Entertainment
Review: In 'Dune: Prophecy,' women lead and vie for power
Even before Denis Villeneuve’s big-screen, two-part 2021 film introduced it to moviegoers who had missed David Lynch’s enjoyably bonkers 1984 adaptation, Frank Herbert’s “Dune” had become exploited IP.
Herbert completed six novels before his death in 1986; 17 more have been written by his son Brian and Kevin Anderson. But it was the Villeneuve film that launched the brand into the franchise-mad universe of 21st century show business, where any well-performing work of sci-fi or fantasy — and “Dune” is both — is practically required to breed a network of sequels spinoffs and merchandise (Lego Atreides Royal Ornithopter, $164.99; Funko Pop! Paul Atreides, $11.99).
If you’re not familiar with the films or the books, the new HBO series, premiering Sunday, will not do you the favor of supplying much context. It does take place 10,000 years earlier, yet in most respects, life in this far-flung network of planets seems to have changed little in 100 centuries. On either side of that temporal divide, we’re in an essentially feudal society of royal houses and hereditary emperors, clothed in the medieval trappings that have ruled science-fiction fantasy from “Flash Gordon” to “Star Wars” and beyond.
Spice, a super-duper special element that has mind-altering, mind-enhancing powers and is the key to space travel, is already the most valued substance in the universe and is at the bottom of what drives the story’s antagonisms, skulduggery and power plays. It’s “Game of Thrones,” with spaceships and sandworms.
The Sisterhood, later known as the Bene Gesserit in the “Dune” universe.
(Attila Szvacsek / HBO)
The main, and most interesting characters, not to say the star power, in this space opera are Valya Harkonnen, played by Emily Watson, and her sister Tula, played by Olivia Williams. The Harkonnens (the bad guys in “Dune,” or maybe just the worse guys) are, in this era, a disgraced house, banished to a far off, snowbound planet because great-grandpa deserted in the war against the “thinking machines.” (I do appreciate the anti-AI stance.)
In what counts as the present day — there is an earlier timeline in which young Valya is played by Jessica Barden and Tula by Emma Canning — the sisters have lifted themselves to positions of influence by way of the newish Sisterhood, later the Bene Gesserit; they’re nuns, basically, who have learned to bend minds. Such supernatural activity is accompanied by extreme close-ups of an eye, occasioning thoughts of Sauron, and sometimes an unintelligible voice that occasions thoughts of the Beastie Boys’ ”Intergalactic.”
Valya has become the Mother Superior, Tula a Reverend Mother. The two don’t agree on everything, or many things. Valya, a by-any-means-necessary, push-ahead sort, is continuing the late founder’s plan to use a “genetic archive” to implement a long-term plan to breed “better leaders” — which is to say, “leaders we can control.” (The name for this is eugenics, and it is a bad thing that imagines it’s a good one.) Tula, the more sensitive sister, reckons the human cost of their multiple machinations.
The little sisters of the Sisterhood — the novices are an appealing, heterogeneous lot when they get a little screen time — are being trained as “truthsayers,” provided to the heads of different houses to act as human lie detectors. There’s also, per the title, a prophecy, a deathbed vision by Valya’s predecessor of an apocalyptic “red dust” storm that will wipe out … something. The order, or maybe everything? Prophesies are, of course, endemic to these sorts of stories, but they are a poor basis for governance and rarely do anyone any good. Just ask Oedipus, or Macbeth.
Mark Strong plays Emperor Javicco Corrino, ruler of the “known universe,” who is busy completing the arranged marriage of his daughter, Princess Ynez (Sarah-Sofie Boussnina) to a 9-year-old princeling from another house, which will earn him a dowry of rocket ships he can use to destroy the Fremen. (Ynez is also, confusingly, going off to train with the Sisterhood.) The Fremen, whose home planet is Arrakis, where Spice is mined, bedevil the miners and the troops that protect them and, as the indigenous population battling imperial usurpers, are the faction you should root for. I can’t say whether they’ll make an actual appearance in “Prophecy” — only four episodes of six were made available to review — but they’ll still be fighting this fight 10,000 years hence, when it becomes the main business of the original “Dune,” and you can catch them there.
Emperess Natalya (Jodhi May) and Emperor Javicco Corrino (Mark Strong) in “Dune: Prophecy.”
(Attila Szvacsek / HBO)
Attaching himself to Corrino is Desmond Hart (Travis Fimmel), the sole and miraculous survivor from a campaign on Arrakis — the Iraq war of “Dune” — who has gained special powers that make him dangerous to cross, like Billy Mumy sending people to the cornfield in that “Twilight Zone” episode. He’s one of those sci-fi characters whose normal Earthman name distinguishes him as a plebe among patricians. Which does not mean he’s not a horrible, fanatical person. Other male characters include Ynez’s half-brother Constantine (Josh Heuston), with whom she does drugs on the night before her wedding; the Harkonnens’ cousin Harrow (Edward Davis), who has some whale fur he’d like to sell you; and Corrino’s “swordmaster” Keiran Atreidas (Chris Mason), who fences and flirts with Ynez. Ten thousand years later, Paul Atreides will become the messianic hero of “Dune.”
Sisterhood is powerful. In a nice change from recent Earth history, women are the series’ defining force, before and behind the camera. Diane Ademu-John developed the series; Alison Schapker is its showrunner, Anna Foerster the primary director. Its many female characters — so many, good, bad and mostly in between — not only demonstrate power, but, so you don’t miss the point, talk about it. Along with the Harkonnen sisters and their young trainees, who are not shy about expressing an opinion, there are Ynez, who is no pushover, and her mother, Empress Natalya (Jodhi May), who tells her emperor husband, “There was a time when you took my views seriously and the Imperium was stronger for it.” She seems ready to make herself heard again.
The TV series is made in the image of the Villeneuve film, with downward adjustments for budget and such. In the episodes I’ve seen, the action takes place largely indoors — it’s less “Lawrence of Arrakis” than it is, you know, a premium cable show. Like the movie, whose commercial and critical success suggests people approve, it’s pokey and self-serious and almost entirely devoid of humor. There are a few lower-depths, bar-set sequences to change the mood, and some HBO-brand sex scenes that feel imported from a different known universe altogether. But as they involve characters talking about revolution — once again, it’s the Rebels vs. the Empire — they don’t exactly lighten it.
As is the case with many films in which classically trained actors are called upon to elevate genre material, “Prophecy” comes across as simultaneously grand and silly — which, after all, didn’t stop “Star Wars” from taking over the world. (Probably, it helped.). Watson and Williams, respectively aggressive and deceptively passive, attack their roles with commitment. It isn’t Shakespeare, but they play it as if it were.
Joy, 2024.
Directed by Ben Taylor.
Starring Thomasin McKenzie, Bill Nighy, James Norton, Charlie Murphy, Rish Shah, Cecily Cleeve, Eoin Duffy, Mariam Haque, Abbiegail Mills, Olivia Sellers, Joanna Scanlan, Tanya Moodie, Ella Bruccoleri, Douggie McMeekin, Miles Jupp, Louisa Harland, and Toby Williams.
SYNOPSIS:
3 trailblazers: a young nurse, a visionary scientist, and an innovative surgeon face opposition from the church, state, media, and medical establishment in their pursuit of the world’s first ‘test tube baby,’ Louise Joy Brown.
With several competing plot threads and perspectives, Ben Taylor’s directorial debut (but not without plenty of prior experience working on television), Joy – the story of the first-ever baby birthed through IVF (in vitro fertilization) methods – overcomes such a scattershot narrative through sincerity and a pair of winning, affecting performances from a conflicted, sacrificial, and determined Thomasin McKenzie a nuanced Bill Nighy.
From a script by Jack Thorne (seemingly a screenwriting journeyman, having dabbled in television, other Netflix originals such as Enola Holmes, and other period pieces centered on life-changing accomplishments like The Aeronauts) with story contributions from Emma Gordon, Rachel Mason, and Shaun Topp, there is a case to be made that this inspirational story could have benefited from the limited series treatment given how much these filmmakers are trying to tackle.
Rather than stick to scientific research and problem-solving (while also using interactions with test subjects to break down scientific babble for the average viewer with a light and amusing touch), the film admirably cares about the life of nurse Jean Purdy (Thomasin McKenzie), her reasons for getting involved with IVF research, and how that cuts her off from a disapproving, conservative mother played by Joanna Scanlan. The film is also interested in depicting how she became close to the numerous human test subjects, bonding over their personal lives and taking the occasional field trip.
Front and center of the research is Bob Edwards (James Norton), who also becomes the public face, trying to push back against conservative media, public, and medical boards that don’t see finding a way to give infertile women a choice as important science. This typically blows up in his face, as he is unable to sway minds and earn additional funding, something that gradually begins to wear him down mentally. Meanwhile, outstanding surgeon Patrick Steptoe (Bill Nighy) is convinced to join them, also serving as a source of wisdom for Jean and Bob, each going through personal and professional strife. His incisions and various surgeries are also sensitively and educationally captured without bordering on gratuity.
There is a moment where Jean, moderately religious, also has to look inside at the other side of that choice, abortion, which her coworkers also perform and is a procedure that initially makes her uncomfortable. A large part of this is also due to her mother threatening to never talk to her again if she continues working with these “heathens,” but this mostly goes underexplored. The mother-daughter estrangement is also unconvincingly resolved, eventually playing to a sappy beat.
Similar issues persist throughout Joy, which is simply trying to broadly do too much with too many characters, meaning that plenty of it doesn’t feel as emotionally involving as it should be. There is an entire romantic subplot involving Jean and a coworker, there to convey something important about who she is, but it’s also servicing the plot without adding characterization. Some test subjects are also revealed to have some dark backstories that tie into a greater understanding of how infertility can destroy personal lives and marriages, but also frustratingly gloss over those people as characters here.
However, the decade-encompassing story (despite none of these characters actually aging) is remarkable and affecting; Joy is a slice of history one is happy to have learned more about, wrapped up in a film that might have worked better off in another format or as a documentary. Regardless, Thomasin McKenzie elevates the material, especially in some of her final scenes, as succeeding in this research is also personal to her.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews, follow my Twitter or Letterboxd, or email me at MetalGearSolid719@gmail.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=embed/playlist
(L to R) Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans in ‘Red One’. Credit: Courtesy of Prime. Copyright: © Amazon Content Services LLC.
Opening in theaters on November 15th is ‘Red One,’ directed by Jake Kasdan and starring Dwayne Johnson, Chris Evans, J.K. Simmons, Lucy Liu, Bonnie Hunt, Kiernan Shipka, Kristofer Hivju, and Nick Kroll.
Related Article: 10 Things We Learned at ‘Red One’ Press Conference with Cast and Crew
Initial Thoughts
‘Red One’. Credit: Courtesy of Prime. Copyright: © Amazon Content Services LLC.
Not to be confused with Netflix’s ‘Red Notice,’ another algorithm-induced action movie starring Dwayne Johnson and a Marvel superhero, ‘Red One’ aims to be something for everyone: it’s not just an action movie, but it’s also trying to be a fantastical Christmas story and a heartwarming family yarn. As often happens, however, the effort to please all audience quadrants results in something bland, boring, and derivative.
Directed by Jake Kasdan, who also collaborated with The Rock on the recent, overrated ‘Jumanji’ movies, ‘Red One’ does feature a cute idea at its core and a winning performance from J.K. Simmons as a very different kind of Santa Claus. But a lethargic pace, an often-murky visual palette and a ton of half-baked CG, along with less than stellar efforts from some of the cast, makes ‘Red One’ the kind of holiday present you hope they included the gift receipt for.
Story and Direction
‘Red One’. Credit: Courtesy of Prime. Copyright: © Amazon Content Services LLC.
‘Red One’ opens with a prologue in which a young boy named Jack O’Malley (Wyatt Hunt) shows his disappointed cousins where the Christmas gifts are hidden, simultaneously smashing their dreams and foreshadowing his adult career as a cynical, clandestine tracker and bounty hunter (now played by Chris Evans) who claims he can find anything. He’s also – as par for the course for this kind of thing – divorced and a largely absentee dad to his son. But Jack’s life takes an unexpected turn when he helps an anonymous client pinpoint a security breach at some kind of mysterious location near the North Pole.
That location happens to be the complex where Santa Claus (J.K. Simmons), his wife (Bonnie Hunt), and their many human and non-human employees live and work behind a security shield that might give Wakanda a run for its money. But that security is compromised thanks to Jack, and despite the best efforts of Santa’s head of security, Callum Drift (Dwayne Johnson), a quasi-military squad parachutes in and kidnaps “Nick” – as Callum calls him – whisking him into the clutches of Gryla (Kiernan Shipka), a legendary winter witch who wants to channel Santa’s magical powers to disrupt Christmas with her own nefarious plans.
That leaves it up to Drift and Zoe Harlow (Lucy Liu), head of the Mythological Oversight and Restoration Authority (M.O.R.A.), which oversees the existence of mythological creatures around the world, to forcibly recruit Jack in their efforts to reacquire Santa and keep Christmas on schedule. Along the way they’ll interact with more creatures out of legend, including Santa’s estranged brother Krampus (Kristofer Hivju), while Jack learns the value of family and Drift slowly regains the positive outlook he’s lost over the centuries as more and more humans migrate to – you guessed it – the Naughty List.
(Right) Dwayne Johnson in ‘Red One’. Credit: Courtesy of Prime. Copyright: © Amazon Content Services LLC.
On paper, this sounds like a fun, even fresh premise for a Christmas movie – all the creatures of myth and folklore are real and live in a cautious détente with humanity, while Santa himself trains for Christmas like an Olympian and covertly visits department stores in presidential-style motorcades just to reconnect with the public. Some of this material elicits a smile for sure, even as the world-building threatens to overwhelm the narrative at times.
The bigger issue is the film moves at the pace of an elf who’s had far too much spiked egg nog. It’s also tonally all over the place; one minute it’s a self-referential action movie, the next it’s a family comedy desperate to tug at the heart. Either way, none of the jokes or emotional beats land very well, and when a comic performer like Nick Kroll gets wasted in a painful cameo you know this is the cinematic equivalent to the Christmas that you really wanted that Xbox and got a sweater instead.
And it looks like hell too. Large swaths of the movie take place at night in the snow, but Kasdan makes it inexplicably murky, particularly the climactic sequences, and there’s enough bad CG to make ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’ look like ‘Dune: Part Two.’ One scene set at a beach resort can’t escape painfully looking like it was shot on a Volume stage, with the digital snowmen that launch a surprise attack in the sequence looking pasted into the action. For a movie that reportedly cost $250 million to make, ‘Red One’ doesn’t deliver on the kind of big-screen wonder necessary to make this work.
The Cast
(L to R) Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans in ‘Red One.’ Photo: Amazon MGM Studios.
If there is one thing that stands out in ‘Red One,’ it’s J.K. Simmons’ performance as Santa. Playing against the archetype – this wiry St. Nicholas lays off the holiday cookies and trains relentlessly for his ‘Mission: Impossible’-like Christmas Eve run – Simmons nevertheless generates real warmth, good will, and wisdom as the jolly old fellow. It’s a shame that he’s only active for the beginning and end of the film, as a movie built around him might have been more interesting.
As for the leads, both Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans seem to be in something of a rut lately. The Rock has lost some of the self-deprecating sense of fun that has powered some of his best performances, and takes Callum Drift – a centuries-old head of security – so seriously that he comes across as monotonous. Evans as well, seemingly intent on getting past his earnest Captain America image, plays a variation here on the kind of cynical wisenheimer he’s essayed in recent duds like ‘The Gray Man,’ although he’s also trapped by the script’s rote characterization. Other members of the cast, like Lucy Liu and an underused Bonnie Hunt, more or less understand the assignment, although Kiernan Shipka is miscast as the villain, delivering no real menace at all. Kristofer Hivju stands out under a mountain of prosthetics as Krampus, although the scene at his castle goes on way too long.
Final Thoughts
J.K. Simmons in ‘Red One’. Credit: Courtesy of Prime. Copyright: © Amazon Content Services LLC.
You can’t just manufacture a holiday classic, but that certainly isn’t stopping Jake Kasdan, Dwayne Johnson, and company from trying. But Kasdan, who brought a certain amount of surreal humor to the ‘Jumanji’ movies, can’t work any magic here. ‘Red One’ huffs and puffs so hard to be all things to all people that it just ends up playing in similar fashion to one of those Netflix pics that’s good for Sunday-afternoon-chores background noise.
Perhaps a different, less ponderous, and less digitized story starring J.K. Simmons’ Nick could have concentrated on generating some real holiday spirit, but ‘Red One’ is likely to be packed away with the rest of the Christmas trinkets in the attic once the season is over, never to be seen or heard from again.
‘Red One’ receives 4 out of 10 stars.
“The mission to save Christmas is on.”
66
2 hr 4 minNov 15th, 2024
Showtimes & Tickets
After a villain kidnaps Santa from the North Pole, an E.L.F (Extremely Large and Formidable) operative (Dwayne Johnson) must partner with the world’s most accomplished… Read the Plot
What is the plot of ‘Red One’?
A hacker (Chris Evans) is recruited by the head of Santa Claus’s security team (Dwayne Johnson) to help rescue St. Nick (J.K. Simmons) after he’s kidnapped by a witch intent on ruining Christmas for everyone.
Who is in the cast of ‘Red One’?
- Dwayne Johnson as Callum Drift
- Chris Evans as Jack O’Malley
- Lucy Liu as Zoe Harlow
- J. K. Simmons as Santa Claus
- Kiernan Shipka as Grýla
- Bonnie Hunt as Mrs. Claus
- Kristofer Hivju as Krampus
- Nick Kroll as Ted
(L to R) Dwayne Johnson, J.K. Simmons, Chris Evans and Lucy Liu in ‘Red One’. Credit: Courtesy of Prime. Copyright: © Amazon Content Services LLC.
List of Other Christmas Movies:
Buy Tickets: ‘Red One’ Movie Showtimes
Buy Dwayne Johnson Movies On Amazon
Buy Chris Evans Movies On Amazon
Entertainment
Sabrina Carpenter brings 'Short n' Sweet' — and special guest Christina Aguilera — to Crypto.com Arena
In late 2022, Sabrina Carpenter was a hard-working Disney Channel journeyman just getting out from beneath the pop-culture ignominy of having been cast as the bad-guy “blond girl” in Olivia Rodrigo’s instant smash of a Gen Z heartbreak ballad, “Drivers License.”
Two years later, Carpenter arrived at Crypto.com Arena on Friday night with one of 2024’s biggest albums (the chart-topping “Short n’ Sweet”), two of its biggest singles (the perky “Espresso” and the quirky “Please Please Please”) and half a dozen fresh Grammy nominations, including nods for album, record and song of the year as well as best new artist.
If you were tempted to say that Carpenter was on top of the world, you needn’t have bothered: Set in an imagined Midcentury bachelorette pad high above a city — a penthouse on the 69th floor, she told us with a wink — Friday’s fun and frisky concert made the point on its own.
As with this year’s other long-toiling pop breakouts, Chappell Roan and Charli XCX, part of what finally brought 25-year-old Carpenter to stardom was a sense of play and pageantry that’s clearly connected with audiences after a lengthy period defined by the gloomier likes of Lorde and Billie Eilish. “Short n’ Sweet” is brimming with hooks and jokes and vocal exaggerations; this show, the first of three sold-out dates in Los Angeles to wrap Carpenter’s North American tour, left virtually no surface un-bedazzled.
There were costume changes, each get-up sparklier than the last, and there was a troupe of male and female dancers executing athletic choreography. About halfway through the 90-minute gig, Christina Aguilera — one of several earlier icons in pop’s blond-bombshell lineage — appeared onstage without warning for flamboyant renditions of her late-’90s/early-’00s hits “Ain’t No Other Man” and “What a Girl Wants.”
“So, that just happened,” Carpenter said with mock (or perhaps genuine) disbelief after Aguilera’s exit. “And somehow the show continues.”
Yet for all the glitz and throwback glamour in Carpenter’s presentation, there’s a modern edge to her music — an emotional honesty and an unabashed interest in sex — that helps explain her success in an era of social-media oversharing.
As a songwriter, she delights in saying the quiet part out loud, as in “Lie to Girls” — crummy men shouldn’t bother, she sings, because “if they like you, they’ll just lie to themselves” — and “Juno,” an extended bedroom fantasy that climaxes with what might be the year’s most candid lyric: “I’m so f—ing horny!”
At Crypto, that line went off like a battle cry in a crowd filled with girls and young women: a nightmare, no doubt, to some of the parents in the house but certainly not to the fans who value the rawness of Carpenter’s confessions. Indeed, one of her skills is subverting the very razzle-dazzle on which her show is built: For “Sharpest Tool,” a finely detailed acoustic number about a failing relationship, she dashed into the penthouse’s bathroom (as someone might during a party they regretted coming to) and sang while perched on a toilet, of all things; she did her next song, “Opposite,” as she stared into a prop mirror that fed an uncomfortably intimate close-up to the giant video screens flanking the stage.
Toward the end of the show, she performed “Please Please Please,” which is about a celebrity begging her boyfriend not to embarrass her in public, before closing with “Espresso,” which is about how embarrassing it is to be wanted in the first place.
“I can’t relate to desperation,” she sang — a lie, of course, but a perfect rhyme for “My give-a-f—s are on vacation.”
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