Hello folks, and welcome on back to Wrong Every Time. We’re now roughly halfway through the winter season, and I’m happy to report that I’ve actually been catching up on BanG Dream! Ave Mujica, having screened and written up its first four episodes over the last week or so. It’s certainly more of a fantastical melodrama than MyGO, but still exceedingly entertaining in its own way, pitting girls who need even more emotional guidance than Tomori or Soyo against bandmates who give even fewer shits than Anon or Raana. The results are as disastrous as you might expect, leaving me with a disorienting psychological crime scene to sort through. I’ve also of course made time for a scattering of variable film screenings, ranging from recent blockbusters to delightful mid-century adventures. Let’s break ‘em down!
We began this week by concluding Dennis Villenueve’s take on Frank Herbert’s classic with Dune: Part Two. Driven far into the desert by the duplicitous Harkonnens, Paul Atreides (Timothy Chalamet) rallies the Fremen who make this place their home, mixing tactical brilliance with Bene Gesserit-implanted prophecy to position himself as their long-awaited savior. Eventually, Paul will have to make a choice that will affect billions, as he stands athwart a turning point of history.
It’s little surprise to me that Dune has had such a troubled path to film adaptation, and that Lynch’s prior take on the book is considered more “interesting artifact” than definitive take. Dune simply does not lend itself to theatrical spectacle; in spite of that central, iconic image of the massive sand worm, it is otherwise a work of interiority and prophecy, with little (particular in its second half) to qualify as “active,” cinema-ready drama. Herbert set out to write a story about the tragedy of messianic worship, and to his credit, Dune’s last act rings with the same sense of impersonal inevitability as Moses’ return to Egypt, with the boy Paul lost behind the inexorable steps of the Kwisatz Haderach.
Given this deliberate eschewing of propulsive, high-stakes mechanical drama, I would say Villenueve did a phenomenal job of creating a film that more or less feels like an actual story. It certainly helps that his visual and dramatic sensibilities are naturally attuned to Herbert’s style; the man’s two visual fascinations are “scale” and “austerity,” while his recurring thematic obsessions are “tragic inevitability” and “mankind’s irrelevance on the grand scale,” all of which fit Dune’s great deserts and looming prophecies perfectly. The cast is also excellent; Austin Butler astonishes in his transformation to the reptilian Feyd-Rautha, while Javier Bardem serves as the film’s essential secret weapon, adding just a hint of levity through his performance of first believer Stilgar. The film is a testament to Villenueve’s minimalist visual sensibilities, and also a pretty darn effective adaptation of a nearly-unadaptable book.
We then screened Mysterious Island, a ‘61 adaptation of a Jules Verne novel, wherein a handful of imprisoned Union soldiers escape by stealing a Confederate hot air balloon. Flying blind through a terrible storm, they eventually emerge somewhere over the Pacific, until their balloon brings them to rest upon a distant, uncharted island. There, they will contend with both monsters and mysteries, squaring off with strangely oversized beasts, and eventually coming to know the island’s legendary caretaker.
You really can’t go wrong with Jules Verne and Ray Harryhausen. Mysterious Island offers a fine blend of the two, proceeding in Vernes’ usual manner of transitioning from historical adventure to outright fantasy, and offering such charming stop-motion pleasures as a giant crab and nefarious nautiloid along the way. The cast also possess some solid chemistry; most of the male characters fit into Vernes’ model of the competent, stoic adventuring man, but Joan Greenwood impresses as the castaway Lady Fairchild, who maintains both wit and dignity in spite of the island’s less-than-ideal accommodations. An easy viewing and endearing adventure on the whole.
Next up was Ænigma, another horror feature by giallo icon Lucio Fulci. When a prank at a girls’ boarding school goes violently wrong, the victim begins reaching out with her psychic powers, controlling the mind of her newest classmate and committing violent revenge. As bodies stack up, her remaining classmates will need to race against time to discover the strange connection between their comatose victim and new friend.
So yeah, this one’s basically a combination of Carrie and Phenomena, except with a significantly more convoluted psychic conceit. I frankly never understood why the script has the school’s newest arrival get mind-controlled into villainy by the actual psychic, rather than just having the psychic commit the crimes herself. If she’s already got ill-defined psychic abilities, why does she need an avatar of those abilities to do her bidding for her? Does she just have a weak psychic signal at the school, and need some sort of human amplifier to really work her magic?
The confusion of this premise is genuinely debilitating to the film’s dramatic intent, as the line between the identities of these two characters is never clear enough to feel emotionally connected to either of them. Nonetheless, Fulci furnishes the corners of Ænigma with a reasonable assortment of nightmares, including one memorable scene where a girl is covered in slugs and snails until she simply expires. Far from his best work, and highly derivative of Argento, Ænigma is ultimately just one of many films that makes me think “jee, I should really watch Suspiria again.”
We rounded out the week with Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, George Miller’s latest action masterpiece. Anya Taylor-Joy stars as the young Furiosa, torn from her home and tormented by the manic warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth). The film follows its heroine’s life from the moment her peaceful childhood is disrupted right up to the starting line of Fury Road, offering a vivid and far-ranging portrait of life in the Wastelands along the way.
It is an immense credit to Miller that the success of Fury Road did not seem to guide his conception of a potential sequel. That “Saga” in the title isn’t just a stab at gravitas (though Dementus would surely approve) – this is a genuine five-act epic, a hero’s journey replete with harsh lessons and tragic losses, alongside some of the greatest action scenes ever committed to film. Even at 79 years old, Miller’s talent for bombastic yet entirely coherent action remains unparalleled; watching Furiosa felt like coming home, and receiving a warm greeting from Fury Road’s distinct style of perfectly orchestrated action-ballet.
Stacked with memorable side villains (The Octoboss! The People Eater!) and grounded in the desperate daily concerns of Imortan Joe’s citadel, Furiosa expands on the world of Fury Road without ever letting exposition get in the way of excitement, offering a vivid and violent tour of the Wasteland’s three great imposing fortresses. Taylor-Joy is perfectly cast as the nearly silent Furiosa, her eyes conveying a terrible, haunted intensity no matter what garb might shroud her. And Hemsworth absolutely revels in the discordant charisma of the terrible Dementus, his scenery-chewing performance perfectly matching the showmanship that is his character’s calling card. We are so damn lucky to have George Miller.
