Earth & Arrakis: a Villeneuve Double Feature [2/2]
I had forgotten how incredible this movie was. I remembered lots of details from it, like the Sardaukar language, or the bagpipes employed by House Atreides, or the mysterious, egg-shaped Bene Gesserit ships, or the scene with the palm trees, and more. But my prior familiarity, perhaps, with the source material and my pre-existing mental images of what happened had perhaps obscured away many of the details. I had forgotten just how visually…
Earth & Arrakis: a Villeneuve Double Feature [1/2]
This was the last English-language Villeneuve movie that I had not seen. I was really surprised by how much I liked this movie, because I wasn't the biggest fan of Enemy, which came out the same year, and also starred Jake Gyllenhaal. Prisoners felt a lot like David Fincher's Zodiac for much of its runtime, but ultimately, it's a very different movie.
Keller Dover is an interesting character. He shows one of the…
I’m happy to have seen this. An English theme song, weird. The soundtrack on the whole is weirdly ambient, like it’s Vangelis meets traditional Japanese music. There’s a shamisen number in this movie that’s cool, though.
Some “greatest hits” in this movie. The ol’ “dice outside the cup” trick from the first movie, as well as the “attack the blind man by the lantern we give him,” and the stupid “hide inside a cylinder made of reeds” trick from a…
This movie is so dark, visually. Much of the movie takes place at night, with limited lighting from fireplaces and candles, and the darkness seems to entrap the light, making it difficult to discern sometimes what's happening. This beneficially adds to the mystique of the settings.
The music is sometimes a little too on the nose, but it is often beautiful.
The settings are all effective and cool in this movie: the Transylvanian town with the Romani, the castles, the…
