispensable planet to the Empire because the “spice” collected there is what makes space travel possible —only to be betrayed into the clutches of monstrous Baron Harkonen — is mostly faithful to the book but it’s underwhelming. I read that Villeneuve opted to shoot as if it were newsreel footage of real events, avoiding the flash of Star Wars or Flash Gordon and that was a mistake. And while the cast, including Oscar Isaacs as Baron Atreides, Stellan Skarsgard as Harkonen and Zendaya as one of Arrakis’ native Fremen are good, they’re giving their lines as if overly conscious that they’re doing Serious Drama Not Pulp Entertainment. In short, not impressed. “There is no call we do not answer, there is no faith that we betray.”
DUNE PART II (2024) was a pleasant surprise, with far more energy and action than Part One generated. Living among the Fremen, Paul learns their ways and steps into the role of their prophesied champion but Zendaya begins to worry his White Savior ways ultimately mean the Fremen are exchanging one master for another. With Javier Barden as a Fremen and Christopher Walken as Emperor, this was completely satisfying — but taken as a whole, I might still prefer SyFy (a final verdict will hinge on my rewatching it). “Place your hand in the box.”
SOLARIS (2002) was Steven Soderbergh’s adaptation of the Stanislaw Lem novel (which I’ve read and didn’t care for) about a space station orbiting the eponymous planet where suddenly the crew are encountering the ghosts of their past. Psychologist George Clooney goes up to make sense of all this only to find himself haunted by the ghost of his suicide wife. Clooney’s good but the movie’s ghost story didn’t work for me when I caught it in theaters, nor does it work on rewatching. “I’m going to resist the impulse to ask you about the doorknob.”
Andrei Tarkovsky’s SOLARIS (1972) remains a much superior version, never dragging even though it’s almost twice as long. According to TCM host Bob Osborne (I caught part of his narration taping this off the air) Tarkovsky made the film after seeing 2001 and thinking it spent too much time on SF and not enough on the people. Thus this starts out with the psychiatrist (the Clooney role) spending time on Earth learning about what’s going on (which is never clear in the Soderbergh). Despite emphasizing people it feels more science fictional that the later film did; a shame Tarkovsky couldn’t make his Stalker equally good. “In this situation mediocrity and genius are equally helpless.”
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