BillyOceansBlues

Every single person we lay eyes on in this movie is young, clearly willing to work for scale, and we pay the price for it. Very obviously these are all former child actors who have yet to advance to normal actor levels of skill. I don't like movies starring kids because they are all such gratingly bad actors, and this has exactly the same thorns (Oh, no, are they not best friends anymore?? Will he still get invited to the birthday party?? Oh, no, this one is jealous and is about to do a bully thing! Who on the planet earth could possibly check into this and care about it?). Does not help at all that the writers are probably in the same "happy to be here" boat as the child actors, because the no-thought-to-this-script dialogue does them zero favors. Very much like the recent Hellraiser, this is yet another low point for the Alien IP - whoever got this together collaged it on a nothing budget with a staple gun and it's just plain old bad.

DOUR. So dour. Everyone glowering intensely at everyone else. Characters absolutely crippled by the artificial "weight" of how "important" what they are doing is. How do we know it's important? Because the characters state their aspirations right away, and what they aspire to is the way things are in the present of the movies. Wow. Profound. I wonder if it's going to work out in the end??? Remember Game of Thrones? Realistic people doing their best in the horrifying world, trying to find some semblance of meaning, purpose, maybe love? Joking and chiding each other like real human beings do? Remember characters being believable people? Why does every premium show have to be completely humorless and rigid? We get it, the implications are vast. We get it, setting up the world of Dune is "important." Look, I'm a huge fan of the material and the new movies. But even in those they chide each other. "Stilgar is from the south. You didn't notice his accent?" They freaking relax for two minutes! You can't expect me to tighten up and stay rigid for the entire series. There has to be a rhythm to it! Ups and downs. Intensity and levity. Inhale, exhale. Life!

A surprising underhand slow-pitch from someone whose writing I had come to get excited about when I heard about a new upcoming project. I SUPPOSE I understand the decision to not "take a side," since you will first have to define the sides, which can be perilous - I get it (sort of). But to not even go into any detail at all? I mean the entire appeal of going to see an Alex Garland film was that you were, at the very least, going to experience something original and interesting, if not kick-ass and profound. What we have here is so clearly a slapdash half-effort based on zero knowledge of our past, our present, and only casual suppositions about the future. Clearly didn't bother to sit down with any historians, political writers, anything. This is what you get when you watch the news for ten minutes a day for one year. Really far too shallow politically, far too shallow character-wise, and story-wise. All of their little "stops" were not even interesting situations. Everything played out in a very middle of the river kind of way. The scenes wrote themselves and offered nothing surprising or interesting. What a bummer. Maybe Garland SHOULD move on from movies if he's feeling so disenchanted by the response to this. The response to this movie is direct reflection of his efforts: yeah, whatever.