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Dune: The Rewatch For Part 2

Dune Part 1 is directed by Denis Villeneuve, and stars Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Zendaya, Stellan Skarsgård, Josh Brolin and Jason Momoa. It is based on the 1965 novel by Frank Herbert and roughly covers the first third to half of the book and will be continued into Part 2 this year.

In honour of Dune Part 2 releasing at long last, Dune Part 1 was re-released in theatres in part to milk a little more cash from the film, and also serves as a good refresher of all that goes on in that first movie. Something very helpful since it originally released in 2021, and thanks to that pesky strike, its sequel came a little later than planned.

And a refresher is a good idea in a story so deep and dense as Dune. Just all of Paul Atreides’ (Timothée Chalamet) titles and names are tricky to remember for even the most fervent of fans. Sure its easy to recall Muad’Dib and the Kwisatz Haderach, and that he is the new Duke of the House Atreides, but do you remember Mahdi, Usul, or Lisan al Gaib?

Going back also allows us to take a look at that first part again, what worked, what didn’t and how much is riding on Part 2.

Dune is a dense story with many different factions, names, occupations and immense world-building. The House Atreides inherits Arrakis, or Dune, arguably the most important planet in the universe, since it provides the all important Spice, required for long distance travelling.

However, the former rulers of Arrakis, the ruthless Harkonnens, aren’t looking to give up their cash cow so easily and are planning a hostile takeover of what was once theirs. But that is the barest of rundowns. There is so much lore and world-building crammed into a relatively short book that making it one movie would undoubtedly feel rushed, or skip a lot (case in point the 1984 film).

So the natural thing to do is to break the story into two. The only question is…

How Do You Rate Half A Movie?

On a moment-to-moment, scene-to-scene basis, Dune Part 1 is pretty great. The acting is great, the direction is slick and gripping and the special effects are gorgeous at many points. The story is exciting and fantastic, but what else do you expect from a movie inheriting the story of one of the most beloved science fiction novels of all time?

The problem? Watching Dune Part 1 is a very unsatisfying watch. The story ends at arguably the darkest point in the story. The House of Atreides has fallen, House Harkonnen has retaken control of Arrakis, and Paul and his Mother (Rebecca Ferguson) are on the run, making a shaky alliance with the native Fremen.

Now this isn’t too uncommon in multi-part stories for one segment to end at a dark moment. The Two Towers ends with Rohan barely surviving an attack from the Army of the White Hand, and Frodo and Sam face the hardest leg of their journey, with their guide deciding to sabotage them for his own nefarious machinations.

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince ends with the death of Dumbledore, the wisest, most powerful wizard on the good side, betrayed by a main character, and little hope for Harry and co to find all the Horcruxes and take down Voldemort.

The thing is these are all designed to be cutting off points. The Two Towers ends with with the destruction of around half of evil’s forces, and the idea that the final leg of the journey is here. Harry Potter had the built in device of every book/movie taking place over one year, and with the clear goal set out of destroying all of the Horcruxes.

But Dune was written and conceived as one story, and a lot of it is so interconnected with foreshadowing and just general wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff. The knife fight between Paul and Jamis (Babs Olusanmokun) goes from a ratcheting up of tension between the Atreideses and the Fremen, it becomes a climax to an entire film.

And again, the fight itself is well done and exciting. But as a resolution to the entire film? It is a little bit obtuse, especially with all of the often contradictory visions Paul receives throughout the movie, especially when it comes to Jamis. It makes sense after thinking for a few minutes, but doesn’t make for a very satisfying ending.

Sticking The Landing

There’s this little movie that came out in 2018 called The Perfection. It stars Allison Williams from Get Out and Steven Weber from iZombie and Wings. I won’t spoil anything here, but it teaches a big lesson about sticking the landing.

The first half of The Perfection is pretty much perfection. Its really tense, exciting and at times terrifying, and although there are some minor holes, it all-in-all is a pretty fantastic start. However, it only takes up half the runtime; there’s a whole other half to go through.

And it low-key sucks.

The story doesn’t make very much sense and it gets more than a little goofy. I like the ultimate place and last shot of the movie, but to get there it completely botches the landing.

So instead of wholeheartedly suggesting watching The Perfection, I put a huge caveat on that, and recommend it more as a curiosity than an actual good movie. But man, that first half is great.

And that is the place that Dune Part 1 finds itself. If Part 2 fails to stick the landing, and turns out to be bad or just okay, Part 1 faces a steep uphill battle to be worth a rewatch or being remembered.

Not that I am worried about Dune Part 2. For my money, Villeneuve hasn’t made a bad movie, has set up a solid base in Part 1, and has a great blueprint in the book. However, the first half of Dune is the most conventional part of the Dune series, and the book and its sequel, Dune Messiah, just become more and more atypical as it goes.

The One Misstep

Dune Part 1 follows Dune pretty faithfully. There are small changes, like the cutting of the greenhouse in the palace, and the changing of Liet-Kynes (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) from male to female, which ultimately doesn’t change the story in a very significant way.

The only thing that I can really say the film dropped the ball on was the mystery of the first half of the book: who betrayed House Atreides?

There are long chunks of the book where the characters know someone has betrayed them to the Harkonnens, but no one knows who it was, and everyone suspects everyone. Everyone is walking on eggshells, and a standout scene is where Duncan Idaho goes on a drunken tirade and accuses Jessica as the spy, and her and Thufir Hawat have a tense standoff. Its a genuine mystery and really surprising when it is revealed that the traitor is Yueh.

Yueh in the book and film is a Suk doctor. As mentioned in the book, Imperial training makes it impossible for Suk doctors to cause harm in any way. Its essentially programmed into them. There isn’t a choice in the matter, not like the Hippocratic Oath today, which is a choice.

So when House Atreides is betrayed and people are killed, Yueh is essentially ruled out due to the fact that he cannot due harm. However, Piter de Vries, the Mentat for House Harkonnen corrupts and breaks Yueh, and the reveal of his treachery is a genuine shock.

Unfortunately, Yueh’s betrayal is set up, and payed off in the same scene basically, and the idea of his Imperial Oath making this an impossibility is unfortunately cut.

Is missing the mystery of the betrayer a small thing? Sure. But it also is the clearest and largest example of the movie missing something from the novel.

Luckily, the book narrows down significantly from in on out. All of the ideas of Bene Gesserits and Mentats and Spice are all set up, and for a while, it becomes the story of Jessica, Paul and the Fremen. Most of the cast is cut down from the first half of the book, but it becomes more spiritual and allegorical that will be interesting to see how it plays out in Dune Part 2.

The first movie set up some of the more obtuse aspects of the second half of the story, including precognition, divergent timelines and the jihad to come, but it will take a deft hand to visualize the literal mind-blowing elements of Dune. Not to mention the planned third film based on the second book, Dune Messiah which deconstructs many common storytelling tropes, and even parts of Dune itself.

But if anyone can pull it off its Denis Villeneuve. Whether its the circular story of Arrival, or the tightly-woven (like a spider’s web) Enemy, to the deep and bombastic Blade Runner 2049, he has proven himself to be able to be able to convey challenging ideas in a crowd-pleasing way that should hopefully carry over to Dune Part 2 and beyond.

Let me know what you expect for Dune Part 2, and if you think that Dune Part 1 would still be worth visiting if its sequel doesn’t stick the landing.

Knock at the Cabin Book Review

I just finished The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay. The book is the basis for the upcoming Knock at the Cabin by M. Night Shyamalan starring Dave Bautista, Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldritch.

I’m sure the film will have some changes, but this review will contain spoilers for the book and potentially the movie. I would recommend the book, with some caveats. It is short, but drags through the middle a bit, and some of the characters bleed into each other. Leonard, Wen and Redmond are distinct enough characters, but Eric and Andrew, and Adriane and Sabrina can occasionally be tough to tell apart.

Ambigious To A Fault

So things will get a bit spoiler-y right from the start.

So, the crux of the book hinges on the characters and the reader not knowing if the world is ending or if the intruders are insane. Which is fine, but unfortunately Tremblay paints himself into a corner early and can’t find his way out.

Early on, Leonard gives his speil about the choice, the end of the world and some vagueries about the coming apocalypse. Something about cities flooding, plagues and the sky falling.

The problem comes where Leonard shows earthquakes and tsunamis on the tv to prove his vaguries. But Tremblay doesn’t want to prove or disprove the existance of the coming apocalypse so everything is as vague as possible.

Its very clear early what is going on. The zealots always mention seeing their visions on the television screen, but never before and clearly enough to prove that they were actually seen beforehand.

The Goonies rock is mentioned multiple times in the book, but never before its shown on the t.v. It makes the intruders frustrating to watch because if they are telling the truth, then why not tell the family as much as possible?

All of this would be fine, but it neuters what would have been the story’s greatest strength. And there could have been a way around it. Have the group say they cannot prove anything for the ritual to work. Or for one to start, only to be hushed by the others. Instead, its never brought up and the villians look idiotic for it.

Oh The Misery!

I saw comparisons between this and Misery before reading, and I have to agree. Both are stories of people being held against their will in a secluded cabin by people of questionable sanity. Both are stories of suspense punctuated with splashes of violence.

The thing is that Misery wears its heart on its sleeve. From the start, everyone knows something is up with Anne Wilkes so King can waste no time developing and exploring Wilkes’ character to its full extent. The suspense comes from whether or not Paul Sheldon can escape, not if Anne Wilkes is crazy or not.

Leonard is the Anne Wilkes of The Cabin at the End of the World, and the family is Paul Sheldon. And while Paul is a fine enough character, everyone comes for Anne.

The thing is, Leonard is like if Anne Wilkes didn’t do anything crazy until at the end of the story to try to build suspense of whether she was crazy or not.

But those insane moments are what makes Anne Wilkes such a compelling character, and we would be missing a lot of that if King wasted time trying to trick the reader into thinking she might not be crazy.

Leonard is this book’s Anne, and to a lesser extent Redmond, Adriene and Sabrina are too. But we never get enough information or character to get invested into these characters.

It would be interesting to hear about their visions in detail, or what exactly they believe in and expand on their strange rituals and weird weapons, but that would mean proving if their beliefs or not.

A Lack of Movement

Okay, so back to Misery. Paul may be trapped in a cabin, but there is a lot of movement. Annie leaves, Paul escapes the room, he gains things, he loses things, hatches schemes and becomes hobbled.

So despite being trapped, we always feel as if Paul is progressing and moving towards something, be it his own demise or freedom.

That’s not the case with The Cabin at the End of the World.

Once the initial break in and fight happens, Eric and Andrew spend a vast majority of the book tied to chairs with no changes other than the tightness of their bonds. Which, unfortunately, gives the story a lack of momentum and the book drags in the middle.

Wen is underutilized in this section of the novel. We lose a lot of her point of view through this time even though she is one of the few characters free and with agency in the story. But she winds up doing nothing anyways.

The Trolley Problem

The story is essentially a complex version of the trolley problem. The trolley problem is one of the most famous morality thought experiences ever, saying that a trolley is speeding towards a group of people on the tracks, but you can divert the trolley and in doing so kill one person. The morality comes from the fact that the person at the controls would actively choose and “murder” one person to save others.

That is the dilemma that Leonard gives Eric, Andrew and Wen. Kill one of your own or the world will end. Can you kill to save others? Is it worth it?

But what if you don’t know the trolley exists?

At this point in history the trolley problem is well trodden ground, but the characters don’t put any thought into it outside of outright denying it immediately.

Which isn’t itself an issue, that’s a totally valid reaction, it just feels like a missed opportunity especially knowing how the rest of the book goes. Having a philosophical throughline and debate would have made the static second act feel more interesting and engaging.

But I feel that that would have given too much information and tipped the reader into believing Leonard or not. And because of that it never feels like the story realizes its philosophical potential.

Conclusion

There are other nitpick-y and personal things as well. Whole paragraphs are dedicated to describe the plots of cartoons shown on T.V. for Wen. I personally don’t like it when stories reference other stories or media, especially if there isn’t a really good point for it. Like mentioning the weapons look like something the orcs in Lord Of The Rings would use feels very lazy to me.

Also, the book is written in a tight third person perspective, with that perspective shifting constantly through the story. However, at the end Tremblay switches to two different first person views in a jarrimf and baffling decision. I don’t know why he chose to do it. There isn’t anything that feels purposeful or needed until the end, but changing ‘He’s to ‘We’s just feels confusing.

I am hesistantly excited for the movie still. We have gone from good Shyamalan to bad and now its swung back around to be okay. I liked Split and Glass but thought Old was hilarious with how serious and bad it was. There are some interesting camera techniques used and I expect some sort of interesting Shyamalan twist.

Stranger Things Season 4, Part 1 Review: Bloated In More Ways Than One

Stranger Things is created by the Duffer Brothers.

The long awaited(?) season 4 of the 2016 phenomenon Stranger Things is here. The story Mike and his band of nerds teaming up with the superpowered Eleven to defeat a Demigorgon from the Upside-Down electrified everyone around the world.

Then Season 2 rolled around, and the raving died down to more of a dull roar. The season lacked the novelty of the first, and the episode The Lost Sister went down about as bad as an episode could go.

After that, predictably, Season 3 came after Season 2. It didn’t have the standout The Lost Sister episode, but the quality as a whole was not as high as before.

So expectations weren’t necessarily high coming into this 4th season, and then it was announced it was the dreaded double season. Part now, with more coming in July. Unfortunately, the splitting of the season is more of a marketing gimmick than one driven by storytelling necessity.

And that is unfortunately where the new season of Stranger Things finds itself. Season 4 finds itself in the same place as two of its predecessors, a good season of television stuck in the shadow of a great one.

Longer Things

To me, the new season did not start out on the right foot. The first episode, The Hellfire Club is filler, plain and simple. Its important to see where these characters are after the time jump between seasons, but it takes so much time in doing so.

Okay, so Lucas has drifted a little apart from his friends due to his involvement with the high school basketball team, and the others need another kid to help them with their Dungeon and Dragons campaign.

Those two storylines are important to show where our characters stand after a time jump, but it could easily be condensed into half the time. The important parts of these storylines are the introductions of Eddie Munson and the bully basketball team. But it takes it time in doing so, in an unnecessarily bloated season.

Too Many Cooks

So the first episode introduces Eddie, the bully basketball team and Eleven’s bullies. Which technically is fine. The bullies are minor antagonists and Eddie is an important secondary character spread across two main storylines and two main locations.

The problem is that even without these new characters, the cast already feels too big. Will and Johnathan, once main characters in the show are regulated to the sidelines if they are remembered at all. There are so many characters fighting for screen time and relevance that inevitably some will fall away.

Which almost punishes the viewer for caring about the characters. A big part of the previous seasons was the relationship between Johnathan and Nancy, who have not had any interactions at all this season. Nancy is embroiled with the main story, but all Johnathan has to do is hang out with his stoner friend (another new character!).

This isn’t to say that Nancy and Johnathan need to be together. Its just that they are major characters, and the fizzling out of their relationship offscreen feels cheap, especially when there isn’t time to dwell on it because we have to move to one of the other characters or storylines.

Why are the basketball players here? Couldn’t the police be looking for Eddie, the main suspect in a murder investigation and function as the show’s ticking clock? It would save the time of showing these cliché, one-note villains which could be spent on better things.

But television shows add new characters all the time. What makes Stranger Things different?

Toothless Horror

Stranger Things is a horror/thriller show, that surprisingly doesn’t have a lot of death in it. Which isn’t surprising. It takes big inspirations from 80s horror, specifically those starring pre-teens and Stephen King, staples of which are ensemble casts and little character death.

And those work in a short movie style, or extravagently long book. Movies don’t need to keep adding new characters, and a book can be as long as the author wants to to explore these characters.

Think of it this way. How many characters have died in Stranger Things? Like real, recurring characters, with real names. You have Barbara, naturally. Bob in season 2. Billy. Connie, I guess in season 1. Chrissy and Fred if you stretch it.

That is not a lot of deaths for a show that started with a large cast already that just keeps on getting bigger.

And the Duffer Brothers admitted it. They said they regret killing Bob in season 2 and Chrissy in this season. Chrissy! Who was just introduced this season just to die!

Her death is the catalyst for the story. Without it, there is no reason for Eddie to go into hiding, the basketball bros to form a mob, and the characters to learn about the main antagonist Vecna.

She was created to die, and the Duffer Brothers didn’t want to kill her. So imagine how hard it would be to get them to kill a main character, something the show desperately needs.

This not only leads to a bloated cast, but it hamstrings any moment of tension because it’s hard to believe anyone of note will die.

Including:

The Scene

Everyone is talking about the scene with Max in the Upside-Down. It was good enough to get Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill charting again.

And to be fair, it is a technically great scene. Everything comes together and works really well. The music, special effects, flashbacks are all used really well.

But watching it, all I could think of was: Man, I wish I could care about this.

I don’t dislike Max as a character at all. You could replace her with any other character and I would have the same reaction. Because there was not a second that I believed Max could or would die.

And that’s the crux of the scene. But three seasons have taught me that main characters do not die. I wish I could have enjoyed the scene as much as others, but Vecna seemed neutered in the Upside-Down, his terrain, to facilitate Max’s escape.

And this press cycle has quashed my hope of tension in the future. There is constant mentioning of the death or a main character. Thanks for telegraphing it.

Tension is built on surprise. Saying a major character will die sets a precedent that might follow and haunt the show. I don’t want to know, but Stranger Things and the Duffer Brothers seem incapable of keeping secrets and building tension.

But I guess we shall see after what amounts to Stranger Things season 4: Part 2: The Movie.

Hummingbird Salamander Book Review: How to Make Your Audience Care

Hummingbird Salamander is a book by Jeff Vandermeer published on April 6th, 2021. It follows the story of Jane, a security consultant who receives a key to a storage unit owned by the enigmatic Silvina Vilcapampa. Inside is a taxidermy hummingbird, and a mystery to find a taxidermy salamander.

‘New Weird’ is one of the newest underground movements in literature, one pioneered by author Jeff Vandermeer. His definition of what ‘New Weird’ is as follows:

“…a type of urban, secondary-world fiction that subverts the romanticized ideas about place found in traditional fantasy, largely by choosing realistic, complex real-world models as the jumping-off point for creation of settings that may combine elements of both science fiction and fantasy.”

The New Weird Anthology by Jeff Vandermeer

That’s from the foreword of the collection curated by him and his wife Ann Vandermeer. Which is appropriate. All of Vandermeer’s work falls squarely into the ‘new weird’ and thanks to the success and film adaptation of Annihilation, means he is probably the most famous voice in the genre.

Which is what makes Hummingbird Salamander weird. Precisely that there isn’t much weird about it. It’s set in a world much like our own about a woman, hummingbird, salamander and ecoterrorism.

So I was immediately intrugued. I don’t think that authors and artists should be confined to one genre or style, but it is always fascinating when someone goes against the grain of their previous work. And so, alike many filmgoers sitting down to watch Todd Phillip’s Joker (whose previous directing credits include all the Hangover movies), or those listening to Kanye West’s gospel album, I started to read Hummingbird Salamander.

A Huge Departure

If you are likely to know Jeff Vandermeer from anything, it is his big breakout hit and first book in the Area X Trilogy: Annihilation, which was later adapted into a film, both of which are fantastic.

Of his works I have read the Area X Trilogy, the Ambergris Trilogy, Borne and Dead Astronauts. To give you an example of how weird they get, Annihilation is mostly centered on a hole in the ground in the Shimmer. The hole has a staircase and our main character, Ghost Bird, is compelled to call it The Tower. In The Tower is a large slug-like creature writing a neverending sentence on the walls in an ink made of living organisms.

Ambergris is a steampunkesque otherworldly city inhabited by humans and benign, silent mushroom men. One day, while a lot of the townsfolk are hunting a giant squid, they return to a totally empty city with no sign of struggle or where the rest of the people went.

Borne takes place in a nameless post-apocalyptic city ruled over by a 5 storey tall flying bear named Mord.

So yeah, a book set in pretty much our own world with all simply human characters stood out.

And I didn’t just not like it because its not weird. There are a lot of reasons why, but the root cause comes down to the fact that I did not care.

1. A Mystery Impossible to Solve

The heart of Hummingbird Salamander is a mystery to solve. Our main character ‘Jane’ (she changed her own name in the retelling to protect her identity, as well as others in the book), a former wrestler/body-builder who now works in cyber security.

One day, sitting in a cafe, the barista handed her a note with an address and a unit number. The address is an abandoned storage building, and in the storage unit denoted is a taxidermied hummingbird with a note to find a taxidermied salamander.

The note comes from the owner of the storage facility, Silvina Vilcapampa, daughter of a rich entrepeneur and possible ecoterrorist. A quick google search shows she died the week before the start of the story.

Its a compelling enough start. Where is the salamander? What is this leading to? Why did Silvina pick a total stranger to give this task to?

A big part of the enjoyment of a mystery thriller is trying to guess what the solution to the mystery is. Who is the killer? What was the murder weapon? etc. And its fun to either guess it right and brag, or get it wrong and try to put the pieces together retroactively.

That’s the joy of reading and/or watching a mystery for a second time, knowing the solution. Suddenly, little things make more sense, and you catch clues that you missed the first time around.

How is the mystery solved in Hummingbird Salamander? Well, the first thought goes to whoever taxidermied this rare hummingbird. Jane follows up on it, but it ultimately goes nowhere except the taxidermist threatening her to give up on following the trail.

So then Jane pops the eyes out of the hummingbird, finds two numbers on each, which correspond with an address that Silvina owned. There Jane finds a diary, that leads her to Unitopia and a storage unit filled to the brim with taxidermied rare animals. After being captured, Jane determines the bad guys have the salamander, so she steals it back and the address on its eyes leads her back to the farm she grew up on.

And so on and so forth, until the book ends. The problem with each and every one of these points is that they are impossible to see coming, and not in a good way. She finds the numbers on the hummingbird’s eyes, but it is near impossible to figure out that they are an address, especially without a road name. There have to be thousands of buildings with the same number. And nowhere before is this address mentioned.

Maybe if the address was buried in the book somewhere, list off different addresses that Silvina owns, and it would be better. Very eagle eyed viewers would see it and recognize it, but most wouldn’t.

And that’s a problem. The book is a series of mysteries that have no clues on how to solve them. The answer doesn’t exist until Vandermeer reveals it later. By the time Jane finds the salamander, all thrill of trying to solve the mystery and engagement of that sort is gone. Its just “Let’s see where this goes next, there’s no way of knowing.”

And then, near the end, as if to try to keep the attention of readers, Vandermeer pulls out all the surprising stops. It leads to her family farm! The grandfather she killed is still alive! (Turns out its her estranged and aged father, but it is presented when she first meets him as her grandfather) Surprise! It turns out Silvina grew up right next door to Jane! Surprise! Jane’s husband is there! Surprise Langer wasn’t killed! Surprise Hellmouth is here! Surprise the whole thing led back to the storage unit that originally held the hummingbird! Surprise Silvina didn’t die a week before Jane found the hummingbird, but she’s dead now!

But its too little too late. Most of these twists don’t have a basis earlier in the story, and happen too quickly one after another to be effective.

2. Action at Arm’s Length

Okay, but all that isn’t a death sentence. After all, this isn’t an all out mystery story. There’s some action, there’s some suspence and thrills.

Unfortunately they all come a little too little, and a little too late.

As previously mentioned, Jane works at a cyber security company, so she knows the risks in this online world. So when first dipping her toes in the mystery of the hummingbird, she takes all precautions. Using coworkers’ computers, getting her assistant to do it under the guise of company research, buying burner phones, the works.

The thing is that there is no inciting incident for this behaviour. Which is fine, but for the first half of the story there is no contact between Jane and the shadowy ‘bad guys’ that supposedly want to do her harm.

A kooky gym owner tells Jane he thinks she’s been followed. There are remains of cigarettes and beer at the back edge of the property, and nothing changes. Jane just continues on.

Which could work if we were supposed to question how important this is. But never once is the question brought up if Jane is crazy or just seeing things. We are just supposed to assume she is in danger from a net slowly closing in on her.

And then the first interaction with the villains of the book is Jane beating up some random thug with complete ease. Not exactly the most intimidating of entrances, especially over a third of the way through the book.

In fact, most meetings (and there aren’t many) easily go in favour of Jane. The highlight of the book easily is the storage unit filled with rare taxidermy that Langer sets on fire with Jane inside. She escapes, but is captured in one of her few moments of weakness.

However, after being nearly burnt alive, shot multiple times and drugged, Jane escapes her captors after stealing the salamander and getting shot again and jumping out the window of a second storey floor.

That fall has massive implications, as Jane needs to walk with a cane for the rest of the story (which jumps ahead two years) but she still manages to escape from her captors. She outsmarts Langer with an explosive houseboat, gets the information to solve the mystery from the villains and even nearly kills Langer, a man everyone says is hard to kill, in hand-to-hand combat while crippled.

That and one time the villains shoot at Jane from really far away and miss and kill someone else unimportant to the story are the interactions Jane has with the villains. The baddies are incompetent to say the most, completely unthreatening to say the least. Because of Jane’s precautions early in the book (which does make sense and is in her character to be fair), the villains come in far too late into the story and are far too incompetent to care about.

3.5 Plotholes

Plotholes are kind of hard to talk about. An engaging story is good enough to make a lot of people forgive them, but in a bad story, people go out of their way to nitpick them. Like Langer jumping off an exploding houseboat into rapid rushing water and being swept downstream only to appear later in the finale. Is that a plothole? Maybe. Its unlikely that Langer could survive, but is possible and very nitpicky and the kind of thing I don’t hold against the book.

There are a couple of plotholes in Hummingbird Salamander that are more serious. Integral to the plot serious. I like to think these are serious problems, but fair warning.

The aforementioned twist that Jane’s brother worked for Silvina, dated Silvina and that Silvina lived right next door to Jane took me aback when I first read it. Clearly there is some connection between Silvina and Jane from the opening page, but like this?

The flurry of revelations makes it hard to process in the moment, but thinking on it later, it makes even less sense than I thought it did. Jane is very good with technology and navigating the world of large corperations. Its her job. However, while digging through all the properties and pieces of land the Vilcapampa company owns, she never comes across this one? She never ran into Silvina in the past, even when she was spending a lot of her time off the property to get away from a broken home?

And then her brother worked for her collecting rare salamanders. The excuse given as to why Jane didn’t know this was that her brother and borderline absentee parents didn’t want her to know that her brother was illegally collecting wildlife.

It is something that is small enough to ignore if the rest of the story holds up, but unfortunately, the rest of the story feels lacking, especially when it comes to…

4. Other Characters

Possibly Jeff Vandermeer’s greatest strength in his writing is his point of view character. Most of his books are written in first person or really tight third. Hummingbird Salamander is written from the point-of-view of Jane, Annihilation is supposed to be the actual journal of the biologist, Borne is the point-of-view of Rachel, and Authority is third person, but totally focused on the character of Control. The City of Saints and Madmen is a collection of short stories, and Dead Astronauts eschews all form of conventional storytelling for better and worse.

Whether its first or third, all of Vandermeer’s stories are very tightly focused on one character, and he is extremely good at getting you into that character’s headspace and really exploring the character.

And Hummingbird Salamander is no different. Jane is a very good, fleshed-out character. She has a good internal monologue, and it is very clear why she takes certain actions in the novel and her motivation.

Except, I cannot connect with them, and it is a problem with the other characters in the story. There are the characters on the margin, like Jane’s husband, daughter and assistant, who all play their small parts well.

It is the more important side characters that feel lacking. The characters tied to the titular hummingbird and salamander are shrouded in shadow, and it makes it hard to care for Jane’s motivation throughout the story.

Let’s go through them, from least to most important.

4.1 Langer

Langer fills a very rudimentary role in the story, and fills it merely satisfactorily.

He is the ticking clock, the roadblock, the villain. He is similar to the guy Indiana Jones has to beat up right before the climax of the movie. The shirtless guy chopped up by the propellor, the big cultist, the general in the tank, the guy that gets eaten by ants.

Langer is described as cunning, ruthless and hard to kill. He is the man that brought Silvina into the world of ecoterrorism and is considered the most volitile of the three characters in their little triangle (more on that later). Its assumed that Langer is on the trail of the salamander in an attempt to use whatever it is pointing to as an ecological weapon.

The problem is that we know so little about Langer, because he interacts with Jane twice in the book, and then subsequently dies.

His men are easily spotted and physically subdued by Jane, he falls victim to her trap on a houseboat, and is killed by Jane after she is crippled long term by falling out a window.

We don’t know anything about his personality, and everything we see of him is failure. Not exactly the most compelling of henchmen.

4.2 Hellbender

Hellbender, or Jack (both psuedonyms so take your pick), is the most fleshed out of the side characters, largely because he is the only one to have prolonged interactions with Jane the entire book.

The two first meet at a convention at a bar as Jack smoothly seduces Jane, only to disappear later in the night.

Its only later that Jane learns he is tied to this mystery, and that he has her cell phone number, so he can text her and keep track of her whereabouts.

In these texts, Hellbender reveals himself as very intelligent, cunning and manipulative. Jane even learns that Jack has interrogated Langer in the past for some organisation on his environmental crimes. He is even part of the suggested love triangle between himself, Silvina and Langer.

The problem is that the macguffin, the thing that all these characters are chasing, is really vague until the ending of the book. So that makes it that much harder to parce out all the characters’ motivations.

We understand that Langer, being the most villainous and radical of the characters, wants to use whatever it is as a weapon. But we don’t really know about Jack. Is he trying to weaponize it? Does he want to use it for good? Is he just continuing on out of love and comradery to Silvina? And why does he give up so easily?

This confusion just makes his character more confusing and hard to relate to, even in the climax when he and Jane are desperately searching for the end the treasure hunt, we don’t know what it is or what anyone is going to do with it. Its hard to get excited.

4.3 Silvina

Silvina is the most important character in the entire book.

Yes, Jane is the protagonist and point-of-view character, but did you wonder why a computer security consultant who works behind a desk all day with a happy family would give it all up in order to chase this salamander?

The answer, naturally, is Silvina Vilcapampa.

Jane constantly states throughout the book that the reason she persues this mystery is because of some bond with Silvina. She is driven to find out more about this enigmatic woman and where this mystery leads

The problem is that Silvina is either presumed dead, or actually dead, through the whole book. We never meet Silvina in the flesh. Which wouldn’t be so bad in theory.

There are ways to learn about a dead character. Have people talk about this character. Parce out details through their actions in hindsight. Or Vandermeer could’ve broken his dogmatic adherence to the first-person perspective to give us some chapters with Silvina in the past. So we get to know her.

Because at the end of the book, I don’t feel like I know Silvina at all.

I know facts. She grew up rich. Something happened when she was a child that made her jaded against humanity. She got into ecoterrorism and probably blew up a dam. She sold taxidermy. Something happened on a beach between her, Jack and Langer.

But really, I don’t know what actually happened. What made Silvina lose faith in humanity? What was her relationship with the other two? What makes her so special?

I am with Jane to a certain point just on her word of Silvina being so special and important. But when she abandons her husband and daughter, ruins their lives by taking all her money and maxing all the credit cards, falls out of a window causing permanent damage to her body, starting a whole new life on a houseboat; that is so extreme to just do because you are interested in a woman that is already dead and we as the reader know nothing about.

It creates a disconnect between the book and the reader. I feel like I’m missing out on something. I want to know what is so magnetic about Silvina, but have been left wanting.

5. How to Fix It

The way to fix this story is pretty obvious in my opinion.

I would judisciasly cut parts of Jane’s story and add in the story before the story, what happened between Silvina, Jack and Langer.

It can even be written from the perspective of Langer or Jack, in order to flesh out their characters, while keeping Silvina a bit more mysterious. But it still gives us some glimpse of the central figure in this story.

The one biggest part of the Jane storyline I would cut was the first interaction she has with one of the villain’s henchmen, who she handles extremely easily.

Don’t Look Up Review: Disruption Dismemberment

Has anyone ever heard of Disruption Dismemberment? To be honest, I thought it was something else at first, that being drawn and quartered.

But drawn and quartered is shorthand for being hung, drawn and quartered. Its a medieval execution method that involves being drawn by horse to the site of the execution, hung until almost dead, emasculated, eviscerated, decapitated, and finally extremities are lopped off to be quartered. Its a particularly brutal method of execution, usually saved for those guilty of high treason to the crown in Britain, the most serious of all offenses.

Disruption dismemberment is quite different, but the quartering is similar. The victim has all four limbs tied to horses, which are all encouraged to walk in opposite directions, to ultimately pull the victim apart, limb from limb.

So the victim would be in the middle, being pulled in all directions and going nowhere. And an issue was that it sometimes wouldn’t work. There have been records of the ordeal lasting upwards of four hours. The execution, being overlong and tedious would be mercifully cut short by the executioner hacking off the limbs in a more traditional way.

Wait a minute. Painful? Going nowhere? Overlong? Tedious? Why that sounds like…

Don’t Look Up

Okay, that is a little harsh to Don’t Look Up, but it is what I thought about while watching it.

Part political satire farce, and part serious depressing drama, Don’t Look Up tells the story of a planet-killing comet aimed directly at Earth, the scientists who discover it, and the rest of the world who are either too greedy or too stupid to do anything about it.

Comparing it to a medieval form of execution is too harsh, but I have my reasons. There are disparate parts of this movie that do work. Standouts Meryl Streep and Jonah Hill as President Orlean and her chief-of-staff/son are hilarious, and it is nice to see characters like Leonardo DiCaprio’s Professor Mindy and Jennifer Lawrence’s Kate Dibiasky reacting to the oncoming apocalypse by hyperventalating and crying in every other scene.

The problem, as you may have noticed, is that these things are on the complete opposite spectrum, and actively harm each other from getting anything done.

Horsepower

The goal of a movie is to accomplish something. It can be to make the audience think of something critically, or simply to entertain. But everything has to be working together in order to go anywhere.

For example, Logan is a movie about the death of what is to many a beloved character. The movie is filled with bleak ruminations on life and death and punctuated with bouts of extreme, bloody violence.

What makes it work is that the two compliment each other. The depiction of death and pain in the story gives weight to the violence.

It could also be as simple as Die Hard. Die Hard isn’t trying to say or do anything other than entertain. And it does that using comedy and action.

It works because the action isn’t serious enough to make the comedy feel out of place, and the comedy is grounded enough so that the action doesn’t feel too toothless. That’s why when John McClane jumps off the building with a fire hose tied around himself, you aren’t thinking about how ridiculous and unrealistic it is. Or when the FBI agents are blown up in a helicopter, you aren’t sad about their brutal deaths, you’re laughing at “We’re gonna need more FBI guys.” Everything works together to just be damn entertaining.

Because multiple horses work best if they are all pulling in the same direction. But if the horses are pulling in opposite directions, it goes nowhere.

Going Nowhere, Fast

So why does Don’t Look Up not really work, despite all the parts being at least competent?

Well, its clear that we are meant to connect to and care about Dr. Mindy, Kate and Dr. Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan). Their storyline and characters are the most serious, and there aren’t many jokes between them, outside of a running gag of a Colonel making Kate pay for snacks at the White House that she later learns are free.

However, President Orlean and the political storyline is just a complete farce. That alone isn’t a problem, because there has to be something to differentiate Don’t Look Up from Melancholia. Melancholia is a 2011 movie made by Lars von Trier before his head disappeared completely up his own ass and depicts a planet named Melancholia that seems to be on a crash course with the Earth. It is a dark and serious drama exploring depression and the human reaction to incoming catastrophe.

So Don’t Look Up probably couldn’t be played straight for fear of comparison to Melancholia, and therefor its good to be played as a farce, like with the way it handles the United States government. But the two storylines are too far apart to exist cohesively in the same work and still carry the same weight.

The dinner scene at the end of the movie had potential to be a heart-rending scene, but it is hard, if just subconsciously, to understand what the movie is going for. President Orlean and her son are cartoonish in their depiction, and is therefor it is completely impossible to care for them. When Orlean is trying to escape the planet near the end of the film and it is revealed she left her son behind, you aren’t sad that he is facing certain death, its funny that he is completely forgotten.

Its too big of a disconnect. One half of the story is trying to make you care about the world that the film has made, and the other half openly states that you shouldn’t. Which is it?

One Perfectly Imperfect Scene

There is one scene where this problem is exemplified perfectly.

The first attempt to deflect the comet is called off because Peter Isherwell (played by Mark Rylance playing Steve Jobs), tech magnate that is one of the three richest men ever, finds out that the comet carries valuable resources that can be used to create phones and computers etc. Think of his company as Apple, Google and Microsoft all rolled into one.

So, his company creates these robots to drop bombs in the comet a la Armageddon and break it up to smaller, less harmful chunks that will strike the Earth, not destroy it, and make Isherwell even more rich. He does this with the help of the US government, but Prof. Mindy, who has begun working with the government, starts to become wary of the lack of peer revision in the science used by Isherwell.

When Prof. Mindy confronts Isherwell, an interaction occurs that is pretty hard to read. Isherwell claims that his company has so much information on Prof. Mindy that he knows that Mindy has colon polyps before even his doctor knows.

That’s meant to be comedic, right? I guess. Its hyperbolic to the extreme, and a play on how much tech companies know about us in the real world. And also haha, colon anus funny.

But then Isherwell continues to say that they can predict a person’s death to about 97% accuracy, and that Prof. Mindy’s death is so mundane and forgetable that Isherwell has totally forgotten it.

Is that a joke? It is hyperbolic and silly to think that a company could predict someone’s death to that certainty when there are things like car accidents and acts of God that cannot be predicted at all that factor into someone’s death. And this concept is used as a joke later in the movie when it comes to President Orlean’s death.

But we are supposed to care about Prof. Mindy, and the concept of death being so mundane, and the ending of life being so meaningless, is not really funny. Its a sort of existential dread that goes hand in hand with a comet wiping out all living things on Earth. Except that for every single other second of the film, Isherwell is a joke. He is a parody of the Steve Jobses and Elon Musks of the world, and its really really hard to feel threatened by a parody. But at the same time, its not a joke.

Whatever the intention of the scene is, its muddled through this confusion of tones and mixing of emotions in the most extreme way, and everything loses its power.

A Formula Broken

This movie is written and directed by Adam McKay, best known in his early years by his comedies with Will Ferrell such as Step Brothers and Anchorman, but has since moved into these snappy, quick-witted comedy-dramas with The Big Short and Vice.

Don’t Look Up on the surface resembles The Big Short and Vice in tone and genre. The Big Short has an almost Scorsese-esque pace covering a long period of time with a lot of characters. The pacing is slower in Don’t Look Up, as it covers a lot less ground in time and characters, and the dialogue is a lot less snappy and witty.

Compared to Don’t Look Up, The Big Short’s story about the housing collapse is such a light concept, and therefor the bridge between the comedy and drama is less wide. The housing drama is a real thing that we lived through and we came out okay, so its not that sad. The human race being extinguished totally is really depressing, and trying to bridge the gap is just too wide to do well.

And mankind is doomed at the end of the film. Make no mistake, Orlean’s son survives after the impact, but immediately starts to video himself to all the dead people on Earth. Its clear from that ending that Adam McKay believes we will never learn from what doomed us, and we are destined for destruction. But why are we?

Pulled Apart, In More Ways Than One

What is the reason that mankind is doomed in Don’t Look Up? There are a myriad of reasons and issues that are attempted to be lambasted in Don’t Look Up. There’s the mainstream media, politics in general, the internet hate mob and hashtag activism, celebrity culture, tech conglomerates and the information they have on the public.

The problem is that McKay either has nothing to say about them, or doesn’t want to risk offending with his opinion. President Orlean is not named as a Republican or Democrat, and McKay has deflected the question when asked in interviews. In extended montages showing the internet’s reactions to major events in the film, text and images fly by too fast to comprehend or to say anything cohesive.

This film is like pointing out flaws without giving any reason behind them, or how they can be fixed. Its depressing. The initial announcement of the comet is overshadowed by a pop starlet’s announcement of her engagement to a DJ. The president calls off a world saving mission because a rich guy told her to. Talk show hosts are incapable of taking the news of impending doom seriously.

These are all issues that are serious enough to make statements on, but McKay either refuses to say anything on the subjects other than that they exist, or he has nothing to say about them. There’s too much happening too fast for anything to stick.

The political stuff is really quite funny, and if the film focused more on that, made the satire more biting and specific, and just kept Prof. Mindy or Kate as someone to react to the ridiculous events taking place.

Narrow the focus and really bite into the meat of one issue, line up all the horses in one direction, and you will go places. But this movie has too many horses pulling in too many directions to go anywhere. Its a bunch of sound and fury and it signifies nothing. It is funny at times, looks good and is well acted, but it still remains nothing and goes nowhere.

Nightmare Alley Review: The Importance of Story Structure

Its always hard to criticize someone that you admire, especially when it comes to something so basic and subjective as story structure. It is easy to criticize explicitly bad aspects, but the structure is so subjective.

For example, I really love slow paced movies that have big climaxes. One of the earliest formations of this in my media consumption is the book series Gone. Gone comprises of Gone, Hunger, Lies, Plague, Fear and Light and is about a town where a mysterious dome appears around it, all people over 15 years old disappears and some children have strange powers.

Each book has a similar pace of building up a big event for half of the book, and then spending the second half on that event. For example, in Hunger, a lot of the first half is talking about the town losing power, and how important the nuclear power plant is. Then, the second half is a big fight for control of said plant.

This is a bit extreme for the style of pacing and structure that I mean, but it was something I really enjoyed reading as a kid. But, I can also see why people would not like that. They could be bored in the first half, or burnt out through the second half.

Plus, I love Guillermo Del Toro. Pan’s Labyrinth is incredible, The Shape of Water is deserving of the Oscars it won, Pacific Rim is uneven and strange but it is a lot of fun when its on. Crimson Peak is fun and inventive, even though the effects don’t really hold up.

Del Toro has an interesting style of writing and directing, in what I guess the best desription for it is old fairy tales. Dark stories set in a world much like our own, barring something not realistic at all (Ghosts in Crimson Peaks, the labyrinth in Pan’s Labyrinth, the fishman in The Shape of Water. They are often fairy tale-esque, in that they are often tales of morality and whimsy, punctuated with beautifully flourished exclamation points of extreme violence and horror aspects. Its wonderful to see him work at the top of his game, and through most of the runtime of Nightmare Alley, he is just that

The Positives

This movie is positively gorgeous. From the early shots of a brooding Bradley Cooper, scarcely light save for the burning ember of his cigarette to the cluttered and colourful vistas of the carnival locales to the too big, too clean, intimidating locations of the big city, this movie looks totally amazing.

Bradley Cooper is getting early talk of another Oscar nomination as Stanton Carlisle, a drifter who finds great opportunity in a travelling circus. Willem Dafoe, Toni Collette, Ron Perlman and Richard Jenkins all do their regular strong character work as the ringleader, psychic, strongman and eccentric millionaire respectively.

The second half of the film is strongly carried by Cate Blanchette, who I swear was born to be framed by the dramatic lighting that Del Toro bathes her in in almost every frame. All the acting and the cinematography and set design are strong across the board.

The writing and storytelling is also a very strong aspect of the movie, if it does have one problem. The story has a strong sense of momentum, and keeps enough of its cards close to the chest to keep audiences engaged.

The mystery of Stanton’s past is a driving force in the story, and there is enough subtle foreshadowing, from an ominous tarot card reading to Clem’s line directly mentioning the title of the film, for the watchers to have fun predicting where the story is going, and watch the puzzle pieces fall together.

Why A Story Is Told As It Is?

Okay, so this is tough. Storytelling has rules, generally, that can be learned through schooling, or just by consuming media and seeing what works for you, what doesn’t work and why. That’s what this site is for really, just a personal thought experiment to analyze and learn from storytelling. And if anyone else likes it, well that is just peachy.

Another common statement is that rules are meant to be broken. I mean, if rules weren’t broken we would never had movies like Pulp Fiction (rule: generally tell your story in chronological order). And if you are a master of storytelling, like Quentin Tarantino (writer/director of the aforementioned Pulp Fiction), or I would consider Guillermo Del Toro in that category, the rules can be less and less important. If a lesser writer tried to tackle Pulp Fiction, it would come out as a complete mess.

So what’s the rule being broken in Nightmare Alley?

Unfortunately, this is where some minor spoilers come into effect. I will try to keep them to a minimum, but when talking about the story, you kind of have to talk about the plot.

Ostensibly, Nightmare Alley is two stories, or more precisely, two halves of the same story with little connective tissue between them. There is a time jump, a drastic change in location, and outside of one scene, a complete change of cast outside of Bradley Cooper’s Stanton Carlisle and his electric-lady-turned-psychic-partner Molly played by Rooney Mara.

So, there are two ways to play this. Either straight up divide the movie in half (or however long two chunks) and have no change in time save for brief flashbacks set before the film begins, or interweave the two stories to play incongruently.

Del Toro decided to keep the two halves as separate as possible. And since he likes fairy tales and fables, let us spin a little yarn of our own.

Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas the movie is a decisive one. For me, its up there with the original Matrix as the Wachioski’s best work (not saying much, given their uneven backlog). But there are many people thag dislike the movie for the length, performances or convuluted story.

Well, Cloud Atlas is based on a book written by David Mitchell and I have read it. There are many differences between the movie and book, but the biggest one is the structure.

Cloud Atlas is composed of a handful of vastly different stories. They are tied together thematically and by the idea of reincarnation.

In the Wachowskis’ film the stories, for lack of a better term, happen at the same time. The film flips between these stories constantly, and many of them rise up, climax and descend together. If you can get into the story, it is extremely satisfying to watch.

David Mitchell’s book is structured completely different. The first story, a man on a ship, takes up the first and last chapters of the novel. The next story takes up the second and second last chapters, and so on until the last story is a larger chapter in the middle, and the pattern repeats in reverse.

There are positives and negatives to each approach. Mitchell’s novel is much easier to follow, as each you have to only follow one story at a time instead of bouncing between all of them. But you lose the sense of connectiveness when all the stories come together at just the right moment during the film.

But to be fair, it wouldn’t work quite as well in book form if all the stories climaxed together. Film is so kineti, fast and visual. Just a one second shot can communicate what story we are in and what is happening. One second! To say what would take a novel a paragraph to say. And that’s not a bad thing, but its impossible to mimic the speed and tempo a well timed scene can have in book form. Or at least very tough.

So really, its up to you which you prefer. The distinct chunks, or everytjing being mixed together. But really, is depends on the story being told.

Are We There Yet?

Nightmare Alley takes the Cloud Atlas novel approach of keeping the two stories it is telling at arms length of each other. There are no flash forwards in the first half of the movie, and scant few flashbacks in the back half (at least to events that took place during the first half of the movie).

The problem with that is that the runtime for Nightmare Alley is two hours and twenty minutes, the longest Guillermo Del Toro movie to date (beating Shape of Water by 18 minutes). By any standards, that is a long movie, but Nightmare Alley justifies this long runtime by having . relatively fast pace, and lots of stuff going on to keep audiences entertained. There isn’t anything that sticks out as distinctly cutable without losing something from the experience and its hard to not be entertained throughout.

The problem is that with a few rewrites, this could easily be two good, full length movies. Now that inherently isn’t a bad thing. The problem is that it might make the film overlong to moviegoers.

The circus portion of the movie has a clear beginning, middle and end. When the two years later tag comes, its hard to decipher whether this is just an epilogue, a third act, or a whole half of a movie. If people are expecting the movie to be finished, or have fallen head over heels for the narrative beforehand.

Tangent on Theatres and Toilets

Now I saw this movie in theatres, I think the only way to see it right now, and thankfully I am in a part of the world that still has theatres open.

Due to the rise of streaming and this whole pandemic business, its become the trendy to hate on the whole theatre-going experience.

Personally, maybe because I haven’t seen quite as many movies as some others, I have not had a bad theatre-going experience. Even in this showing, some teenagers talking in the back corner did not ruin it.

In fact, at times it has raised the experience considerably. Krampus starring Adam Scott is a fine enough film, but one moment burns it in my mind. The titular Krampus is doing some Yuletide shenanigans on the roof, and our doomed group of protagonists are sitting in the living room.

“Must be squirrels,” the grouchy old grandma opines. Then a loud bang comes, followed by “Playing with their nuts.”

Hey, not all jokes are winners and this one went about as well as you expect. Silence for a beat, and then one man lets out a huge, belly-laugh, all-out guffaw, and then the whole theatre laughed along. You can’t buy that. The guy was with a girl, and she didn’t seem to be having the best time. I hope they are doing okay.

But, to get slightly on track, the theatre does offer some downsides. There are no subtitles, but that isn’t a huge deal. My partner turned me on to them. Its just handy to catch all the dialogue fully sometimes, and you hardly notice they’re there.

The other, bigger, problem is the lack of pausing ability to use the toilet. Yeah, its unfortunate to have to pick your spots to do the least amount of damage, and run and do your business as quick as possible. Or try to hold it in as long as possible and miss the climax á la me at Arrival (I’ve seen it multiple times since, so I do know how a certain phonecall was made, but the first time I missed it. I was so mad, my friend convinced my other friend I was storming out because I hated it).

And then there’s The Last Jedi. Its not good, but I hate missing anything, so I was determined to sit through the whole thing. It didn’t hurt that I felt I had to go sometime after Kylo Ren killed Snoke, and they were having a big fight in a Star Destroyer that was destroyed in the one good shot of the film. Sounds like the finale, I can hold it for a few minutes.

I should’ve known. The film was mindlessly going against expectations, so why not tack a different climax and another half an hour? And let me tell you, that planet needlessly made out of salt (get it? You expected it to be snow, but its not!) felt like forever.

While I’m not saying the last half of Nightmare Alley took forever, but at the start of the time jump, it might have felt longer than it had to be.

The Quick Fix

The disappointing thing is that the story had a built in way to fix this problem.

You can make it into two movies, but that’s a tough sell. The first has to have done well enough to afford a second (and putting it up against Spiderman essentially doomed it), and then you have to sell a sequel that’s fairly loosely tied to the first. Little to no common locations and very few of the same characters.

Unfortunately, to explain this will go into further spoilers of the plot.

Stan uses his newfound pseudopsychic abilities to put on a hit show in the city, but finds a better grift in being a personal consultant/psychic to the uber-rich with dead people problems. Dr. Ritter is a psychatrist who figures out Stan’s game and gets cut into the deal.

The thing is, Dr. Ritter doesn’t want his money to spill the beans on her upper crust clients, she wants information on Stan’s past.

What better way to organically involve long flashback sequences than to frame them around Dr. Ritter’s psychiatric sessions with Stan. It meters out the information to Dr. Ritter and the audience in a natural way.

Because in reality you will always have a favourite. Ask any parent about their favourite child and they will lie and say they love both equally. But even though both of them are great there will always be one of them that you connect to more than the other.

Both halves of Nightmare Alley are great and well done. But no matter how great they are, you will always like one more than the other. One half will always bring the other down because it simply is just not as good as the other. And by having the halves so seperate, it just drives the difference that much further.

So shoukd you watch Nightmare Alley? Yes. All of it is pretty much fantastic, if you can stomach the long runtime. Its Guillermo Del Toro. Its just unfortunate that it maybe could’ve been better.

Dune: Denis Villeneuve’s Story Lacks Immediacy

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is probably the biggest sci-fi epic since Star Wars has ended its latest trilogy with the Rise of Skywalker. And with that comes a huge number of bandwagoners, both positive and negative. Its either the best thing ever, or totally awful and there’s little in between.

Well, for my two cents, I thought that the movie was pretty great. Its definitely not perfect, but the directing and production value are top notch, even if the storytelling isn’t amazing at times.

It really is impossible to value this movie as a whole, since it is very clear that this is half a story. It is two-and-a-half hours and tells half a story. For context, I read the first book in the Dune series at the start of the year, and I thought that it could possibly be a single movie if there is a lot of lore and context cut down. But then I saw David Lynch’s version.

Love him or hate him, Lynch’s Dune is a bit of a mess. Its so weird and dense and Lynchian and doesn’t fully work. Its not bad, but its not great either.

Possibly Villeneuve’s Dune’s greatest strength is the cast. The jury is still out if Timothee Chalamet can pull off the warrior ruler Paul of the second half of Dune, but he plays really well as the brooding teen that is being used by most of the other characters in the story. He also has good chemisty with Oscar Isaac’s Duke Leto, but obviously that won’t be a factor in Dune II.

I didn’t love Rebecca Fergusson as Lady Jessica, but it is a tough and thankless role. She goes from fearful and controlling to just fearful of Paul.

Villeneuve’s Dune is focused and gives the story time to breathe. It has an almost dogmatically strict adhesion to the source material, but strayed in a few choice moments.

The fact that Doctor Kynes is a woman as opposed to a man, as they were in the book, makes absolutely no difference narratively. But there are other characters that are changed, and not for the better.

Doctor Yueh

Okay, so if you just watched Villeneuve’s Dune, you don’t really know what happened with Dr. Yueh, played by Chang Chen. In the film, Yueh is simply a minor character who appears in two scenes before betraying the House Atreides.

Its a similar story to Lynch’s Dune, which has some leeway, as it has to barrel through an immense amount of exposition and story in a miniscule amount of time. And also his vision had a definitive end.

Dune the novel is large, but it is also incredibly dense. Everything has multiple names and the history is rich and plentiful. Its tough to remember everything while watching a two-and-a-half hour movie, and both versions of the movie forgo explicitly describing what things like the Kwisatz Haderach and Bene Gesserit mean, but context clues get the audience by on minimal information.

This doesn’t apply with Dr. Yueh and the mystery of who betrayed the House Atreides. Because in the book, after Paul is attacked by a hunter-seeker, it becomes clear that someone has betrayed the Duke and let a Harkonnen spy into the palace.

Then a good chunk of the first act is everyone trying to figure out who the traitor is. Duncan Idaho, Dr. Yueh, Gurney Halleck and Thufir Hawat have been given equal emphasis so far in the story, and even Jessica herself is seen as a suspect. No one is comfortable with anyone else, and it is a major driving force of tension early on in the story. Its tension that doesn’t really exist in either film.

In my opinion, focusing on the betrayal would have made for a more immediate watching experience, especially for a film that does not have an ending. Duke Leto’s story is one of the only aspects of this film that has an ending. But without any heft to the mystery, the resolution to the Duke’s storyline lacks weight.

In the novel, Dr. Yueh is a physician, that has gone through Suk Imperial Conditioning. That Conditioning is basically like an extreme version of the Hippocratic Oath, so much so that it is seen as impossible for these physicians to cause any harm.

And that is why Dr. Yueh’s betrayal is so surprising and impactful in the book. The Duke quickly dismisses Yueh as a possible suspect, and by proxy, the reader also dismisses him.

The problem is in how the Harkonnens managed to break Dr. Yueh. Its not great. They just kidnap his wife and children, and told the Doctor that they were going to kill his family if he didn’t betray the Atreides. Its a rather obvious solution, and its hard to believe no one else tried that before. But the plan was put into place by the mind of…

Piter de Vries

Who? That’s what I think I would say if I had just seen the film and nothing else. Piter is played by David Dastmalchian, of the Suicide Squad fame, and is barely featured in the film. Piter is a Mentat, along with a similarly underused Thufir Hawat (Stephen McKinley Hendersen). Mentats are also a victim of this bareboned style of exposition, along with Dr. Yueh.

In the lore of Dune, there was a battle a long time ago between man and machine (as machines had become sentient) and the humans won, vowing to never create artificial intelligence again. Its an interesting distinction against most typical science fiction, which is littered with robots.

Now, is that necessarily essential? No, of course not, but it does hwlp describe what a mentat is. Since there are no more computers, humans need some way to do what computers can do. And so Mentats are akin to human computers, capable of vast calculations and borderline future-seeing abilities, just by calculating odds. I can remember Thifur saying one thing that was a great calculation, but that was all I can remember. No mention of what a mentat actually is.

Piter De Vries is also a mentat, but corrupted by the Harkonnens. There are a lot of chapters that take place with the villains, and many times Piter is the reader’s proxy, until his death of course. He’s the one that concocts this scheme for the Baron Harkonnen, and is the one that found the way to break Dr. Yueh.

In the movie, Piter goes to see the Sardukar army, and dies when Duke Leto gasses the room. Its an interesting development when he dies in the book, as it completely changes the dynamics of the villains, he’s the villain we are closest to, and it is surprising when he dies. None of those are true in the film, and the only way people would know about him is that that’s the guy who played the Polka Dot man.

Sardaukar

The ties that bind Yueh and Piter together is that they have little to no impact on the second half of the book (or the second movie in this case). Its clear that most of this movie is building up to events in the second half of the story, including fleshing out the prophetic dreams Paul has throughout his time on Arrakis.

If you can allow me to be cynical for a moment, there could be a different reason outside the realms of the movie itself. Dune is a big name in the world of science-fiction literature, a decidedly older demographic. There are big names in the movie like Oscar Isaac, Rebecca Fergusson and Josh Brolin, but they can’t be considered superstars. To a lot of people, Isaacs is the guy from Star Wars, and some people might recognize Brolin under all the makeup and CGI from the last two Avengers movies.

Zendaya is a big draw, especially for the young crowd. And there were young audience members that were disappointed in her lack of screen time. Big names get big numbers at the box office. Older people were already interested in the Dune name, Zendaya gets the younger tickets.

Anyways, when adapting a work, its all about give and take, especially with the gargantuan Dune. Give more to Zendaya’s Chani, there’s something that will go missing.

Unfortunately, it came at the expense of the Sardaukar. They exist in the film, but without anything that made them special in the novel. The Sardaukar are an elite fighting force that come from the Emperor’s prison planet. It is a brutal planet, and only the best of the best become Sardaukar, the most fearsome fighting force in the universe. Sure they are some intimidating force in the film, but not to the point in the book.

The Harkonnens are not the most intimidating physically. The Baron is morbidly obese, and needs gravity lifts to move around his immense weight. He has two cousins, a meatheaded barbarian named Glossu Rabban, and a lithe and cunning would-be heir to the throne named Feyd-Rautha. Only one appears in the film, Dave Batista’s barbaric Glossu Rabban, and it remains to be seen if Feyd-Rautha will appear in the sequel. It reasons that Villeneuve decided to hold off on the second nephew as to introduce something new in Dune 2.

The intimidating force in the book is the Sardaukar. They are a presence in this film, but not to the extent that they are in the novel. The Sardaukar aren’t just a good fighting force, you don’t survive if you cross blades with them. They are a death sentence and the film just doesn’t have the same gravitas. When Duncan stalls the Sardaukar to save Jessica and Paul, it is shocking that he kills some of them, not that he dies.

The film kind of augmented this by putting a lot more weight on the Baron. It is no longer Piter’s idea for the take-over, but the Baron’s. He no longer kills members of his staff indiscriminately like in the Lynch version. Unfortunately, the Baron doesn’t really have anything to do in the first film, and he doesn’t interact with the main cast, outside of the capture of Duke Leto. He’s a puppet master, pulling the strings behind the scenes, never out front.

Conclusion

Should there be a conclusion if the film didn’t have one?

In all seriousness, its really hard to judge this as a movie. The end leaves a definite sour taste in the views mouth, especially those unfamiliar with the source material. A story isn’t just an ending, but a lot of time is setting up things that will resolve at the ending. And the old adage is true, stick the landing and many issues can be smoothed over in the minds of the audience. Sour the ending, and many great moments will be forgotten.

Dune does not have an ending. It doesn’t really have a cliffhanger. Just a few minutes after a knife fight and what felt like a tacked on Zendaya voice-over, the credits roll. It almost feels like Villeneuve tried to stuff the runtime as full as possible, and added a “This isn’t over; in fact, its just beginning” speech as late as allowed by the studio.

So this movie could very possibly be just an afterthought. It wholly depends on Dune 2 being good, because if it isn’t, there is no reason to watch this movie again. Its like having a great soup to start a meal. It all really depends on the main course. You aren’t going back to a restaurant that has a good salad but a terrible main course. Odds are that Dune 2 will be good, it is a Villeneuve movie, and he seems to only make good movies. But right now, Dune Part 1 is an incomplete, if not very good story.

His House: Personalizing Horror

His House is a new horror film on Netflix directed by Remi Weekes and starring Sope Dirisu and Wunmi Mosaku as a couple that are refugees from South Sudan who hope to start a new life in England. Matt Smith plays the immigration officer who tells them that they must live in a run down house to become citizens with no supplemental income. After a night at the house, it is clear that there is something malevolent in the house, which will be spoiled here.

NOT JUST ANY HAUNTED HOUSE

His House fits pretty squarely into the haunted house genre of horror films. There is an evil spirit that seems to be tied to the house, and generally all of the spooky stuff happens under the cover of nightfall. It also have a shared problem with other movies of such genre with a lack of rules of what the evil spirit can do. One moment it seems that the spirit can kill the occupants of the house at whim, and the next it seems powerless to stop them from getting away.

His House however deftly disarms those problems by making the horror deeply personal. It eschews the tropes of the traditional haunted house by not making the spirit an old man that used to live in the house, or a generic demonic spirit, but the haunting memories of what was done to get the couple to where they are now. It gives the horror a personal edge that cuts through some of the traditional faults of the genre.

WHAT IS REAL?

Unlike most haunted house movies, there is very little contact with the outside world. There are no paranormal investigators, no newsteams, and even no friends or family to come in and share in the terror. This provides ample room for interpretation and doubt as to whether the events are actually taking place. All that is proven when the immigration officer comes to inspect the house is that holes have been put in the walls. It can be because there is the ghost of a witch doctor in the house, or the pressure of conformity and the true horrors that they endured to get to England.

In other haunted house stories, there are things that are done and said that the current occupants would have no idea about the previous occupants or spirit. It leaves no question of the legitimacy of the supernatural occurances. Here, all the supernatural goings on are based on common superstition and the little girl that was killed on the way to England.

Because that is where the true horror lies. The true terrible things that happen to all refugees overshadow all other things that can happen. The mental strain of doing anything you can to survive is immense and the increased pressure of being isolated could cause hallucinations and insanity in the strongest people.

ASSIMILATION VS TRADITION

The main strain put on the relationship between Bol and Rial is the pressure to assimilate against keeping the tradition of South Sudan in their lives. It is as small as Bol trying to wear English clothes and eating with a fork and knife, and Rial complaining of the taste of metal coming from the cutlery. It comes to a head when Bol decides to burn all possessions that have ties to Sudan in an attempt to kill the past and start totally fresh and leave this witch doctor in the past. It predictably backfires as the supernatural happenings become more and more serious.

There is a lesson to be learned that neither total assimilation nor tradition is the correct course of action. We cannot totally supress the past, nor should we. Once the possessions are burned, the spirits become more powerful and malevolent. As anyone tries to bury the traumas of the past, they have ways of coming up in other, more harmful ways. But at the same time, totally unattempting to change into the new culture just heightens lonliness and isolation. There isn’t a clear cut answer, but all towards one direction is not the answer.

MEANINGFULNESS

Its this subtext is what elevates His House above the average horror flick. It may not be a movie that keeps you up at night, or has the greatest scares, but it is a movie that means something other than trying to spook with disparate scares. It says something about refugees and immigration, past and trauma, it tries to stick with the audience. Say something about the world that we live in. And that is more than most horror films even can think to be.

The Midnight Sky: Wasted Potential

The Midnight Sky is the latest movie from Netflix and is directed by and starring George Clooney as Augustine Lofthouse, an astronomer who might be the last person on the earth after an unspecified global catastrophe. He is trying to reach the crew of the Æther, a spaceship returning from a mission from one of the moons of Jupiter. It is captained by a pregnant Sully (Felicity Day), her husband Adewole (David Oyelowo), inexperienced medic Maya (Tiffany Boone), and crewmen Sanchez (Damien Bichir) and Mitchell (Kyle Chandler). While alone, Augustine finds a young girl who cannot speak (Caoilinn Springall).

Its hard to talk about this movie as a whole as it feels like two separate films that come together at the end. That will be reflected in this text, because as well as being separate narratives, each has different problems.

PART 1: THE ÆTHER

SOME MINOR GRIEVANCES

The Æther as previously stated is a spaceship with a small crew that was sent to one of the moons of Jupiter. It is set about 30 years ago, so technology has advanced, but I would hazard a guess and say that it is still a long trip there and back. Sully is pregnant and most likely was impregnated during the trip, which would be something I would think NASA, or whatever agency sending them on their mission, would frown upon. Its another mouth to feed, and could cause a myriad of potential health problems for the mother and child. Not to mention the fact that the pregnant Sully is chosen to go out on a dangerous and stressful spacewalk, putting two lives at risk. And even if she is the only one who could fix the broken radar, there are clear video and communications from inside the ship to outside, meaning she can direct anyone to fix it. Its and unnecessary and unbelievable risk that these characters made.

One of the only source of conflict for the crew of the Æther is that the auto pilot on the ship fails, sending them a few degrees off course. A few degrees may not seem like much, but in space it can mean using too much fuel to realign themselves back into the correct trajectory. So the crew decides to pilot through unmapped space and hope there is nothing there. As it happens, there are meteors there.

Unfortunately, this conflict falls under the coincidence category, a death knell for many plot points and conflicts in storytelling. Its such a simple fix as well that its a shame nothing was done about it. All there needs to be is one or two lines of dialogue that explain why the auto pilot was shut off. Maybe an unexpected flare of radiation? Some minor space debris? Anything other than no explanation at all. Otherwise the storyteller shows their hand, and the story feels contrived. Every story has strings that the author pulls, but the trick is to mask those strings so no one sees.

SLOW PACING DOESN’T MEAN BAD PACING

The Midnight Sky is a slower paced movie than most big budget movies, and mainstream audiences with shorter attention spans may see this automatically as a negative. Especially a streaming audience, who don’t have the obligation of paying 15$+ tickets at a theater. Its much easier to shut off a “free” streaming movie than walk out a theater. And for the most part, the opening of The Midnight Sky does a good job of grabbing the audience with a great George Clooney performance.

Every story has a pace that works best to tell it. Augustine Lofthouse’s story has problems, but there is nothing that can be fixed by upping the pace. Its slow, contemplative, lonely and is the perfect pace to tell this story. Unfortunately, its only half of this story, and the pacing has to carry over from one half of the story to another. Without it the audience risks getting tonal whiplash. Especially when the two halves are being cut to back and forth, and those two halves are pretty distant from each other.

However, the slow pace does not necessarily work perfect for the storyline on the Æther. There are more characters and a lighter tone in general than the story back on Earth. And that slow pacing that’s brought from one storyline to another comes to a head in paradoxically one of the worst and best scenes in the movie.

THE SPACEWALK

The spacewalk is a long scene in the latter half of the movie where three spacemen venture out to repair the communication radar after it was struck by space debris. It all culminates in the droplets of blood  sequence where Maya discovers she has been wounded as blood floats around in her helmet. It becomes a race to get her medical attention and is a tense and visually great looking scene. The problem is everything before it.

This scene begs for a more seasoned director and writer to be at the helm. Both George Clooney and Mark L. Smith have nine credits to their names of directing and writing respectively. And this scene is one that needs better direction. The entire scene is an attempt at building tension, that does no such thing. There are a couple different reasons for this, but the sequence, outside of the finale with the blood, seems aped off of other stories. Like it seems that they knew there is supposed to be lighthearted moments of levity before a tragedy and that can be used to ramp up tension in some cases. But it is used so ineffectively.

First off the sequence is too long to be effective. The build up of Maya being sick in the spaceship, to getting out and moving around, to a whole verse and chorus of Sweet Caroline, more spacewalking and fixing until the asteroids come is just mindnumbingly long. Especially when you consider where it falls in the runtime.

METATEXTUAL STORYTELLING

When telling a story, one has to always be aware of the audience and expectations that they have of the story. This changes from medium to medium and genre to genre, but its always there. Its a delicate balance of giving the audience what they want but not being overtly predictable.

In the context of The Midnight Sky, the spacewalk scene comes in the latter half of the movie, where the audience is sure that if something is going to go wrong it will go wrong now. There’s not much time left for something to happen. Therefore the audience is already tense at the start of the scene.

The build-up to when the asteroids arrive is mostly wasted time. If this scene happened half an hour or more earlier in the film, that build-up would have been more effective, since its more believable that nothing wrong could go wrong. Think the highway scene in Nocturnal Animals, as a scene early in the film with tension that nothing could potentially happen.

TENSION AND DRAMATIC IRONY

Dramatic irony is a bit differently defined than the more general use of irony. Dramatic irony is when the audience knows something that characters in the story do not know. Whether that is the true identity of a character, a character’s true motivation or a plot point, its a useful tool that can serve multiple purposes. Its commonly used in comedies as a physical gag of a character disparaging another character while said character is standing behind them the whole time and other similar situations.

However, it can also be extremely useful in creating tension. Think of amy time you have just wanted to scream through the screen at characters to do something other than what they are doing. That’s dramatic irony.

One of the most famous examples of dramatic irony creating tension is in Die Hard, when John Mclean meets the villain, Hans Gruber. Only, John Mclean isn’t aware that this is Hans. The tension is then further ramped up when John hands Hans a gun.

Dramatic irony can also work the other way, where characters know things that the audience doesn’t. Its the moment of tension where the good guys look like they won, but then the villain starts to laugh. They know something that the audience doesn’t. Otherwise why would they be laughing when they are defeated?

The problem with The Midnight Sky is that it does none of these different options for building tension. No one is in direct peril until the asteroids are upon them (after all, there could be no other asteroid shower coming), and the audience knows the same amount of information as the characters. There’s nothing that adds to the tension. No new information or even a ticking clock to add tension. Its all empty space. There isn’t even a question of what is going to happen. We can put together from what happened that if there will be peril, it will come from asteroids.

The sad part is that this could be fixed really easily. It could be as simple as showing another asteroid shower coming in the distance, where the characters cannot see. Or even have one character see the incoming danger and have them drowned out by the playing of Sweet Caroline. Sure that last suggestion would call into question how good the astronauts are at health and safety, but it would bring in some semblance of tension building and peril, unlike the long scene of nothing that we get

PART 2 – AUGUSTINE LOFTHOUSE

George Clooney as Augustine Lofthouse is the fingertips that keep this movie on the cliff of being good. The only problem is that there is not enough of him.

CROWDED ISOLATION

Augustine’s storyline is a fairly simple tale of isolation. He’s alone in an inhospitable landscape, trying to contact people that might not be out there. Except the film never succeeds in making the audience feel that isolation.

Iris is introduced far too early in the film. Instead of getting to know Augustine alone and developing his character, Iris is introduced very quickly, as if the film is worried about how gripping just George Clooney would be on his own. Which is not true.

It is a casuality of a movie that doesn’t really know where is the best place to spend its time. The amount of time and emphasis on the characters on the Æther actively fights the goals and atmosphere created in Augustine’s half of the movie. There’s a strong connection from Augustine to the Æther, with him trying to contact it, but there is nothing coming back. No one knows he exists, or that he’s trying to contact them, or anything has gone wrong. That creates a huge gulf between two halves of the movie and there is nothing done until the very end to bridge that gap.

SPEAKING ON GAPS

There is a lack of concrete measurements on where characters and places are. The Æther is on its way to Earth but we are never sure where exactly it is or how far away from Earth it is. Augustine has to move away from his current location to a different base with more powerful communication systems. The only problem is that I don’t remember hearing or seeing how far away it is.

Vagueness can be effective in building a tension of when characters will arrive at a location. However, where there is no idea how far Augustine and Iris have to go to reach this other Arctic station, its hard to feel tension in the scenes that would otherwise be a lot more tension filled. It would provide a lot stronger feeling of dread if we knew that Augustine still had tens of miles to cross after he fell through the ice, however with no marker to guide us, we don’t know if he still has 100 miles or a few feet away.

THE PROBLEM OF KNOWING TOO MUCH

Early on in the movie, we know that the Æther is okay and safely on its way back to Earth. It takes a lot of narrative heft away from Augustine’s storyline. There could have been so much more drama if the audience didn’t know if the Æther was still out there or not. It could be made a point early in the film that it is late, and there may have been a problem, but Augustine wouldn’t give up on them.

There would have been a worrying throughline of “what if this was all for nothing?” All the hell that Augustine goes through seems much more justified because we know that the Æther is out there. Instead of a man who is embarking on a dangerous journey for a last ditch effort to save humanity that might not work, we know that there is hope. The dark and slow atmosphere of Augustine’s half of the film would have much benefitted from this vaguery and more hopeless feeling.

LACK OF IMPACT

There are a couple of story beats in Augustine’s storyline that lack the correct impact that should be given to them. When talking about the new station that he and Iris are trying to reach he talks about all the food that will be there and how nice it is. However, once they arrive, we never see anything of the station outside of the one room that Augustine is in when he contacts the Æther.

Part of the big twist at the end of the film is that Sully is actually Iris Sullivan, Augustine’s daughter, and the young Iris that Augustine was living with was a figment of his imagination. It doesn’t work well has an emotional moment, since we don’t spend enough time with Augustine alone, and we don’t spend enough time with Augustine and Iris together to feel strongly about this. There are two scenes where Augustine and Iris and eating peas and pushing them across the table at each other, and one where Augustine tries to get Iris to sleep in another room. Its not enough to build up an emotional connection to feel strongly when its revealed that Iris was never really there.

And that is the crux of the problems with the film. Since its so split between two separate stories, neither has the time and space to do what they need to do to make an good story. And its a shame cause there could have been something there, just out of reach.

P.S. THE BOOK

I have not read the book. There is not a ton of information on it online. It doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. However, I found some information in reviews of the book of a change that the film made. In the book, Sully isn’t pregnant.

This seems like a small change. Just an addition to up the drama on the Æther. That is until you learn about what her story is in the book. She has a daughter on Earth, estranged since she decided to go on this long space journey. Her now ex-husband is estranged from her as well. This is very similar to the backstory of Augustine. He loses his partner and daughter over his obsession to colonize space. This could’ve been a great way to bring the two stories together, seeing how two different people deal with the struggle of family over obsession. Unfortunately, its just another wasted opportunity.

Yesterday and Chekov’s Gun

Yesterday is a pretty simple concept, and a fairly simple movie overall. Anyone that’s heard the movie gets the basic concept. A failing musician (Himesh Patel) gets hit by a bus and the rest of the world forgets everything about the Beatles. Its a simple enough concept, but it forgot one of the basic rules of storytelling.

CHEKOV’S GUN

Chekov’s gun is a practice in a lack of excess. The basic idea is that if there is a gun hanging on the wall, then a character has to take it down and fire it. Now, the purpose of the gun doesn’t have to be so explicit. It can inform the audience about a character’s violent nature, or serve as a dire bit of foreshadowing. The point is, the gun has to have a point in the story. If something doesn’t have a point, it shouldn’t be in the story. What does this have to with Yesterday? Well two things…

OASIS SIDEBAR

Before getting into the good stuff, a little sidebar on the band Oasis. When Jack first discovers that no one remembers the Beatles, he runs off to do a Google search. He finds no sign of the Beatles, but finds other musicians, like the Rolling Stones and Childish Gambino, to be completely intact. Then, he searches Oasis and finds nothing. Its a funny little jab at Oasis being Beatles rip offs, but opens a huge can of worms.

I don’t pretend to know too much about music, but I know that the Beatles have a wide and long lasting impact on a huge amount of music, from pop to rock to metal and beyond. The logic of the movie seems to be that everyone forgets about the Beatles, but their influence and impact remains. Like the past wasn’t changed at all, and everyone just forgot. Except that Oasis doesn’t exist anymore, due to the fact that the Beatles don’t exist. Perhaps inadvertently, the film makers are saying that the full extent of the influence the Beatles had on popular music is limited to Oasis, and bands like Coldplay or singers like Ed Sheeran would be the exact same without the Beatles.

This Oasis conundrum at least has a purpose in the story. Its a funny, applicable joke that only begins to not make sense if you think about it for too long. Unlike these other two things…

COCA-COLA AND CIGARETTES

Coke and cigarettes. Now, the main conceit of this movie is that after the accident, the Beatles no longer exist. The world is generally the same outside of that point. There are three major discrepancies though. One was previously discussed in Oasis, but the other two is that the mega company Coca Cola and the mega industry of cigarettes both, also, no longer exist.

The big question is what exactly is the point of Coca Cola and cigarettes no longer being around. Coca Cola originated in 1886, and cigarettes have been around since at least the 9th century. That’s a lot older than the Beatles, who formed in 1957. And its not like these were not popular products until the Beatles influenced them to be. They were very popular before any of the Beatles were even born. So, unlike the Oasis reference, I cannot see this being some half baked commentary on the Beatles influence on popular music.

So, first off, Coca Cola. As far as I can remember Coca Cola is mentioned twice. First, when Jack is going to perform Let It Be and second, when Jack is on Ed Sheeran’s private jet. The first mention is purely superfluous. There is absolutely no reason for it that I can find. The second mention is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it joke. The stewardess on the jet gives Jack a funny look, implying she thought he was ordering cocaine instead of a soft drink. So that’s a purpose. Its a very small purpose. But it still has a purpose.

Cigarettes, on the other hand, have no discernable purpose. Towards the end of the movie, before a large show Jack has to perform. Jack makes a comment about how he would “kill for a cigarette” and his friend Rocky (Joel Fry) says he has no idea what those are. That’s it. No joke, or commentary on anything. It could have been an interesting exacerbating problem to Jack’s story. He could have been going through withdrawal as well as dealing with his newfound fame. However, its just a throwaway line.

WEIGHT

Every story has throwaway lines of dialogue. Mostly empty, vague words of little importance that help the movie along. Not every line can be a perfect masterpiece, and nor should they be. A story without throwaway lines would lack a good amount of connecting tissue that would make the story hard to follow for anyone experiencing it.

The trick is knowing what can be a throwaway and what cannot. Just think of all the Star Trek style science fiction, where a fair amount of the script is techno-babble that doesn’t really mean anything.

“Because of the spinning gravity of the nearby planets are throwing off the rotating black matter thrusters on the ship, we cannot get enough momentum to move forward”

Does any of that sentence make sense? I should hope not, I made it up on the spot as a poorly written example of this throwaway line in science fiction. But does it matter if the audience fully understands this or not? The implication is perfectly clear. “We’re stuck.” That’s what the narrative needs to convey to the audience, and unless it is crucial to the plot, and science mumbo jumbo works just as well as the next.

However, when the entire movie is about the whole world forgetting one thing, there must be a great reason for any other examples of mass amnesia (and I mean reason in the story sense. There has to be some reason in the narrative for something so integral to the plot existing. I’m perfectly okay with the lack of explanation why everyone forgets).

Think of it this way, if you have a story that takes place in tens of rooms, and one of them has a gun in it, does it really need to fire? It should serve some purpose to the narrative, but there are tons of other rooms, so the importance is diminished. But if the story is a contained thriller set in one house or one room, that gun had better go off. There’s no wiggle room of a lack of emphasis, or a proverbial watering down of the walls. If its so important, use it or delete it. The only question is why wasn’t cigarettes and coke used or deleted in Yesterday?

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