Dave Bautista – Blood and Porridge

March 27, 2024March 29, 2024

It’s Timmy time

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Legendary Pictures

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Part Two, sequel to his 2021 sci-fi blockbuster Dune and an adaptation of the second half of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel of the same name, has been on release for a few weeks now. Though we’ve been busy recently moving apartment, my partner and I found time to watch it yesterday afternoon in our new neighbourhood’s cinema.

The film’s opening 20 minutes weren’t a happy experience for us. Villeneuve immediately plunged us into the action, with Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), his mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), and their Fremen escorts Chani (Zendaya) and Stilgar (Javier Bardem) pinned down on the surface of the desert planet Arrakis by a squad of heavily-armed, black-clad goons from the villainous House of Harkonnen. The tension mounted as the two parties, hunting each other, snuck across the planet’s scorched landscapes of sand and rock… The soundtrack was unnervingly silent… And from right behind us came an incessant cacophony of rustling paper, crackling wrappers, slurpy masticating and greedy chomping. We were attending a 1.30 pm screening of Dune 2 and the couple sitting behind us had decided to guzzle a takeaway lunch while watching the film. I wished a giant Arrakis sandworm would surface directly under their seats and guzzle them.

Finally, the couple managed to finish their meal, their unwelcome sound effects abated and we were able to focus fully on Villeneuve’s movie. So, what did I think of it? Before I give my verdict, here’s a warning. In the entry ahead, there will be spoilers galore for Dune 2.

Well, to be honest, I didn’t enjoy it as much as its predecessor. Mind you, I expected that three years ago as I walked out of Dune 1. As I wrote at the time: “One thing I suspect makes this version of Dune so good is that, in telling only the book’s first half, it’s a story of tragedy. And tragedy, as any student of Shakespeare will confirm, is one of the most powerful forms of narrative. I suspect Villeneuve will find it harder to make the next instalment of Dune, dealing with how Paul marshals his forces and finally restores order on Arrakis, as gripping. For me, at least, downbeat endings last longer in the imagination than happy ones.”

To be fair to Villeneuve and his co-writer John Spaihts, the ending they come up with here is less happy than the one I remember in Herbert’s novel, which I read as a teenager. But the plot, wherein Paul Atreides joins forces with the Fremen, Arrakis’s Bedouin-like natives, and they take on the scumbag Harkonnens, still feels emotionally less complex than that of the original film.

© New English Library

The first film saw Paul’s honourable, though imperialistic father Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac), head of the House of Atreides, get tricked into taking stewardship of Arrakis. There, the House is destroyed by the brutal and grudgeful Harkonnens, with the connivance of the galactic Emperor (the ever-whispery Christopher Walken) and the Bene Gesserit, a female sect with Jedi-like powers who’re secretly manipulating events. Paul and Jessica are among the few survivors and the Fremen reluctantly take them under their wing.

I had some problems with Dune 2’s pacing. Much of the film takes place in the Arrakis desert, where Paul and his mum are gradually initiated into the ways of the natives. Some Fremen are particularly interested in Paul because he seems to fulfil a long-held prophecy about a messiah who’ll come from another world and not only lead them to freedom but make their sandy world green again. While I respect Villeneuve’s efforts at ‘world-building’ here, I feel this section goes on too long. He ladles on the Fremen’s rituals and lore, especially things involving hallucinogenic substances like the spice – the prized commodity, necessary for enabling space travel in the Dune universe, which makes Arrakis such a big political deal in the first place – and the Water of Life, a blue fluid extracted from baby sandworms, the planet’s main non-human lifeform. Though as any Scotsman will tell you, the Water of Life is actually whisky.

Also, the scenes where Paul argues with the Messiah-believing faction of the Freeman (headed by Bardem) that he isn’t really the Messiah put me in mind of the 1979 movie Monty Python’s Life of Brian. While Chalamet tried to convince them that he wasn’t the Chosen One, I kept expecting to hear Terry Jones call out in his raspy old-lady voice: “He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!”

© HandMade Films / Python (Monty) Pictures

Conversely, towards the end, things feel rushed. As Paul and the Fremen escalate their attacks on the Harkonnens, who’ve taken over Arrakis and are trying to supervise its spice production, and the planet slips out of control, the Emperor and his daughter (Florence Pugh) are compelled to make an intervention. They head for Arrakis… And after their spaceship lands at the Harkonnens’ base, Paul and the forces of the Fremen simply turn up, unobserved and unannounced. Until then, we’ve been led to believe that they’re confined to the inhospitable, storm-ridden south of the planet, outside the Harkonnens’ control. How they arrive so quickly and easily, with legions of troops, a cavalry of sandworms and an arsenal of missiles, in the Harkonnens’ backyard is a mystery. It’s as if the planet of Arrakis has suddenly shrunk to being the size of the Isle of Wight.

Meanwhile, certain sub-plots from Herbert’s book don’t quite enrich the movie in the way they could have – or are cut altogether. The return of Paul’s faithful warrior-mentor Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin) happens abruptly. He just pops up all-of-a-sudden. I’d have liked to know how he survived the massacre in the previous film, especially as we last saw him about to engage the Harkonnens in desperate battle. Gurney brings with him an unexpected revelation about some ‘House Atomics’, nuclear missiles belonging to the Atreides that Duke Leto quietly stashed away on Arrakis. These become a handy bargaining chip for Paul when he points them at the all-important spice fields and are a deus ex machina if ever there was one. I can’t recall if these were in the book – if they were, I assume they were introduced less jarringly.

I do recall the book having an interesting twist whereby Gurney believes Jessica is the one who betrayed the Atreides to the Harkonnens. But there’s zero interaction between the two of them in Dune 2. Rebecca Ferguson, incidentally, deserves praise for her portrayal of Jessica, who grows into a sinister, if not chilling figure as she exerts more and more influence over the Fremen. Gurney would be right to distrust her.

Elsewhere, I was perplexed by the absence of Thufir Harat (Stephen McKinley Henderson in Dune 1). Thufir is a mentat, beings in the Dune universe who do the work of computers. Employed by Paul’s late father, he has a reasonable supporting role in the first film and it’s noticeable that he’s not around in Dune 2. In the novel, the Harkonnens enslave him after their bloody takeover, but then he secretly tries to undermine his new bosses whilst working in their headquarters. In Dune 2, his presence might have solved the problem of how Paul moves his forces to the proximity of the Harkonnens and the Emperor without anyone noticing – Thufir could have deactivated the monitoring systems. Anyway, the film leaves us to surmise that Thufir perished during the slaughter of the Atreides, though Villeneuve thanks McKinley Henderson in the credits, presumably for accepting the dropping of his character with good grace.

Ironically, in the first adaptation of Dune, the 1984 movie directed by David Lynch, which tried to shoehorn the entire novel into two hours and 17 minutes of running time and was derided for leaving so much out, Thufir is shown surviving the Atreides’ massacre and becoming the Harkonnens’ slave. In that version, he was played by Freddie Jones, father of Toby Jones, with big, spidery eyebrows.

All that said, I did enjoy Dune 2. The film was generally impressive and there were moments where I went, “Wow!” Following on from Arrival (2016) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017), it’s good to see Villeneuve again treat a science- fiction story with high seriousness. And I like how, for all that the male characters hog the screen and flaunt their testosterone, it’s implied that the female characters, as portrayed by Ferguson, Charlotte Rampling, Florence Pugh and Lea Seydoux, are the ones really running the show.

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Legendary Pictures

Also great is Villeneuve’s depiction of the Harkonnens. The scenes set on their home planet truly capture their fascistic, creepy, sado-masochistic awfulness, resembling black-and-white footage of rallies in Nazi Germany but populated by the bald-headed Cenobites from Clive Barker’s Hellraiser franchise. Even their fireworks look dark and perverted. And as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, the psychopathic nephew of arch-villain Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard) who’s drafted in to quell the Fremen’s resistance and restore order on Arrakis, Austin Butler gives possibly the best performance in the film. (In the old David Lynch movie, Feyd-Rautha was the character played by the reggae-loving Geordie, Sting.)

Though Butler just about manages to steal the show, it is one of those films that’s helped immeasurably by its ensemble cast. That includes Timothée Chalamet who, as Paul, has the hardest acting task – he could have ended up a dull goody two shoes or, as he agonises over whether or not he should proclaim himself the Messiah, a whiny pain in the neck. But Chalamet avoids both pitfalls.

Lastly, watching Dune 2, I realised it featured no fewer than three James Bond villains – Walken (Max Zorin in 1986’s A View to a Kill), Bardem (Raoul Silva in 2012’s Skyfall) and Dave Bautista (Mr Hinx in 2016’s Spectre). For good measure, you get a Bond lady too, Lea Seydoux who played Madeline Swann in Spectre and 2021’s No Time to Die. Yes, I know. It’s sad that I notice these things.

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Legendary Pictures

June 18, 2021June 21, 2021

Dave of the dead

© The Stone Quarry / Netflix

I’ve finally caught up with one of the most hyped films to land on Netflix last month, Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead (2021). I’m not a massive fan of Snyder’s work, though I can’t say either that his films rouse in me the antipathy that they seem to rouse in thousands of other movie-fans, who regularly spray adjectives like ‘bloated’, ‘dour’, ‘humorless’, ‘prolonged’, ‘hollow’, ‘overbearing’ and ‘overstuffed’ at them, while dissing Snyder himself as some sort of dumb-assed filmmaking dude-bro.

Mind you, I’d only seen two of his earlier films. The first was his 2004 remake of George A. Romero’s masterful 1978 zombie epic Dawn of the Dead. I have mixed feelings about Snyder’s version of Dawn. Its first 25 minutes are terrific, but thereafter it becomes a routine, if slick, affair, with no attempt to replicate or develop the satire on mindless consumerism that made Romero’s original so enjoyable. (Incidentally, I recently discovered that Romero shared my opinion of the remake.)

The second was his 2013 Superman movie Man of Steel, which I thought was underrated. I didn’t mind it being darker in tone than the Superman movies of the late 1970s and 1980s and liked how it showed Superman getting a hard time, initially at least, from a suspicious humanity. Admittedly, Henry Cavill as Superman and Amy Adams as Lois Lane didn’t engage in the way that Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder did in those roles three decades earlier, but the splendid supporting cast – Michael Shannon, Laurence Fishburne, Russell Crowe, Diane Lane and Kevin Costner – more than compensated. That said, not being a fan of DC Comics overall, I felt no inclination to watch Snyder’s later ventures into the DC Extended Universe, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) and Justice League (2017).

As its title suggests, Army of the Dead sees Snyder return to zombie territory, although this new movie takes place in a different universe from Dawn of the Dead. Whereas in Dawn, the zombie outbreak happens everywhere and brings civilization to its knees within days, in Army it’s localized and quickly controlled. It begins with holidaymakers, gamblers, croupiers, showgirls and Elvis impersonators succumbing to a nasty, bite-y zombie virus in the casinos and hotels of Las Vegas, after a top-secret convoy transporting the bug crashes in the nearby Nevada Desert. The US military responds and manages to contain the virus, plus all the zombies carrying it, by sealing off Las Vegas behind a towering perimeter wall of metal containers.

Although it was obvious from the start that I was going to be watching a big, dumb, action-fantasy-horror movie, even at this early point I found myself shaking my head in disbelief. From where did the military suddenly rustle up all those giant containers? And how come the Las Vegas they seal off seems to consist only of the downtown area with the casinos and hotels, but with nothing else attached? Doesn’t the real city sprawl a bit? Doesn’t it have suburbs? I’ve never visited it, but I had the impression that Las Vegas was more expansive, thanks to reading Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (2013) and watching David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return (2017).

Oh well. Now under zombie-lockdown, Las Vegas is completely inaccessible. This is frustrating news for casino tycoon Bly Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada), who has 200 million dollars in cash sitting in a vault under a casino in the city and would like to retrieve it. The fact that the US government has just announced that it’s going to erase the zombie plague by nuking Las Vegas in a few days’ time gives extra impetus to his desire to retrieve it. Thus, Tanaka approaches a tough ex-mercenary called Scott Ward (Dave Bautista) and offers him a generous portion of the 200 million in return for putting together a ‘team’, breaking into Vegas, blasting their way through the zombies and liberating the money before everything goes up in a cloud of mushroom-shaped radioactive smoke. Ward was involved in the original military operation to evacuate non-infected people from the city and seal it off and so is the best man for the job, but he carries psychological baggage. His wife perished during the operation, which has so traumatized him that he’s been reduced to flipping burgers in the kitchen of an out-of-the-way diner.

Indeed, food seems to have become the Bautista character’s way of dealing with post-zombie stress disorder. He’s still blathering about lobster rolls near the movie’s close, two-and-a-half hours later. (Yes, two-and-a-half hours – this is a long film.)

The set up reminded me less of past zombie movies than of John Carpenter’s rugged sci-fi actioner Escape from New York (1981), in which tough guy Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) is sent into a future version of Manhattan, sealed off and transformed into a giant, hellhole prison run by its own inmates, to rescue the US president whose plane has just crashed there. The president was played by Donald Pleasence, so the film was eerily prophetic in its vision of a dystopian future America run by a president called Donald.

The difference is that Carpenter would have established the premise, introduced the protagonists and got them into the zombie-fied Las Vegas within the first quarter-hour. Snyder, it’s fair to say, is a less economical filmmaker. While Bautista was in the middle of assembling his team, and no one had got anywhere near Vegas yet, I checked my watch and realized 45 minutes had already passed. Herein lies Army’s greatest problem. It takes its time getting going. And even after it gets going, there are still periods when everything stops going again so that Snyder can shoehorn in ponderous, talky, supposedly character-building stuff. I can’t help wondering how much better the film would have been if some studio bigwig had told Snyder that Army wasn’t allowed a 150-minute running time. No, it’d only have 90 minutes maximum in which to tell its story. I’m sure the result would have had much less flab and far more momentum.

Another issue I have with Army is its derivativeness. I don’t mind films containing little nods and homages to other films, but Snyder not only pinches a major subplot and supporting character from James Cameron’s Aliens (1986) but also rehashes at least two of that film’s legendary action sequences. As the film progresses, it also increasingly calls to mind the Will Smith sci-fi / horror movie I Am Legend (2007), with Bautista and his crew discovering that there aren’t just ordinary, common-or-garden zombies shambling mindlessly around downtown Las Vegas. There’s also a more evolved variety that can sprint, climb, communicate, experience emotions, reproduce, organize themselves and even wear metal headgear, making them impervious to that normal zombie-stopping technique, “shoot ’em in the head.”

Frustratingly, like the film I Am Legend (and unlike the marvelous 1954 novel by Richard Matheson on which it’s based), nothing is done with these creatures once they’ve been introduced. They merely become another threat to be blasted away, like a new foe that’s appeared on a new level of a computer game. Considering how it’s clear at this point that both Bautista’s team and the evolved zombies are being shafted by unseen corporate villains, it would have been interesting if the script had had Bautista try to communicate with the creatures and enlist their aid against the common enemy.

One other irritant is Snyder’s use of music, which is meant to be ironic but just seems clunkingly obvious: Elvis Presley’s Viva Las Vegas (1964) and Suspicious Minds (1968) to evoke the setting and the Doors’ This is the End (1967) and Credence Clearwater Revival’s Bad Moon Riding (1969) to evoke the apocalyptic mood. Most of these appear as cover versions by the likes of Richard Cheese and Allison Crowe, Theo Gilmore and the Raveonettes, which suggests Snyder didn’t trust the young audience the film was targeting to be able to handle hearing the songs in their original forms. Worst of all, though, is his deployment of the Cranberries’ Zombie (1994). I’m not a fan of that song but it was written to protest the killing of children by the IRA. Using it on the soundtrack of a Hollywood blockbuster about zombies doesn’t strike me as funny, but as crass. (Also, when Zombie plays in the background of a scene, it gives away an important, upcoming plot twist.) Still, I laughed when Culture Club’s Do You Really Want to Hurt Me (1982) made an unexpected appearance. Musically, Snyder got one thing right, at least.

Despite everything – the film’s bloated-ness, overlong-ness, derivativeness and unimaginative use of music – I did quite enjoy Army of the Dead. Largely this is due to the cast. Even though he’s the size and shape of a muscular Michelin Man, Bautista comes across as a likeable human being, while the other performers do a good job of creating characters you can relate to and root for. Well, apart from the character who might as well have ‘I’M A SCUMBAG WHO’S GOING TO BETRAY EVERYONE’ written on a signpost above his head. Particularly good are Ana de la Reguera as Bautista’s capable deputy, who quietly carries a torch for the big fellow; Tig Notaro as the helicopter pilot tasked with flying them out the disaster zone before the bomb drops on it, who displays Dr. ‘Bones’ McCoy levels of loveable crankiness; and Omari Hardwick and Matthias Schweighöfer as, respectively, a macho, chainsaw-wielding mercenary and a nerdy, mild-mannered safecracker, who get involved in an unexpected bromance.

And the action and suspense scenes, when they come, are exciting. It’s just a bit disappointing that, as I’ve said, so many of these scenes evoke similar scenes in earlier movies – Aliens or I Am Legend or, say, 1981’s An American Werewolf in London (two blokes crossing some desolate terrain at the film’s start, trying to escape a slavering monster) or the 2013 Brad Pitt vehicle World War Z (Bautista’s team having to make their way through a building that’s crowded with zombies, who are all in a statue-like state of hibernation but will wake up if there’s any sudden sound). Definitely worth waiting for is a gory sequence featuring the movie’s best original touch, possibly its only original touch, a zombie tiger that’d originally belonged to Vegas magicians / entertainers Siegfried and Roy.

To sum up – plot-wise, Army of the Dead is as ragged and hole-ridden as the undead creatures that inhabit its dystopian setting, but it remains entertaining. Its main problem is its inordinate running time. If an hour had been chopped off that, you’d have had a thrilling, engaging action-horror movie as fast-moving as its evolved tier of zombies. Unfortunately, the two-and-a-half-hour-long Army too often resembles its other tier of zombies, the ones that just shamble.