solarz
Brigadier
Agreed. As a Jet Li fan since childhood, Hero was watchable but nothing amazing. Its message was pretty hamfisted. The only thing of note, aside from Jet Li's martial arts, was the use of color schemes in the narrative.
Movies in General
- Thread starter bladerunner
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Agreed. As a Jet Li fan since childhood, Hero was watchable but nothing amazing. Its message was pretty hamfisted. The only thing of note, aside from Jet Li's martial arts, was the use of color schemes in the narrative.
D
Deleted member 23272
Guest
Directors peak, when was the last time Spielberg or Ridley Scott made anything noteworthy, or as good as Jurassic Park and Gladiator?
Lethe
Captain
The Last Duel was quite good. Not on the same level as stuff like Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator, Black Hawk Down, but certainly not an embarrassing film to have on one's filmography.
Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven [2005] is pretty good. Unfortunately with Hollywood's obsession with identity politics, I don't expect much from them.
Lethe
Captain
As a huge fan of Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049, Dune (2021) and Frank Herbert's original Dune novels (all six!), I feel I must defend the latter pair.
First, I think Villeneuve's Dune is an aesthestic achievement that fully captures the pseudo-medieval nature of the world that it depicts. It's decisions in terms of character development, narrative and so forth are also quite strong. It is, I think, a better adaptation (of the first half of the first novel) than one could've hoped for.
That said, I do think it falls short, as probably any film must, in capturing the more philosophical and didactic elements of the work that made it so profoundly influential on many young men (and it was mostly men) encountering it for the first time in their teenage years, including myself. Dune resonated strongly so many others because it hits the young reader with a freight train of ideas that they may not have previously encountered, about the nature of power, the role of religion in history and society, the environment as shaping persons and societies, foreknowledge and destiny, the long-term view of history, relations between men and women and the power of sex, attitudes towards technology. And if I may say so, these ideas are explored in ways that undermine your critique. Allow me to sketch a couple of examples:
1) The Emperor's power in part comes from his control of the Sardaukar, a people from a planet so hellish and brutal that only the strongest and toughest survive, thereby serving as the ultimate warriors. They are clearly inspired by the mythology that has built up around Sparta. The Atreides identify the Fremen as useful for the same reasons: they are the product of a particularly harsh environment and accordingly make superb warriors. It's not that the Atreides are just nice people, rather they intend to leverage the Fremen to advance the position of their house, which first means trying to understand and make peace with them.
Arrakis and the Fremen are clearly inspired by and reflect European fascination with the Arab and Persian worlds, the stagnant and decaying societies that Europeans encountered in the 18th/19th century that yet carried the wisdom and grandeur of the past and seemed to embody a purity that had been lost in Europe and America. Of course this perspective was limited even then, but its increasing distance from contemporary western attitudes to the Middle East, North Africa, and Islamic (i.e. fear and contempt) make it arguably more intriguing than it was at the time.
There is a very brief scene in the film, during the Harkonnen's attack, that has the Atreides soldiers descending the stairs in ranks and engaging the Harkonnen soldiers, while the Sardaukar slip in behind them and ultimately decimate the Atreides. To show so clearly the discipline, competence and strength of the Atreides, and then how utterly outmatched they were, all in less than thirty seconds, is a remarkable cinematic feat.
Also, in the book the Fremen are not just idealised extrapolations from the values of the dominant culture. In the book Paul must marry the wife of the Fremen man he killed at the end of the film and take responsibility for his children, meaning he has two wives. I will be interested to see if the next film depicts this, or if the will "smooth down" those rough edges as they have minimized the more overtly Islamic elements of Arrakis and the Fremen.
2) Paul fails. During the sandstorm, in the tent, he is seized with a vision of a Fremen-powered empire marching across the galaxy and he knows this is what his mother has envisioned for him and he recoils from that vision, realising then that she is his enemy. Yet this is ultimately the path he walks. His ostensibly Godlike powers do not permit him to break out of the path that has been set. He knows before he walks into the Fremen's house that the nuclear device awaits that will strip away his sight. He knows that Chani will die in childbirth and is powerless to prevent it. And he ultimately flees the role of Messiah to lose himself in women and drugs. This is not a typical "hero's journey".
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Lethe
Captain
Ok so it is a 50-second scene:
Fantastic use of the visual language of cinema, even if you can't see shit with Youtube's compression mushing darker scenes into a low-contrast mess. I bought the film on 4K HDR Blu-Ray for a reason!
You are right, I'm probably failing to appreciate the background nuances here due to my inability to immerse myself in the setting, I would probably enjoy the movie way more had they just used guns. The action scenes in the movie seem quite inconsistent.
There was a scene during the Harkonnen surprise attack where two disorganized mobs of people start running at one another brandishing just a short one handed weapon, it looks more like a scaled up version of streets gangs brawling it out on the streets than a clash between two professional militaries.
And then there's an absurdly choreographed formation fighting scene where everyone acted perfectly in sync, no one react to anything around them even as they are surrounded and destroyed to the last man, it does not look like they are in the midst of a existential battle for their lives. I understand it is meant to show the training and discipline of Atreides troops but it's choreographed to the point of looking sterile and unauthentic.
I'm probably approaching battle scenes with too much expectations of watching of a semi-realistic medieval/ancient battle, Dune is......something else entirely.
Lethe
Captain
I think there is a level of whimsy in Dune that is quite difficult to render in a "realistic" film, which is perhaps one of the reasons why David Lynch's 1980s adaption took a very different approach to the material.
When folks talk about Dune as one of the great works of science fiction, they are often thinking of the assortment of "weird ideas" that make up its world. The personal shields that block rapid projectiles and strikes but allow slower strikes to penetrate and thereby bring back a pseudo-medieval form of physical combat are one such idea. That the pilots of Guild highliners navigate the stars in a drug-induced mathematical trance in lieu of computers (which were destroyed and banned as part of the Butlerian Jihad) is another. As written, these ideas take only a fuzzy form in our minds, but a film must be much more visually precise and I think it is fair to say that some translate from the written to the visual realm better than others. Personally I look forward to seeing Fremen riders on the great worms as they break through the Shield Wall at the end of the second film.
As mentioned previously, the other element that lends Dune its reputation are its philosophical and didactic qualities which are, perhaps inevitably, mostly absent from the film. To the educated adult the novel's musings are not particularly impressive; but for many impressionable young readers (such as myself) it was the first time they had been challenged to think about history, religion, power, ecology, etc. and it therefore left an indelible mark. Wikiquote offers a of material from the novels.
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