Top 15 Movies of 2024: No 11 - Rebel Ridge

11. Rebel Ridge, dir. Jeremy Saulnier

To talk about Rebel Ridge, one must first talk about Aaron Pierre. This is only his fourth film role, with the fifth being a voicing credit on Mufasa: The Lion King. (Fun fact: That was the first and the last time I ever talk about Mufasa: The Lion King.) Pierre stands out as deeply impressive presence. He has the physicality, he's got the muscle, he's got perfect cheek bones, and more importantly he's got those deep blue soulful eyes. Aaron Pierre is preposterously beautiful, and is blessed with the intensity to match it. I wanted to see more of him after his short role in The Underground Railroad, and I'm glad he has a full starring role in Rebel Ridge. He is a glacier of ice, a sublime beauty. Admire it from a far, but do not mess with it. When the glacier moves, it crushes all in its path.

Rebel Ridge is a big return to form for director Jeremy Saulnier. His previous works were also gritty stories set in the back corners of America, Blue Ruin and Green Room. The unique thing about his thrillers is how neither side, the hero or the villain, are ever fully in control of the situation. These are nightmare scenarios spiraling out of control, with every bad decision leading towards more violence. I disliked Saulnier's first film with Netflix, Hold the Dark, which led to a tough fallow period for this director. Something went terribly wrong with True Detective Season 3, where he ended up exiting as showrunner after just two episodes. Then we had five years of no Saulnier.

Something also went wrong with Rebel Ridge's production as well, where John Boyega was going to play the lead, then quit. That caused production to pause for an entire year. Aaron Pierre was the second choice to be our hero, Terry Richmond. You'd never know that this role was written for anybody else though. Nobody else could be this contained, this calm presense against such reckless stupidity and corruption.

Rebel Ridge is a modern answer to First Blood, the original Rambo movie. That was one about PTSD and local police bullying. Terry Richmond is an ex-marine CQC expert, but he's never used these tools he's mastered to hurt anybody. He's just a tutor who shows up in Youtube videos. Richmond has not seen war. The only war Terry runs into is our at home War on Drugs. Welcome to the 21st century, where civil forfeiture and qualified immunity are naked and obvious corruptions of the justice system. Meaning a local sheriff (Don Johnson) can strut around like a gangster and lead his whole sleepy little precinct to destruction by messing with the wrong guy. Presume invincibility leads to pointless provocation and finally, a lot of people getting hurt. Like many of Saulnier's great films, all of this could have been avoided if a stranger on his bicycle had just been allowed to ride to a courthouse with $10,000 in his pocket and get his cousin's bail.

The action in Rebel Ridge is a flashy fantasy. The way the real world works is that a corrupt sheriff like this will become the next governor of Louisiana or even president. Who is still pretending in justice anymore? But let's pretend for a second those things exist because this is a movie. 

Terry Richmond's action is the opposite of fancy, the choreography is built around an economy of movement. He will disarm you in just two twists of your arm to maintain absolute control. He will not hit you unless you need to be hit. He will not shout unless he needs to be heard. Every gun needs to be unloaded before he makes his next move, his finger is never on the trigger unless he means to shoot. The gun is pointed downward, he holds the weapon in two hands close to his body so that nobody gets any ideas. This is efficient "less" lethal violence. Unlike First Blood, Richmond never kills anybody, not even the proud bastard of a sheriff who honestly, deserves worse. Even in spiraling chaos, where nobody is control, Terry can at least control his own limbs, and what violence he gives out.

Top 15 Movies of 2024: No. 12 - A Quiet Place: Day One

12. A Quiet Place: Day One, dir. Michael Sarnoski

First of all, this movie has the best movie pet of 2024. Frodo the Cat, played by Nico and Schnitzel, is the best. There is no way any cat is well-behaved enough to survive A Quiet Place invasion, the cats would probably join the aliens instead of doing what Frodo does: be a mysterious fairy creature to guide the protagonists together. I know a cat that meows for hours at 3 AM for no reason other than to be an asshole.

There was a strange amount of misunderstanding as to what this movie wanted to achieve. The wiki writers in the audience came away very disappointed; there were not many alien lore pages to update after seeing A Quiet Place: Day One. The movie skips over of the initial alien attack in Manhattan. Day One in fact takes place largely during Days Two through Four. If you do want to see the startling chaos of the first few minutes of aliens landing to ruin a normal day, they did that already in A Quiet Place Part II. (And you do get a really alien attack in Day One eventually.) The aliens make for a great tension-building construct, but they are the most boring part of the Quiet Place movies. Even their design is that generic Cloverfield shape we've seen a thousand times now. They are just spooky monsters that eat people using frankly nonsensical sound rules to force video game-y stealth sequences. I like these movies for those thrills, but I the aliens do not matter. People seemed really disappointed when A Quiet Place: Day One was focused on its human characters and emotions, as if that was not always the point, even back when this was John Krasinski's vehicle. Michael Sarnoski, coming off Pig, has even greater ambitions for this franchise.

A Quiet Place: Day One kept most of its premise secret during the marketing campaign. People expected just aliens in New York, and got something more. The trailers did nothing for me. Day One was one of those movies whose release I was anticipating just so I would not need to see the coming attraction again for the twentieth time. I largely saw this because Lupita Nyong'o is a great actress and sadly has not had much acting to do in the last five years. She was exactly the kind of presence needed for a movie like this. Nyong'o can carry scenes entirely alone with just CG monsters and Frodo, so she is great for a monster movie. But this is also a meaty dramatic role. Our heroine, Sam, is a very rare kind of character for a monster movie: she's dying of cancer at the start.

Palliative care is not a topic many films will grapple with. It is not something that society in general much wants to think about. Death is an inevitable part of life - and unlike some writers, I'm not going to pretend that it is good, death sucks - it is something you'll need to deal with one day for yourself and your loved ones. I've had to have difficult discussions with family members about end of life planning, and you do not want to know the details. The medical system is built to keep you alive against all odds, using miracles of science and industry to pull it off. However, there is also a moment where the battle is not worth it, where some levels of existence are clearly worse than the alternative. Sam is in that process now, the youngest person by decades in a ward full of the walking dead. She's angry at the world, and not going to get happier with it now that its in flames.

"Why should I care about the last days of a near-dead woman anyway?" It is exactly Sam's instinct to stay alive that makes A Quiet Place: Day One interesting. It is not a question of whether she will die, rather how she dies, whether it be just random bad luck in an alien's jaws or something more meaningful. This is the process of letting go. Day One is the best movie of this franchise by far, asking much more of its audience than the nostalgic white pastoral fantasies of the Krasinski movies. Sam starts in downtown Manhattan and wants to walk all the way up to Harlem for a particular pizza spot she loves. This is not really an odyssey to get past the space monsters, rather it is one through her own memories and past. We're not saving the world or an idealized vision of farm life, we're saving a woman's soul through, of all things, performance.

A Quiet Place: Day One had me crying at three separate moments, including one that was not even melodrama. This movie opens with Sam and her hospice traveling into Chinatown to see a puppet show, which sounds like a particularly trite way to spend one of your few remaining days on Earth. Then Sam is stunned, as are we, by a surprisingly beautiful puppet of a little boy, moving with remarkable realism. What does this scene have to do with aliens? Nothing. It is just a moment of simple truth that meant something, that made her feel something other than embitterment. We cut straight past it to 9/11-esque imagery of New York City covered in soot and chaos. Random fate hands her a partner in Eric (Joseph Quinn), a fellow survivor of which she shares nothing in common. He's just a lost guy, who washes up from a flooded Subway station and has nowhere else to go. And his most touching act to save her is also a silent pantomime of a magic show. The movie transcends mere monster fun by having these almost inexplicable moments where the care and love you put into production actually means something. Art finding its connection.

Top 15 Movies of 2024: No. 13 - Nosferatu

13. Nosferatu, dir. Robert Eggers 

I wrote a history of vampires in film two years ago, with a focus on Dracula. I'll admit some bias here. Nosferatu, in case you do not know, is a serial-numbers-filed-off version of Dracula, with the same characters and events. The retitle was just an unsuccessful attempt to evade copyright, which even a century ago was often an enemy of artistic expression. We get a New-sferatu every fifty years or so, and you can see a lot of influence across the century here. The original 1922 film is not a movie I enjoy. However, the 1979 version from Werner Herzog is magnificent. Robert Eggs is taking a lot of influence from the centuries of Dracula material to choose from. Isabelle Adjani’s take on heroine shares a lot in common with the 2024 version played by Lily-Rose Depp. One can even feel Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stroker's Dracula in the Eggers version. There's a wild archness to the performances and the intense sexual connection between its vampire and his female victim/lover. 

Is Nosferatu (2024) this the greatest version of Nosferacula to put to screen? No, Eggers did not make the definitive Bram Stoker movie, Coppola still holds that crown. But Eggers made a really good about an undead eastern noble traveling across Europe to bring death and depravity to the West. There's always room for more movies about that content.

The imaginary of the vampire is as iconic as any film monster. The definitive Dracula, the one you see in the emojis on your phone, is Bela Lugosi. Nosferatu is nearly as iconic, the bald creepy rat-man who would go on to appear in the original adaptation of Salem’s Lot and more importantly, Spongebob Squarepants, that great nexus of 21^st century culture. Eggers went with an entirely different monster. That silhouette at first looks like the Max Schreck, then you see the man in person, and it is a different kind of vampire entirely.

This Dracula – I mean, excuse me, this Orlok, is one that fits the more closely with the Stoker novel. He’s got a mustache, a big pointed nose, and the custom of an Eastern European tyrant. We see the Count nude several times and beneath the big coat, there is a half-rotten corpse, with a back covered in sores and decay. Bill Skarsgård takes his voice down to its deepest register and alternates between a snarling accent and wheezing breaths. It is very unpleasant. You can only imagine what this guy smells like. And yet, this Count, lacking all the style of Lugosi or even the charms of his rodent predecessor, has this compelling tragic connection with Ellen Hutter (Depp). He’s both violation and titillation, exactly the appeal of this monster, but with a new take on it.

And yeah, the mustache adds a lot. I'll fight you over the mustache.

Eggers has a very theatrical method to his films, every actor is going big with their deliveries but often big in different ways. The Lighthouse is a lot of fun because Willem Dafoe is doing cartoon Pirate Captain while Robert Pattinson’s New England accent approaches a Kennedy impression. Dafoe in Nosferatu is a cackling freak - his character is a Van Helsing rift but no longer representing modernity, rather a joyous return to magic and mysticism. Lily-Rose Depp is alternating between strong heroine and madwoman. If the protagonist is this big, it forces this film’s version of Renfield, Herr Knock (Simon McBerney) to become ever more grotesque and monstrous. Not every performance works. Nicholas Hoult as the straight-man Hutter can play off the ham and cheese around him, but Aaron Taylor-Johnson cannot. He seems out of place in every scene, like a high school kid struggling to recite Shakespeare. There's a very specific energy you need to bring to play Eggers, and Taylor-Johnson does not have it. That actor aside, if you just want to see a cast go for it while surrounded by gorgeous Muppets Christmas Carol-esque sets, Nosferatu (2024) is your movie.

Every version of Nosferatu has this unique twist on the Dracula formula wherein the heroine, Mina/Ellen/Lucy, is not saved as she is in the novel and most film adaptations. This woman must be the lure that finally kills the creature, the virginal feminine sacrifice that saves the world. This is made tragic here in the Eggers version by the addition of Ellen being the one who summons Orlok. This director has been trying to make Nosferatu since The VVitch helped start the whole "elevated horror" movement in 2015, and I believe this was the hook Eggers wanted to bring for a decade now. Orlok represents the one escape from stifling heteronormative 19^th century rules and rationality. All through the film nobody really listens to Ellen or her needs besides Dafoe’s character, himself only a few degrees less wacky than the main villain. The final act of this Nosferatu is a woman out of time, out of culture, having never found a place in her world dying for its sin. Nosferatu is one of the rare Christmas vampire movies, and hmm, there's a sacred feminine Christ metaphor here.

Top 15 Movies of 2024: No. 14 - Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

14. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, dir. George Miller

I saw this movie three times in 2024. Twice in theaters, once at home. I just wanted to bring as many people as I could to see it. For whatever reason, Furiosa was one of the biggest flops of 2024, a complete disaster that will almost certainly doom any hope for a future Mad Max sequel. This was a franchise that nearly lasted fifty years, going from tiny no-budget indie B-movies to a major blockbusters. Everything comes to an end, even the end of the world fails to make back its budget eventually.

Mad Max: Fury Road is a movie so beloved at this point that I need not even mention it. It is one of the best blockbusters of this century, and has only grown in esteem in the past decade. Fury Road did not usher in some revolution in the form, if anything it stands out more and more considering how much digital and in some cases, cheap and ugly blockbusters have become. No sequel was ever going to match Fury Road, nor could its prequel. Furiosa has the difficulty of not being a mostly one great scene over the course of unrelenting thrills for exactly two hours. This movie has to be a world-building exercise: with not just the impressions of characters and the implications of a society, but real arcs and real structure, even a subplot about trade and economics. So therefore Furiosa becomes a flabbier movie, depicting a lifetime of a character across many twists and turns. Its action climax occurs well before its emotional one. We even skip over the war, "yadda yadda yadda"-ing the biggest battles like David Lynch's editor cutting past Paul and Chani in Dune.

And worse, director George Miller's cinematography is clearly less than what it was in 2015. There are a lot of scenes that feel like master shots of guys standing around a room talking. You can see the CG compositing a lot more clearly now too. It definitely did not help that Furiosa ends on a montage of shots from Fury Road, so you can see how much more physical stunt-work went into the previous production. (This is assuming you did not rewatch Fury Road that morning before you saw Furiosa, because why not take any opportunity to enjoy Fury Road again?) You never felt in the 2015 movie that you were not seeing real people in a real desert doing this theme park stunt show extravaganza. A lot of Furiosa feels like a digital stage.

One of the funny things about Miller's writing process is that he seems incapable of writing a protagonist. Max in Fury Road was a cipher of a man with barely any dialog, with the protagonist role eventually passing to Charlize Theron's Furiosa. Since Furiosa was the most interesting character in that movie, we therefore get a whole prequel about her. But now, Furiosa made titular speaks as little as Max did, with all the force and energy of the movie going to the new villain, Chris Hemsworth's Dementus. The new Furiosa, Anya Taylor-Joy is only in half the movie and might as well be in a Terrence Malick flick considering how much acting she's actually given to do. Furiosa is the Dementus movie, as seen through the eyes of his marquee victim.

Dementus is one of the best movie characters of the year, I am not complaining. Hemsworth's beard and nose prosthetic are both glorious. This character is a liar, a fraud, and above all else, a fool. But he's a dangerous fool. All through Furiosa he is shifting roles and narratives from wasteland prophet to revolutionary to finally his truest colors, just another tyrant trying to take as much as he can. You cannot buy him, you cannot control him, you cannot even work for him, even though he has the loyalty of a large crew of distinct characters. In every case it ends in blood, his entire band slaughtered, two of the last cities on Earth in ruins, and even at the very end, with nothing left to lose, no responsibility taken. Christianity has a lot of failures but at least it offered salvation only if you confessed your sins. It demanded a final statement of truth and reality, to balance a life of falsehood and deceit. Now, people understand there is no salvation through forgiveness, you should lie all the harder if caught. Never give in. Your other frauds will protect you, to save the bigger lie that is our own American version of dystopia. Even the hellscape of post-apocalyptic Australia has more justice than our world, because Dementus is not rescued by his fellow grifters. At least in our fiction the frauds are still brought low.

Furiosa is a movie about narrative. It is a more successful version of a story about stories that Miller had attempted with his messy genie flick, Three Thousand Years of Longing. There is a narrator in Furiosa, the History Man (George Shevtsov) who appears several times to tell Furiosa's tale. We end on an interesting note where even the History Man's omniscience ends, where he cannot tell us exactly how the final confrontation concluded. There are many tales, contradictory ones. Dementus' backstory is told multiple times, and we have no reason to believe him. It fits therefore that in death there is still no clear truth for this man. He has no beginning and no end, no substance, just the violence and chaos he generates as part of his natural course of being.

Furiosa also makes this list because of the big chase scene. This where one of the Dementus' former hench (or possibly still current hench, there are lies within lies with this guy) the Octoboss (Goran D. Kleut) attacks a caravan Furiosa is serving under. It is a mini-Fury Road, one continuous fight scene down miles after miles of arrow-straight highway as villains lay siege from all sides. Including guys on gliders taking off into the sky, which is easily the most awesome thing anybody put to film for any reason in 2024. Spectacle still matters for something, and the Octoboss' giant octopus-shaped kite filling the sky was an unbeatable image. That rules.

Top 15 Movies of 2024: No. 15 - Dune: Part Two

 

Dune: Part 2, dir. Denis Villeneuve

Dune 2 was originally going to be No #12 on this list. I'm bumping it down in light of today's news, which gave this entry a lot more urgency.

Honestly, I do not even want to talk about Dune 2 right now. I'm cancelling this review, we're going in a whole different direction. I know most people do not think immediately of Dune when they think of David Lynch. I, however, let too many random movies I saw on Showtime Beyond in middle school decide the course of my life.

David Lynch passed away today. He was seventy-eight. The director was no longer a young man or even a man too young to suddenly pass. Last year Lynch reported that he was home bound due to health complications born from a lifetime of smoking. Worse, he had not filmed much since the conclusion of Twin Peaks Season 3 back in 2018. We'll never get to see that TV show he was shopping around with Netflix starring Naomi Watts, because Netflix felt their money was better spent on projects such as Zack Snyder's Rebel Moon. (Spoilers: that did not make my Top 15. I will have words about that project, however.) There will be a lot of piecing written in mourning because Lynch was a singular visionary director, one of the greatest of all time. In his filmography are several films that are more more unique and more fascinating most filmmaker's entire careers: Inland Empire, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Mulholland Drive, Eraserhead, and Wild at Heart. We spoiled by a splendor of greatness from this man, and yet one cannot help but wish he could have made more. You should really make a point to go see The Straight Story right now. It is not a surreal or experimental like many of Lynch's great works, but it is a beautiful story of an old man's final journey across the country to visit his elderly brother. They get to sit on a porch together, holding back tears, unsure of what to say. Maybe that is a perfect movie to mourn Lynch with.

I instead turned on 1984's Dune. That movie is a notorious disaster, one which Lynch himself never quite disowned but clearly failed in realizing his complete vision for. It was a flop. Alejandro Jodorowsky laughed at it in his documentary bragging out the Dune movie he never made at all. As history progresses, the '84 Dune may merely become a curious footnote beneath the 2020s retelling: the funky half-finished mess with terrible-looking shield special effects, an opening that is twenty straight minutes of info dumps, and a montage that "yadda yadda yadda"s over most of what Denis Villeneuve shows in Dune: Part 2.

It is also one of my favorite movies of all time. I cannot argue it is Lynch's masterwork. It is still my favorite thing he's ever done.

I needed some comfort, I worry enough about the death of elderly loved ones too much right now, so on a day like today I needed a floating fat man pulling the heart-plug out of a whimpering boy slave and then smearing himself in the spilled blood. I've only watched that scene a thousand times. I can quote the skin doctor's lines word for word, even down to cadence. "You are sooo beautiful my baron... You skiiin, loove to me..." I needed the Emperor of Space having a conversation with a floating ameba monster in a fish tank, words coming out of an awful twitching genitalia mouth, ultimately just to clunkily exposit to the audience what the plot is - which will be repeated a few more times. The money behind this operation, famed genre producer, Dino De Laurentis, clearly did not trust his audience to follow his director's strange vision. You can feel the arguments behind the scenes that David Lynch lost, forcing more and more explanation for a film that is on its greatest level, inexplicable. In some ways, this movie forced Lynch forward artistically, the more he became handcuffed to an explanation, the more his later works succeed due to the lack of one. This is the final time any studio would Lynch blockbuster money. It was also the last time we got a blockbuster this unique, this broken. I love all the more for the flaws.

You can "solve" a David Lynch movie, some feel that's exactly what they've done with Mulholland Drive or Twin Peaks. There's Youtube lore theory videos that will tell you all about who or what Judy is if you really want to know. Blue Velvet is not all that inexplicable, that first scene tells you all you need to know: the bugs crawling under the bright green lawn are a metaphor for the darkness hiding within the peaceful veneer of white suburban America. Dune is about space barons fighting for control of a sand planet and magic drugs. It is high concept space opera schlock, as explicable as it gets.

My guess is that Lynch was given this job because he had famously turned down the off to direct Return of the Jedi, and De Laurentis wanted his own Star Wars. Thus he funds Dune, the Frank Herbert book that heavily inspired Tatooine, Jabba the Hutt, and that boy's fantasy Hero's Journey that is so core to Star Wars. David Lynch could have turned in a very typical big budget space opera of the era. Instead he made a movie whose every detail, every particularity, is unique.  Dune tells you why Paul (Lynch regular Kyle MacLachlan) goes to the world that the script calls "Dune... Arrakis... Desert Planet..." and why he rides a giant Sandworm. What fascinates is every point on the line besides that big picture explanation. These are choices Villeneuve did not make. They are choices no other filmmaker would have made.

There's a reason that Lynch chose to jump into the world of Frank Herbert and not George Lucas. For one, Lucas has already built a universe and Lynch would have no opportunity to populate his sets with pet dogs, men with giant bushy eyebrows, or bald witches. Dune is a triumphantly singular vision full of character actors delivering their lines in wonderful ways, such as whatever form of kooky sign language that Brad Dourif is playing with. Or Patrick Stewart running into battle with a pug cradled in his arms.

The other reason though is that Lynch actually saw something in this material. His art has always been dream-like. This is a tale of a hero driven by fate into a realm of dreams made real. Lynch believes heavily in the power of transcendental meditation. So his Paul is not like the Paul of the novels, or the 2024 version, a tragic conqueror who is forced against his will to become the Great Man of History, covering himself and the universe in blood. The Lynchian Paul is the sleeper who must awaken. Leto (Jürgen Prochnow), his doomed father, has no access to the greater magics or destinies of the Spice. Yet he is the one who recognizes the value of 'becoming'. This is a full Messianic fantasy, following the power of inward transformation to achieving wisdom and peace. The Reagan-era Paul is a righteous champion of the unjust who brings rain to the desert world, yet wins his final battle by "bending like a reed in the wind".

One interesting thing that Dune '84 does is heavily use voice over. Star Wars will let a few Jedis talk to each other from across space. However, Dune makes it a part of the entire cinematic language. Almost every scene we get interior monologues in this spaced-out whispered delivery. I usually hate voice over exposition like this. Cinema as an artform does not need it, the footage and edit can better tell the story of a a character's thoughts and feelings than blunt "I feel like X". In Dune, however, it works. Because there's this entire higher universe of psychic energies and destinies that our protagonist taps into. There is a network of wills and powers at play, in every scene, whether Paul is there or not to read the character's mind. Sometimes it is just the gross Baron (Kenneth McMillan) luxuriating in his own sadism, a whole galaxy aware from our hero.

Speaking of that Baron, he is the most fun character in the movie. McMillan makes every evil act so delicious in its nastiness. But he's also the first of many terrifying sexual predators that will populate Lynch's work. Behind him is Frank Booth, Killer Bob, Bobby Peru, and whatever is happening with the Phantom in Inland Empire. (My guess is as good as your's.) Lynch never shied away from the most awful and terrible aspects of humanity, the parts society needs to ignore in order for it to continue functioning. The real horror of Twin Peaks is not demons from another dimension, it the regular American home, where so much abuse can hide behind closed doors and ignored under the rotating sound of a ceiling fan. The final shot of Lynch's career effectively is the ending of Twin Peaks: The Return with Laura Palmer screaming at her own childhood home. In some ways, it is a perfect ending to wrap up his life's works. This is what hiding the truth, sealing yourself off brings you: cruelty hidden away.

Back to Dune, there is no real plot reason why we spend so much time watching the formally-human creature called a Guild Navigator fold space. It is a wonderful sequence of miniatures and Eraserhead-like imagery of the cosmos. But all we're seeing is some faster than light speed. Villeneuve cut the Navigators out entirely of his Dune because they did not serve his ends, and maybe one more faction simply confused the plot too much. I see the Navigator folding space in 1984 as one of the most important parts of this movie. Dune is not merely a battle for a patch of sand, with an army of extras in Stillsuits fighting while a very cheesy but awesome guitar riff plays over the soundtrack. There is a mystical level of reality that we are seeing that the Harkonnans cannot imagine, that the scheming Bene Gesserit sisterhood hope to monopolize for themselves, that the Emperor is afraid of, which Paul can unlock and unleash to his followers. Sometimes this power is a miracle, the rain in the desert. Sometimes it is Paul's terrifying half-demon of a sister, Alia (Alicia Witt) spiritually overwhelming the wicked Baron and pushing him into the maw of a Sandworm.

Technically too, Dune is a great looking movie. You got Sandworms on screen, and they still awesome. There's full lavish sets, wild costuming, many many extras with blue eyes rotoscoped onto them in post-production. Though practically any movie shot on film with real objects in frame will look impressive in 2025, when the latest space opera blockbuster is Rebel Moon, tons of CG with an art design that goes out of its way to look generic. No character is unlocking deeper wisdom in that thing.

And yet, Dune (1984) as a movie, is arguably the least of what David Lynch achieved as a director. I would need many more words, more hours of study, and probably some advanced meditation techniques of my own to decipher Inland Empire. That's a masterpiece of dissociation that depicts through an impossible-to-follow narrative the horror of Hollywood's consumption of its actresses. Dune, in comparison, is just is a lot of fun. A guy has to milk a cat to get the vaccine to the poison that's killing him every day. Villeneuve would never dare shoot that. I'm not sure any filmmaker would dare shoot that in a major blockbuster in 2025.

That and more is what we lost today.

...

Anyway, I really liked Dune: Part Two. I'm looking forward to Dune 3 when Villeneuve completes his vision and adapts Herbert's second novel, Dune Messiah. I had a whole review here originally, turns out it was not all that important in comparison. I actually did not have that much to say about Dune 2 that I had not said about Dune 1 a few years ago, so... this emergency piece kinda worked out.

 I really liked Austin Butler in Dune 2, btw.