QUICKIE REVIEW: “Dune” (2021)

For years, Frank Herbert’s Dune has been considered unfilmable. And having seen Denis Villeneuve’s new adaptation, maybe the problem with all of the other Dune adaptations really is the source material itself. Dune: Part One, as the movie repeatedly calls itself, adapts roughly the first half of Herbert’s novel. And it shows. For most of its runtime, Dune feels less like a movie and more like a two-and-a-half-hour trailer for a different movie. And instead of reaching any kind of climax, the film just ends. Like it’s an episode of an ongoing serialized TV show, coming to a sudden cliffhanger to entice you to tune in the following week.

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REVIEW: Blade Runner 2049 (Spoiler free)

mv5bnza1njg4nzyxov5bml5banbnxkftztgwodk5nju3mzi-_v1_sy1000_cr006741000_al_It’s certainly a Blade Runner film. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say it’s even better than the first. May the internet mob spare my life. Directed by Denis Villeneuve and written by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green, Blade Runner 2049 picks up thirty years after the first film. In those thirty years, the original Nexus brand of Replicants rebelled and a caused a massive blackout that led to the prohibition of al Replicants and the bankruptcy of the Tyrell Corporation. In swept Niander Wallace (Jared Leto), purchasing the remains of the Tyrell Corporation. Wallace invented a new line of Replicants, ensuring they would always obey their masters. Eventually, he got the prohibition lifted and things returned to the way they were. As Blade Runner: 2049 opens, Officer K (Ryan Gosling), a Blade Runner (who is also a Replicant) is on a mission to retire a rogue Replicant, Sapper Morton (Dave Bautista), and uncovers evidence of a conspiracy that stretches all the way back to the events of the first film and its titular Blade Runner, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford). (Very mild spoilers may follow)  Continue reading