hopkinsamye

Dune Part 2 is an epic movie; slickly made, and visually stunning.

But I had to explain quite a bit to the friends around me who had not read the book, especially the water of life scene and the final battle.

The movie had almost a 3 hour run time, but it felt overlong because Villenue focuses too much on spectacle on very little on substance.

It is a beautiful movie, but it feels like it has no soul. The emotional connection between Paul and Chani, so vital to the story, is completely lacking and unbelievable. The two main characters are good looking enough but has absolutely zero chemistry on screen.

I am certain Zendaya is a fine actress in some things, but she has basically 2 facial expressions here, and the one she uses the most is a scowl directed at Paul. I found her to be the worst part of this movie.

The final fight scene is short, choppy, and a mess. It felt anticlimactic and unfulfilling The Harkonens are basically reduced to bumbling villainy almost cartoonish. The ending was super abrupt, and was so different from the book that it left me wondering what the filmmakers would do if they want to do a sequel.

I want to reiterate that this isn't a bad movie. Villenue is great at creating a world that looks living and breathing, but he can't give life to individual characters.

It is like he can't see the trees for the forest.

Ridley Scott accomplished making one of the most interesting figures in history seem idiotic and boring.

I won't even go into the inaccurate history he portrays on film, because even if this movie was based on a fictional character, it would have been terrible.

Gladiator bent historical reality to tell a great story. I loved Gladiator, but there was no story in Napoleon...nothing really happened. It might as well have been a music video from the 80s.

Scratch that, I have seen music videos that made more sense than this movie.

The passage of years came across like Game of Thrones Season 8. I, and the group I went to see the movie with, couldn't keep up with the passage of time throughout the movie. It was only a familiarity with the names of the battles that kept me even remotely on track.

The musical cues were terrible. I had a difficult time hearing the characters over some of the blaring music chosen for certain scenes.

The battle scenes for the most part were repetitive, and less than epic.

The choice of the sound director to focus on Napoleon's breathing in the first battle scene was weird and took me right out of the action.

I think Ridley Scott either doesn't give a crap anymore, or maybe he is in early stages of alzheimer's disease.

Whatever is going on, he isn't the director he used to be.

This film had a good premise, and showed glimpses of promise that never were fulfilled.

The music cues for this film were terrible, and the film over-relied on them and weird camera angles to create tension that could have easily been portrayed with better writing and tighter editing.

The film could have easily been condensed into an hour and a half, and not lost any of the plot points it covered.

Whoever wrote the dialogue for this movie seems to have never listened to an actual conversation between two human beings before.

The bad writing really was evident in the scene where Mahershala Ali's character comes into the picture.

His character was obviously a well educated person who was used to interacting with the highest echelons of society in money and information exchange. He would have quickly come to the point as to who he was and why he was there.

Instead, the dialogue came across like a newbie Dungeon Master quickly coming up with dialogue for an NPC he didn't expect his players to talk to.

Someone described this as a thinking man's science fiction. HA HA, what?

There was no subtlety here. No attempt at making one use one's brain. Every concept is shoved down one's throat and repeated over and over just in case one didn't notice it the first time.

Anyway, I wasted more than 2 hours of my life watching this while I cleaned the living room and wrote Christmas cards. I don't want to waste anymore of my time on this garbage film.

My advice to you is skip it.

I didn't hate it.

As a huge fan of the original series, I feel like they did some things correctly.

1. You got your gore and mostly practical effects. (Yay!) 2. You got your dark humor (again, yay! The lack of humor was one of my big problems with the remake).

3. I liked the main possessed actress.

This suffered though from lack of characters you cared about. I watched the original The Evil Dead when I got home from the movie theater, and the small scene where the kids are unloading the groceries went a long way to making the characters relatable The kids come across as whiny, the Mom as negligent, and the sister as absent. The little girl is the only likeable character.

Too many "suspense" scenes that ate up time with uninteresting camera shots. This film was in dire need of tighter editing. I was bored by the bathtub scene, and the duct scene, for all the supposed tension those were supposed to evoke. At least Raimi made his tension scenes interesting with unusual camera angles that provoked the feeling of coming unhinged in the audience.

Instead I felt like I was waiting for something to happen in Evil Dead Rise.

I DID enjoy the peephole shot. That was interesting and original.

There really could have been magic here if they had made it their own thing instead of just being an homage to the original.

The kids were too pretty, the gore was...too constrained.

I want my gore to be chunky, visceral, sticky...not just blood.

They tried hard to make the apartment run down, but everything just looked too slick, to artificial.

I don't think anyone will ever be able to make a true Evil Dead sequel on a big budget and get the feel correct.

The opening scene that tried to emulate the opening shot of the original The Evil Dead is a good example. Everything looked too clean and tidy. It is a freaking swamp, it isn't supposed to look perfect.

And the whole film reeks of this.

They tried. It was better than the remake at least.