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Denis Villeneuve (Canada, 1967) debuted with
Un 32 Aout sur Terre/ August 32nd on Earth (1998).
Maelstrom (2000)
Polytechnique (2009)
Incendies (2010) is an adaptation of
Wajdi Mouawad's famous play "Incendies/ Scorched" (2003).
The real protagonist is the child of the first scene, but we find out only
at the end.
The credit for the harrowing story goes entirely to Mouawad. Villeneuve
simply transfers the play from the stage to a real place.
Villeneuve is able to create a less philosophical but more harrowing drama,
with many memorable scenes.
The film opens in an orphanage that has been occupied by a militia.
A child's head is being shaved, and the child stares straight into the camera.
The country is not named but later we'll recognize Lebanon during the civil war
of the 1980s between Muslims and Christians.
The film then fast forwards to Canada, to the office of a lawyer who pulls out the file of
a woman named Nawal. She was his secretary and a good friend.
His reads Nawal's will to her children, the twins Jeanne
and Simon. She wants a very unusual, anonymous burial until the children
will have accomplished two missions: Jeanne has to find their father and deliver
an envelope to him, and Simon has to find their brother and deliver a second
envelope to him. The children are shocked to hear of such a last will because
their father is dead and they have no brother.
There is a third envelope, to be opened only when the children would have
accomplished their mission.
Jeanne is a mathematician and immediately sets out to carry out her mission.
Jeanne was with her mother in a swimming pool when her mother suddenly became
catatonic.
Simon, instead, is upset by the whole story.
The film flashes back to the young Nawal in a Christian village of Lebanon.
Nawal is trying to run away with a handsome Palestinian refugees but her
brothers stop them, kill her boyfriend Wahab and almost kill her too for
dishonoring the family. She is saved by her granma. Nawal confesses to granma
that she is pregnant. Nawal has the baby and the granma tattoos a mark of three dots on the heel of the baby so that Nawal will be able to recognize him years later.
Her granma arranges to have Nawal move to the city with her uncle's family and go to school, while the child is taken to a orphanage.
Jeanne flies to Lebanon and begins her search at the university where her
mother studied. Jeanne has an old picture of her mother but nobody recognizes her. However, someone recognizes the place where the picture was taken: an infamous prison used by the right-wing Christian militia.
We return to Nawal when she was young and living with her uncle's family.
One day the soldiers took over the university campus and tanks enter the city.
Nawal's uncle decides that the whole family should move to the mountains but
Nawal runs away, determined to find her child.
She travels alone through dangerous military areas looking for the orphanages
where her child may have been. She only finds ruins: the Muslim militias
overran all those towns. She risks her life on
a bus full of Muslims that is attacked by a Christian militia. All the passengers are shot
dead and then the bus is set on fire. She is spared because she proves that
she is a Christian. She tries in vain to save a little girl pretending that
she is her daughter: the girl runs back towards the bus and is shot by a soldier.
Nawal memorizes the face of the leader of the militia, a face that the soldiers
wear on their shirt.
Jeanne reaches her mother's village but there nobody wants to talk to the
child of Nawal, the dishonored woman.
Nawal keeps traveling alone through the war zone. After witnessing a massacre of refugees, she decides to join the refugee militia. She finds a job as a tutor
of the little son of the leader of the right-wing militia. She behaves like
a trusted employee but one day she receives a phone call ordering her to
carry out her mission, and she coldly kills the man. She is imprisoned in
the infamous prison and thrown in a tiny cell.
Jeanne reaches the prison, now closed, and meets with the guard who watched
Nawal for 13 years, not a school janitor. This guard tells Jeanne that Nawal was known as "The Woman Who Sings" because she was singing all the time. She refused to confess.
Eventually they assigned her case to Abou, a young man who specialized in
torture. Abou raped her repeatedly until she got pregnant.
(Jeanne assumes that this is their lost brother).
The former guard knows that Nawal was released after she gave birth and
remembers the name of the nurse who helped Nawal.
We now see Nawal in jail. She could hear the screams of tortured women.
Back in Canada, Simon is getting worried about his sister and asks the
lawyer how to find her. The lawyer arranges for both of them to travel to
Lebanon and join Jeanne.
Now the film shows us what happened after Nawal was taken at the hospital
catatonic. She whispered something to the lawyer. And then we see him preparing the three envelopes
We see Nawal pregnant in the prison and then giving birth to... two children!
Someone is ordered to throw the babies in the river but the nurse asks to have
them and raises them until Nawal is released.
Simon and the lawyer arrive in Lebanon just when Jeanne is about to meet with
the nurse. The nurse is happy to see them and that's when they learn that they
are the children of the rape and that their
original names were Sarwan and Jarwan.
Jeanne and Simon now know that their father is the torturer Abou, and their
lost brother is the one Nawal had from her boyfriend, the one lost in the
orphanages.
The lawyer hires a local lawyer who tracks down the child: his name was
Nihad. His orphanage was occupied by the troops of a Muslim warlord, Wallat.
They send Simon to the refugee camp to spread the word that Simon is the son
of the "Woman who Sings". Sure enough the warlord asks to see him.
We now see Nawal released from prison and someone tells her that she has to keep the children she had from Abou and move to Canada, where she will have a new life. She is initially reluctant to raise the children. On the other hand, she never stops thinking of the child she had from her lover.
In the present, Simon meets with Wallat the warlord who admits that he took
Nihad at his service. Nihad became a feared sniper. Nihad wanted to find his
mother and was capture by the Christian militia which turned him into a
ferocious torturer and renamed him... Abou!
Abou now lives in Canada as Nihad.
Now we see again the scene of Nawal's stroke at the pool. She was swimming
when she noticed a man with the three-dot tattoo on the heel. She got out
of the water to look at him and she recognized... Abou. That was the shocked
that killed her: to finally find her son, the son she had looked for so desperately, but only to realize that her son was the
man who tortured and raped her, the father of her children.
Jeanne and Simon are devastated by the discovery. They return to Canada and,
with help from the lawyer, track down Nihad. They finally deliver the two
envelopes to Nihad: one letter to their father and one letter to their brother.
Until the end, Nawal loved Nihad as the offspring of love, no matter how much
she hated Nihad as the rapist.
Now Nihad learns that he raped his own mother.
The lawyer can now deliver the third envelope to Jeanne and Simon,
and her mother can get a proper burial in a cemetery. In the last scene we
see Nihad visiting the tomb of his mother.
The thriller Prisoners (2013), scripted by Aaron Gruzikowski and
photographed by Roger Deakins, is, on the surface, more
Agatha Christie (a simple "whodunit") than Alfred Hitchcock
(yet another variant of the Psycho archetype).
The plot is an impeccable puzzle.
Behind the surface,
however, it is also a morality play with two protagonists: an imperfect
detective who is basically a social outcast and an atheist,
but is also a real hero, and
a God-fearing citizen with a stereotypical family and a impeccable social
ca father-son deer-hunting tripredentials who, instead, is actually an amoral sadist.
The latter is introduced from the beginning as a somewhat despicable human being
(who teaches his son to kill innocent animals) and a paranoid
millennial survivalist
(he has stocked
the basement in the event of a natural or man-made catastrophe).
The real killer is a mere footnote, that only takes over towards the
end (and the ending is one of the least interesting parts of the film).
Human depravity disguised as high moral ground.
Religion is everywhere and sometimes it feels like Villeneuve is mocking it.
The film can be read as a religious allegory, or as a satire of religion.
Whatever it is, it is shot with the austere tone of a theological study.
The Freudian subconscious is also pervasive, although treated in a manner
that is not very plausible.
Late autumn landscape. A father and a son,
carpenter Keller and his teenage boy,
are hunting in the woods.
He teaches the kid how to kill an animal.
Back home, in the
casual suburban atmosphere of a safe quiet neighborhood,
Keller and his wife Grace have a holiday dinner with two other couples.
Their child Anna plays with Joy, the child of their friends
Franklin and Nancy, an African-American couple.
They are found climbing a camper
parked in front of a vacant house down the road.
We learn that Keller's basement is stocked with emergency food for any
emergency.
Then suddenly the couples realize that the two children have disappeared.
A detective, who is celebrating the holiday alone in a diner, is alerted that
children have been kidnapped. The police quickly tracks down the only suspect:
the driver of the camper. He has parked it in a visible place, obviously not
trying to hide. When the cops arrive, the camper tries to run away but
an inept manouvre sends it crashing against a tree. The detective arrests
the driver, Alex, who turns out to be mentally disabled.
There are no clues in the camper and Alex is incapable of answering simple
questions. Keller is angry at the detective for not being able to extort more
information from Alex.
Since Alex does not seem capable of a kidnap, the detective checks out other
possibilities. He finds an old priest drunk and in the basement of the house
he finds a rotting corpse with a maze medallion. The priest protests that the
man had confessed in church to kidnapping 16 children and murdering most of them
because he was "waging a war against God", and was planning to kill again.
The police release Alex, who walks out escorted by his aunt Holly and
surrounded by journalists. Keller, alerted by his wife, is there to confront
the suspect. As Keller throws Alex to the floor, Alex whispers to him
"They didn't cry until I left them" but no one else can hear him.
It is Keller's word against Alex's denial. Could Alex be faking his mental
state?
Keller is more sure than ever that Alex is the kidnapper and decides to
take justice into his hands.
He gets in the car. He has a plan. The radio is broadcasting a preacher's
sermon.
Keller kidnaps Alex and takes him to an abandoned building outside town
and begins to torture him. He shares the secret with
the African-American father, Franklin, who is much less comfortable with
torturing a human being. Keller insists that Alex should be treated like
an animal for what he has done to their daughters.
The aunt calls the detective, convinced that Alex has been kidnapped by
the same kidnapper who took the children.
She too lost her child, many years earlier.
Keller keeps torturing Alex who doesn't say a word.
The detective keeps interrogating the priest, another suspect, but the priest
keeps repeating the same implausible story of the confession.
During a candlelight vigil for the girls the detective walks among the crowd
and notices a strange man who flees him frantically.
The following day Franklin hears on tv the story of this new suspect and
begins to doubt Keller's theory.
A clerk at a department store recognizes the sketch of the suspect and calls
the detective. It turns out that the nameless suspect frequently
buys kids' clothes in different sizes. The detective asks the clerk to phone
him immediately should the suspect come back.
Franklin tells his wife what Keller has been doing to Alex.
His wife demands to see Alex in the abandoned
bulding and finds him in a pool of blood, disfigured beyond recognition.
She cries and begs him, but she is talking to a piece of flesh who
doesn't react anymore.
Then suddenly Alex tries to escape but only to end up even more injured.
Franklin and his wife are horrified by Keller's manic determination: he has
now built a Nazi-style torture chamber. Keller does not listen to their
doubts, calling them weak.
The suspect, whose face we don't see because he wears a hood, breaks into
both houses. The second time, in
the white folks' house, Keller's wife hears him, and he barely escapes
through the bedroom window, but she has become neurotic and neither her
teenage son nor the detective pay attention to her story.
She shows the detective to the basement, and he sees how full of goods it is.
What does intrigue the detective is that
the husband, Keller, has been going out for days, officially searching for
Anna.
The following morning the detective waits patiently and follows Keller
to the abandoned building, but Keller sees him and makes a scene.
Keller continues to torture Alex. When Keller has doubts, he prays to God
to find the strength to continue his sadistic torture.
The detective is downstairs, having guessed where Keller spends his days.
Keller lies down next to a bottle pretending to have slept drunk there so that
his wife would not see him drink.
When the detective is about to discover the hidden torture chamber, he receives
a call from the store clerk who has just seen the suspect in the store, buying
children's clothes as usual.
The detective rushes to arrest the young man, Bob.
Again, no traces of the missing children and no clues.
It looks like the young man lives alone in a big house.
The walls of the entire house are covered in diagrams of mazes.
There's a room full of trunks that look like graves.
The detective opens one and finds snakes inside.
He keeps frantically opening trunks while the snakes escape and crawl
around the house.
One trunk contains a book full of diagrams of mazes.
He also finds children's clothing drenched in blood.
The parents identify the clothes as belonging to their daughters.
Now Keller knows for a fact that he has been torturing an innocent.
Keller starts crying and we don't know whether he is crying for his daughter
or for what he himself has done to Alex.
Meanwhile the detective is watching Bob, obviously another mentally disabled
man, drawing a maze for hours. The detective loses his temper, Bob manages
to grab a gun and shoots himself in the mouth in front of him.
If he is the kidnapper, he can no longer tell where the bodies of the children
are.
Even knowing that Alex is innocent, Keller continues to torture him imprisoned
in the dark torture chamber. Suddenly, Alex starts talking about a maze.
On a hunch, Keller visits Alex's aunt.
Keller learns that Alex was traumatized by an accident involving snakes.
She says that her son died of cancer.
Another turn of events reopens the case: the forensic lab concludes that the
blood on the children's clothes is pig's blood.
It turns out that Bob was suffering of his own childhood trauma: he had been
kidnapped himself as a child and was spending his life reenacting the crime,
fascinated by real-world cases of child kidnappings.
The detective cannot explain how he got hold of the children's clothes until
he remembers Anna's mother reporting a break-in. All it takes is a few minutes
under the bedroom's window to realize that she had told the truth:
Bob stole Anna's clothes when he broke into the home.
Finally, out of the blue, Joy reappers, traumatized but alive, and is
hospitalized. Keller and his wife rush to the hospital.
Joy is under drugs and can barely move her head. We see flashes of the memories
that crowd her mind. She only mumbles something that implies Keller she saw
him where she was kept prisoner.
The detective arrives just when Keller runs out of the hospital, jumps in his
truck and starts driving away like a maniac.
Keller, looking for Keller, heads for the abandoned building and hears Alex scream.
Keller, instead, has gone to Alex's house, suspecting that Joy saw him there
when Keller came to talk to the aunt, in which case that's
where Anna still is.
The aunt lets him in but then points a gun at him. She forces him
to handcuff himself and drink alcohol.
As she escorts him to his truck, she rambles on that she and her husband
had waged a war on God for taking their child's life, and that war consists
in kidnapping other people's children. Two of those are Alex and Bob. Others
were murdered. She makes him open a trap door in her backyard. There's a
well-disguised pit underneath. She shoots him in the foot and pushes him down.
She promises to dump his daughter's body there.
She then drives Keller's truck away so that it can never be found.
Most likely, Alex knows where the children are, but didn't say it in order
to protect an "aunt" whom he loves, she being the woman who raised him.
At the same time Alex realized the pain of Anna's father and therefore whispered
"They didn't cry until I left them" not to admit guilt but simply to reassure
an anguished father about the conditions of his daughter.
Meanwhile, the detective has found Alex and now he heads for his house
to notify his aunt. She is nowhere to be seen.
The detective walks in and notices
the photo of her husband that she had shown him the first time,
but this time he pays attention to it:
he was wearing the same maze medallion of the body found in the priest's basement,
the same maze that Bob kept drawing over and over again.
The detective connects the priest's story, Bob's living nightmare and the
children's disappearance.
In one of the rooms the evil aunt is injecting poison into Anna's arm who
lies unconscious on the floor. She pulls the gun, he shoots her dead, she
wounds him. Wounded, he drives at very high speed back to town to save
Anna's life. When he hits town, he has to zigzag through heavy traffic to
reach the hospital, while bleeding copiously from the head.
He manages to get to the hospital in time.
The detective himself is at the hospital, being treated for his wound.
The detective reads in the newspaper that Alex has been reunited with
his biological parents, after 26 years. The newspaper also mentions that
Keller is still missing. His wife thinks that Keller just left her.
The police is actually digging in the backyard of the mad woman but work
proceeds slowsly because the ground is now frozen after the winter storm.
When the crew leaves, the detective wanders around alone.
Down in the pit Keller has found his daughter's whistle and keeps blowing it.
The detective, alone at the site, finally hears its faint sound...
Enemy (2013),
based on Jose Scaramago's novel "The Double",
is a Kafka-esque tale that lacks an ending, a thriller
that doesn't reveal the assassin, a doppelganger mystery that can only
explained as a surrealistic hallucination. Most likely, the two men are the same
men, just different personalities of him, and he kills one and his lover
to stay with his wife, but then he is tempted by lust again and his wife
explodes in his mind.
Most likely, however, Villeneuve just didn't know how to end the film.
In the first scene we see the protagonist and a tall man walk down a
corridor in a basement and use a key to enter a room where a zombie-like
audience is silently watching as a naked woman performs an erotic ritual with a
tarantula, and she appears ready to kill it.
Then the film moves on to show a man, played by the same actor, who is teaching
history in an auditorium to a group of students, talking about dictatorships.
His name is Adam.
At home he has sex with his girlfriend Mary, but rather mechanically.
Then we see him again in the auditorium reciting the same lecture, and then
again at home having sex with Mary, who seem rather unsatisfied.
A colleague recommends a a film titled "Where There's a Will There's a Way" and,
after watching it, he realizes that one of the minor actors looks exactly
like him. He searches the Internet for information about this actor, who goes
by two names, Daniel and Anthony.
Adam finds out the address of Anthony's talent agency and visits it.
The security guard recognizes him as Anthony and hands him an envelop.
Adam finds out Anthony's phone number and
calls it: Anthony's wife Helen picks up the phone and thinks that Anthony
is calling because she hears Anthony's voice. Adam, terrified, hangs up.
Adam then calls again and this time finds Anthony, whose voice is identical.
Adam tells Anthony that they are identical.
Anthony initially dismisses him as a crazy stalker,
but then Anthony (played by the
same actor who plays Adam) goes on the Internet
and searches for information about this Adam, while Helen is disturbed and
thinks that Anthony is having a relationship with his old lover.
Helen is six-months pregnant. Helen finds out where Adam works and waits for
him outside. Adam only sees a woman sitting on the bench next to his and
says a few words to a stranger. Helen is shocked because she recognizes
her husband Anthony in Adam. She calls Anthony as we see Adam walking away
and Anthony picks up the phone. She hangs up. Back home she tells him that
he and Adam look identical and seems to imply that they "are" the same person.
Anthony calls Adam back and invites him to a meeting at a distant hotel.
When the two meet, they realize that they have identical bodies: even a scar
on the chest.
It is Adam who panics and runs away. Anthony chases him on his motorcycle.
When Anthony gets home, Helen does not believe him.
Now it's Anthony who stalks Adam. Anthony follows Adam's girlfriend Mary and
comes up with an evil plan to seduce her. Meanwhile, Adam talks to his mother
who dismisses the possibility that there was a twin.
Anthony visits Adam and accuses him of having slept with his wife. Anthony
demands the right to spend a night with Adam's girlfriend to get even.
Adam accepts. Anthony wears Adam's clothes and takes off with Mary in Adam's
car. Adam wanders to Anthony's apartment. The security guard recognizes him
as Anthony and escorts him to his apartment, which Adam doesn't recognize.
While they are walking, the security guard tells him that he wants to go back
to the erotic show, and we realize this is the tall man who was with
Anthony in the first scene, where we were led to believe that it was Adam, not
Anthony. Helen is not home. Adam changes into Anthony's clothes and waits.
When she arrives, he is shy while she is tender and kind and eventually seduces him.
Helen notices that he has no wedding ring on his finger but still has sex
with him. Meanwhile, while they are having wild sex, Mary realizes that the man she is sleeping with has the
marks of a wedding ring and therefore cannot be her Adam. She screams and
demands to be taken home. On the way home Anthony loses his temper and then
loses control of the car: the accident kills them both. Meanwhile, Adam at
Anthony's home opens the letter that is addressed to Anthony and finds a key
inside, presumably the key to the erotic club. He walks into the bedroom to tell Helen that he will go out that night
but finds a giant tarantula.
Sicario (2015), scripted by Taylor Sheridan, is an action movie that tries to deal with the moral
ambiguity of moral forces that use amoral methods to fight against amoral forces.
Kate, divorced and childless, who has just witnessed extreme cruelty in a
place where a mass murder has been committed,
is chosen by an interagency team for a special mission to find a dangerous
Mexican druglord under the leadership of an undercover CIA agent.
From the beginning she realizes that rules will be bent.
They cross the border and, after killing suspects in a car, they kidnap a
Mexican citizen, bring him back to the USA and torture him to find out the
hideout of his brother, the right-arm man of the druglord.
A sinister former Mexican prosecutor, Alejandro, works with them.
Kate is repeatedly told that she just has to watch and learn.
She doesn't understand why she was picked for the mission.
Alejandro clearly has a mission. A colleague sympathyzes
with him for what happened to his family.
They interrogate migrants and find the location of the tunnel used by
the cartel. Kate is told that the plan is to force Manuel, the kingpin's right-arm man, to flee to Mexico, leading them to the druglord.
The druglord is the man who terrorizes Mexican towns.
Kate mades friend with a redneck cop in a saloon but just before having sex
with him she realizes that he is on the druglord's payroll. She fights him
and he almost kills her before Alejandro arrives to arrest him.
Tortured, the corrupt cop reveals the names of other corrupt cops.
The team learns that Manuel is going back to Mexico. They get ready for action.
Kate finds out that she has just been used for procedural reasons, she was
just an accessory to make the whole operation legal. Now she is not needed
anymore, but she insists in continuing the mission.
The team enters the tunnel and kills gangsters in Mexican territory.
Kate tries to stop Alejandro from kidnapping a Mexican officer who works
for the druglord,
but he shoots her in the bulletproof vest and warns her never to point a gun at him again. She is informed that
Alejandro is trying to help a cartel win the civil war
for the purpose of restoring some peace in the region.
In fact, he would work with just about anybody to accomplish his mission: find
and kill the druglord, who killed his wife and his daughter.
Alejandro forces the cop to stop Manuel's car. Manuel
is surprised because all the cops respect him.
Alejandro kills the cop and forces Manuel to drive him to the
druglord's villa.
Alejandro shoots his way into the majestic dining room where the man is having dinner with
his wife and his two sons. Alejandro kills the entire family.
Later he visits Kate and asks her to sign a document certifying that the operations followed the rules.
She initially refuses and he threatens to leave her unprotected in a town
where she would probably be killed.
She tries to stop him with a gun but then breaks down in tears.
Boys are playing soccer, including the son of the cop killed by Alejandro.
They stop briefly when they hear machine gun noise.
Then they resume the game: someone else has just been killed.
Arrival (2016), based on Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" (2000)
is a lightweight sci-fi movie sabotaged by old-fashioned (and a bit ridiculous) patriotic tones and Cold War psychosis (China and Russia are evil and the USA is the good one who saves the world).
The plot is often implausible (she shows the aliens a sign "human" written in English and of course the scientists decipher the alien language in just a few days).
The supposedly moral message has been used before in Peggy Sue Got Married: the protagonist accepts her future despite knowing how she will suffer.
A mother reminisces about playing with her little girl and interacting with her teenager while mourning her in amorgue.
The day they arrived. She teaches laguages to an empty auditorium, mst students
are missing. A student alerts her that something is happening outside.
A UFO just landed, and many more are landing worldwide.
She sees warplanes flashing through the sky.
She lives alone in a beautiful house.
State of emergency is declared by the government.
Government agents show up to recruit her to translate the feeble sounds that
the aliens made in response of English questions.
She tells them that it's impossible to translate the sounds from the tape.
That night a helicopter comes to pick her up. A fellow linguist, Ian, is already on
board.
The military wants to now: where did they come from? and how did they get to Earth?
The helicopter drops them in a vast green meadow in the middle of which a giant egg towers.
Six people are lifted into the egg, where gravity and air are different because
the aliens clearly are trying to recreate the conditions of their earth.
Dark tentacular beings advance towards them and stop behind a glass wall.
Back into the military base, she listens to a lot of sounds made by the aliens.
She shows them a sign "human". They respond with a visual language of smoke signs that emanate from their tentacles.
She removes all protective layers to expose her gestures and facial expressions
to the giant squids. Now the squids seem to understand what she is saying to
them.
As she is studying pictures of the smoke signals she remembers something that her child did.
Meanwhile, the first pictures of the aliens go viral and cause riots.
She is still haunted by memories of her daughter.
A Chinese general is carrying out his own investigation. China mobilizes its
army and Russia follows up.
A message that both Louise and the Chinese decipher as "use weapons" causes
extreme alarm around the world.
Louise returns to speak to the aliens but the aliens produce a cloud of black
ink over the glass wall and eject them. The reason is that some rogue soldiers
decided to attack the spaceship.
China declares war on the aliens and delivers an ultimatum to leave Chinese
territory. Other countries are inclined to follow China's lead.
Louise realizes that the aliens have given information to each of the 12 countries where they landed. She wants the countries to collaborate, but instead
they are determined to keep their secrets from the others.
The aliens lift Louise to the spaceship and have a more intimate conversation
during which they explain that they help humanity because
3000 years later they will need humanity's help.
The aliens tell Louise to use her weapon: she can see her future.
She keeps seeing memories of her daughter, of when she told her of the
unstoppable rare disease and that her father couldn't live with that notion and
left them.
(But now we start suspecting that she is seeing the future because that daughter
has never been mentioned in her conversations and she told Ian that she is single).
The military base is being evacuated because they fear retaliation from the
spaceship for China's and Russia's attacks on the other alien spaceships.
Suddenly Louise realizes that she can read the alien language easily,
and she sees herself publishing a book on it and teaching about it at
the university.
Their gift is a "weapon" to see time the way they see it: time is not linear for them.
The military are packing in a hurry but she has a vision of the future,
18 months later, a reception in which she meets Chinese general who
thanks her for phoning him and averting the catastrophe.
She runs back into the barracks and grabs the commander's phone to make
that phone call.
The general in the future whispers to her his wife's dying words, and she
says them in the phone to the general. That is enough to stop the Chinese
general from starting the war. By seeing the future, she has created it.
Ian has risked his life to hold back the soldiers who wanted her to drop the phone.
The spaceships dissolve in the clouds.
She was actually seeing the future when she was seeing her daughter, and,
knowing that it will end with the unstoppable disease and her daughter's
death, she still embraced it: she married Ian and had the child with him.
Blade Runner 2049 (2017) is a sequel to Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982).
Dune (2021) is a large-scale adaptation of
Frank Herbert's sci-fi novel (1965), the second major adaptation after
David Lynch's Dune (1984).
The huge amount of pomp cannot disguise
the confused plot, the poor acting, the casual heap of Hollywood stereotypes, the cheap visual tricks,
and, in general, the spectacular lack of imagination.
Rarely have battles felt so boring.
Rarely have dialogues triggered so many yawns.
Rarely have actions contained so little suspense.
Many scenes are slow to the point that one would be better served by playing the movie in fast-forward mode.
The film is set in the year 10191 (although clothes, technology and furniture don't seem too different from the ones of 2021).
The emperor orders
Duke Leto, of the aristocratic house called Atreides that rules the planet Caladan, to take possession of desert planet Arrakis, valuable for its consciousness-expanding spice, so far ruled by the Harkonnens and largely under the control
of blue-eyed desert fighters called Fremen.
Leto has a son, Paul, whose mother is concubine Jessica,
and Paul can't wait to join the military action for which he has been trained by a master.
Paul begs Duncan to take him to Arrakis.
Paul has a dream in which he sees a Fremen girl and he sees Duncan dead on Arrakis.
Behind the scenes, the emperor is plotting with the Harkonnens to destroy the Atreides.
Jessica is an acolyte of the sisterhood order Bene Gesserit. The mother superior of the order, Mohiam, reproaches Jessica for having a son instead of a daughter, defying the tradition.
That ruined some kind of divine plan leading to the coming of a messiah called
Kwisatz Haderach, popularly known as "The One".
The mother superior also tests Paul's ability to sustain pain, which is some kind of test to asses his visions.
Mohiam then visits the Harkonnen chief, Vladimir, and orders him to spare Jessica and Paul when he attacks the Arrakis.
Leto, Paul and Jessica land on Arrakis, where Duncan is already settled and
has learned of the Fremen's defenses.
Leto meets with Fremen's chief Stilgar who warns him to stay out of the desert.
Leto and Paul are taken by imperial ecologist Liet, a Fremen, on a tour of the planet
to see where the spice is mined. They learn about the giant sandworms and sure
enough they see one attacking a spice harvester and they risk their lives to
save its crew. During the rescue Paul is paralyzed by fear and almost dies.
Later Paul tells his mother that he had the vision of a Fremen kissing him and
then killing him.
Paul also knows that she (Jessica) is pregnant.
Yueh, a Chinese doctor working for Leto, betrays Leto and helps
Harkonnen and imperial troops to destroy the Atreides army, but Yueh tells
Leto that he did it only to save his wife, which the Harkonnen chief holds hostage, and equips Leto with a tooth that can emit a lethal gas.
Vladimir keeps the promise made to Mohiam and doesn't kill Paul and Jessica,
but he orders them dropped deep into the desert where nobody can survive.
He then kills traitor Yueh implying that Yueh's wife has already been killed.
Leto, however, opens his mouth and releases the gas that kills some of
Vladimir's officials but not Vladimir himself, and Leto himself dies.
Duncan escapes.
Jessica and Paul, who got ride of their escort using mind powers, can see the explosions from faraway as the Harkonnen seize the fort.
Somehow traitor Yueh arranged for a tent that keeps Paul and Jessica alive in
the desert.
Later, they are rescued by Duncan and Liet. It is clear that the emperor wanted
to kill all Atreides, and sending them to Arrakis was a trap, and Liet works for the emperor, but now she tries to save Paul's life.
Paul has a vision of a holy war waged in his name.
Duncan sacrifices his life to protect Jessica, Paul and Liet as they head for
Fremen land.
Liet herself loses her life in the attempt to protect Jessica and Paul,
and a sandworm sucks her killers.
Vladimir's nephew Rabban
Stilgar saves Paul and Jessica from a sandworm,
and Paul meets the woman of his visions, Chani,
but Paul is also challenged to a deadly duel by one of the Fremen, Jamis.
Jessica tells Chani that Paul never killed a man. Paul wins and kills Jamis.
Paul is accepted by the Fremen and follows them to their hideouts.
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