Sublimity in print.
- Features
- December 31, 2024
- visuals bySamuel Mendez II
It is a tough act to follow the last two years for cinema. 2022 and especially 2023 were extraordinary years for movies and was quite frankly, the final shaking off of the pandemic by the global film industry. A return to the movies after COVID. As a result, given the two years prior, and to run the risk of this sentence becoming very way-off in the near future, the two shimmering years after it, 2024 has been seen as disappointing. Not helping it is the fact that many of the year’s biggest critical darlings could be seen as 2023 leftovers. Even half of this very list (to spoil it a little), has it susceptible to this label. Below you are ten movies, one of which is a documentary to a 2023 movie, two having had their initial release in 2023 festivals, and two that were supposed to come out last year but were arbitrarily delayed. Five movies that could be argued came from the year prior, all culminating in 2024 having the assessment of a letdown. But I disagree. Sidestepping the issue of the year being comprised of last year’s scraps, the general culture of cinema this year has exhibited a fervour and passion that has been the continued momentum of the last two years, not a technical retread. Adding on to how music, literature, art, sport, and celebrity were blossoming back to pre-COVID, the world seems to have had its first normal year of this decade. And with its wicked witches, gladiators, killer clown defendants, blue hedgehogs, fourth-wall breaking mutants, sentient emotions, an above average number of monkeys, and Jason Schwartzmans, the movies were essential in that.
DISCLAIMER
Last year when I did this and still used courier font to simulate a typewriter, I issued a disclaimer. The conditions of my life set by said disclaimer have not changed so I will repeat it here verbatim.
I am but a mere college student dependent on parental allowances living in the third-world Philippines. I neither have the time, money, nor geographical ability to watch everything I wanted to watch this year. I always bemoan this during December but unless I start to get paid to write these reviews and travel to film festivals to escape the yearly MMFF purge, there are unfortunately some notable omissions.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
It’s What’s Inside
With this and Bodies Bodies Bodies, we as a society must cement “horrible rich friends that secretly hate each other die in a mansion party horror comedies” an annual genre because this was so much fun.
Saturday Night
I’m a monkey, if a movie is funny and chaotic I can excuse it for just being a glorified series of well acted impressions and it’s really well acted.
Rebel Ridge
You never realize how much you miss straight up crisp action movies that you will watch with your dad for years to come.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
Gave me exactly the expansive worldbuilding I was dying to see in the original trilogy and continues to have one of the best visual effects of the modern era that will probably somehow not win the Oscar.
Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story
Watching hope be crystallized in a spirit despite what will eventually be fatal circumstances because of unending love and support will make it impossible not to cry.
I Saw The TV Glow
A David Lynch movie in a time where David Lynch can’t make a movie anymore, what other blessing can you ask for in these dark times.
The Secret of the Sacred Fig
Despite being internationally famous for strict censorship and media regulation, Iran continues to be as internationally famous for its impeccable film industry and using it as an essential tenet in fighting back.
Juror #2
Being incompetent and incomprehensible would’ve been totally permissible given a 94-year-old Clint Eastwood directed it but for it to be this unwrinkled and gripping is something a much younger man would struggle to pull off.
Anora
Sean Baker shows yet again that he is probably the best American filmmaker around now who can portray America the best as he serves a hilarious comedy with such deep entrenched sadness beneath it.
The Substance
Feels fresh yet universal and unfortunately evergreen, like how such a movie could very well have been made during the decades its beautifully grotesque body-horror influences thrived in.
Hit Man
Richard Linklater continues to prove that he is the king of making witty people pleasers with intense humanity, Glenn Powell continues to prove that he is really good at being a movie star, and Adria Arjona continues to prove that love and sex are bloodlines in cinema.
A Different Man
Probably my favorite screenplay of the year with how it sets up and rewards with details and nuances throughout a pitch perfect surreal story with Sebastian Stan’s second stand out performance of the year.
Evil Does Not Exist
Ryusuku Hamaguchi follows up his Oscar win with something similarly quiet yet so engaging and full that through its quality makes one watch so intently that it forces you to meditate.
Conclave
This year had an unprecedented number of elections happening around the world and this movie with its gossiping, politicking, and glares and twitches that mean a thousand words in one second makes the perfect companion to this hellscape.
How To Make Millions Before Grandma Dies
Specifically engineered to make you cry, a fact the title screams out loud and puts you under the false pretense of being prepared for its emotional devastation only to find yourself emotionally devastated by the end.
10. La Chimera
La Chimera follows a group of rowdy Italian tomb raiders in 1980s Tuscany with an English archaeologist named Arthur newly freed from prison at the center of it. One of two Josh O’Connor movies on this list, and one of two performances that should be nominated for an Academy Award yet will to my indifferent frustration be surely snubbed. A performance that is so perfectly liminal as Arthur just coming off prison is reluctantly forced to live in the present once more while the past tethers on to him, both in the ancient graves their group illegally pilfers and a long lost love from before. A film as tactile yet fuzzy and incomprehensible as the titular Chimera, the movie resurrects a style and aura straight out of the decade and country it’s set in. From the grains in the film to the muted realistic performances, had I not known who Josh O’Connor was I would just assume this was an Italian movie from 1981. Undeniably Italian in every frame and audio byte, La Chimera tells a mythic story with no myth and gives you a dream while you’re awake at sixty frames per second.
La Chimera follows a group of rowdy Italian tomb raiders in 1980s Tuscany with an English archaeologist named Arthur newly freed from prison at the center of it. One of two Josh O’Connor movies on this list, and one of two performances that should be nominated for an Academy Award yet will to my indifferent frustration be surely snubbed. A performance that is so perfectly liminal as Arthur just coming off prison is reluctantly forced to live in the present once more while the past tethers on to him, both in the ancient graves their group illegally pilfers and a long lost love from before. A film as tactile yet fuzzy and incomprehensible as the titular Chimera, the movie resurrects a style and aura straight out of the decade and country it’s set in.
From the grains in the film to the muted realistic performances, had I not known who Josh O’Connor was I would just assume this was an Italian movie from 1981. Undeniably Italian in every frame and audio byte, La Chimera tells a mythic story with no myth and gives you a dream while you’re awake at sixty frames per second.
9. Didi
Annually it seems there’s an obligatory indie middle school coming-of-age movie from either A24 or NEON that with every passing year seems to get more and more specific and tuned towards resembling my life. And Didi has become eerily close to the circumstances of my adolescence that I’ve claimed time and again that movies like Eighth Grade and Lady Bird perfectly portray. Didi follows the titular 13-year-old Didi or Wang Wang or Chris Wang [depending on the relationship], the youngest in a Chinese-American household with his mother and sister during 2008, the latter moving away for college soon. Immigrant household, strong maternal relationships, off color obnoxious male trio of friends, unmoderated internet access, and a hostile yet fundamentally sincere sister dynamic? At this point 2025’s next indie darling is gonna be about a Filipino boy named Sam set in the Middle East. With the sickeningly relatable and resonant relationships, scenarios, and conflicted feelings of being a teenager, it was unavoidable for me to not implant myself onto it and cry. But I think that’s the movie’s biggest strength, that even if one doesn’t check every box as creepily close as I did, the themes here are universal enough that anybody would think the movie just peered into their own memories and projected it. It has come the closest a movie has ever been to actually feeling like it was made for me, and I think anyone will think the same.
Annually it seems there’s an obligatory indie middle school coming-of-age movie from either A24 or NEON that with every passing year seems to get more and more specific and tuned towards resembling my life. And Didi has become eerily close to the circumstances of my adolescence that I’ve claimed time and again that movies like Eighth Grade and Lady Bird perfectly portray. Didi follows the titular 13-year-old Didi or Wang Wang or Chris Wang [depending on the relationship], the youngest in a Chinese-American household with his mother and sister during 2008, the latter moving away for college soon. Immigrant household, strong maternal relationships, off color obnoxious male trio of friends, unmoderated internet access, and a hostile yet fundamentally sincere sister dynamic? At this point 2025’s next indie darling is gonna be about a Filipino boy named Sam set in the Middle East.
With the sickeningly relatable and resonant relationships, scenarios, and conflicted feelings of being a teenager, it was unavoidable for me to not implant myself onto it and cry. But I think that’s the movie’s biggest strength, that even if one doesn’t check every box as creepily close as I did, the themes here are universal enough that anybody would think the movie just peered into their own memories and projected it. It has come the closest a movie has ever been to actually feeling like it was made for me, and I think anyone will think the same.
8. Trap
This was the best trailer of the year, hands-down. Absolute delight comes every time it was played and fills me every time with an overwhelming sense of anticipation. I see it and I think to myself “Well now I have to see what happens in that one!” And yeah I loved seeing what happened in this one. Trap is M.Night Shyamalan’s latest movie, a director whose movies until 6 or 7 years ago, nobody in their right mind would consider putting in their end-of-the-year list, follows a dad who takes his daughter to a concert only to find out the whole concert was set up as a trap to catch a serial killer. Who is that serial killer? That same dad. Josh Hartnett stars in what is essentially a Wile E. Coyote Road Runner cartoon and the thrill of seeing him conjure up increasingly goofy and cartoonish escapes for situations where you think he has no way out, is enthralling. Especially near the end where the inescapability ramps up and up. This is not a movie for people obsessed with plot holes and want their movies to be tied to some real world infallible logic, those people are annoying anyway and watch movies in such a miserable way. Yet the earnestness in the performance of Hartnett and flagrant confidence Shyamalan has in his filmmaking, carries it with an ecstasy and more importantly a sincerity to what is fundamentally a movie about a man’s love for his daughter. Non-stop fun and palpably heartfelt, M.Night Shyamalan has somehow gotten me at the edge of my seat and at the edge of tears with a one hour forty-five minute Tom and Jerry routine.
This was the best trailer of the year, hands-down. Absolute delight comes every time it was played and fills me every time with an overwhelming sense of anticipation. I see it and I think to myself “Well now I have to see what happens in that one!” And yeah I loved seeing what happened in this one. Trap is M.Night Shyamalan’s latest movie, a director whose movies until 6 or 7 years ago, nobody in their right mind would consider putting in their end-of-the-year list, follows a dad who takes his daughter to a concert only to find out the whole concert was set up as a trap to catch a serial killer. Who is that serial killer? That same dad. Josh Hartnett stars in what is essentially a Wile E. Coyote Road Runner cartoon and the thrill of seeing him conjure up increasingly goofy and cartoonish escapes for situations where you think he has no way out, is enthralling. Especially near the end where the inescapability ramps up and up.
This is not a movie for people obsessed with plot holes and want their movies to be tied to some real world infallible logic, those people are annoying anyway and watch movies in such a miserable way. Yet the earnestness in the performance of Hartnett and flagrant confidence Shyamalan has in his filmmaking, carries it with an ecstasy and more importantly a sincerity to what is fundamentally a movie about a man’s love for his daughter. Non-stop fun and palpably heartfelt, M.Night Shyamalan has somehow gotten me at the edge of my seat and at the edge of tears with a one hour forty-five minute Tom and Jerry routine.
7. The Wild Robot
Animation is a medium incredibly well-suited for shutting up, something major American studios continually fail to recognize. The Wild Robot is the latest from Dreamworks Animation and after a few business casualties, the last one before Dreamworks as we knew it for 30 years would change drastically. It follows a robot made to help humans that got stranded in a deserted island, along the way it learns to adapt to the nature, befriends a wily fox, and takes in an orphaned gosling. The first half of this movie has very little dialogue, a creative decision I didn’t expect from Dreamworks of all studios to make, and we are made to follow this robot in this beautifully designed and animated island as it tries to survive the elements. It is one of the most captivated I’ve been all year long and when Pedro Pascal starts talking out of a fox I feared the quality would significantly dip. Luckily, the rest of the movie is as gorgeous, charming, and sentimental as what came before. This is the third movie in a row on this list about parental relationships, and this one even though I knew exactly what they were gonna do, still reduced me to tears. The animation has nothing it can gain from me talking about it because no words can compare to seeing it for yourself, but I would like to point out the incredible design of the robot. Instant iconography, destined to be part of the great robots canon. It’s sad what happened behind the scenes on the corporate side of the fence, but at the very least Dreamworks gave us a movie that will make your heart grow out of your chest and your eyes widen out of your face.
Animation is a medium incredibly well-suited for shutting up, something major American studios continually fail to recognize. The Wild Robot is the latest from Dreamworks Animation and after a few business casualties, the last one before Dreamworks as we knew it for 30 years would change drastically. It follows a robot made to help humans that got stranded in a deserted island, along the way it learns to adapt to the nature, befriends a wily fox, and takes in an orphaned gosling. The first half of this movie has very little dialogue, a creative decision I didn’t expect from Dreamworks of all studios to make, and we are made to follow this robot in this beautifully designed and animated island as it tries to survive the elements.
It is one of the most captivated I’ve been all year long and when Pedro Pascal starts talking out of a fox I feared the quality would significantly dip. Luckily, the rest of the movie is as gorgeous, charming, and sentimental as what came before. This is the third movie in a row on this list about parental relationships, and this one even though I knew exactly what they were gonna do, still reduced me to tears. The animation has nothing it can gain from me talking about it because no words can compare to seeing it for yourself, but I would like to point out the incredible design of the robot. Instant iconography, destined to be part of the great robots canon. It’s sad what happened behind the scenes on the corporate side of the fence, but at the very least Dreamworks gave us a movie that will make your heart grow out of your chest and your eyes widen out of your face.
6. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
There is nothing like Fury Road, there will never be something like its world, design, energy, grit, and yet also slickness. This is like Fury Road. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is a prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road and gives the origin story of Charlize Theron’s Furiosa, here played by Anya Taylor-Joy. Much can be said about the worldbuilding, production design, costume, and chaotic action but it would feel like regurgitating what I feel about Fury Road. Because all those aspects carry forward the same level of quality, so I’d like to talk about how it differs from Fury Road. It’s plot heavy unlike Fury Road which was basically a whole chase stretched to movie length, and that makes Furiosa’s whole journey so ergonomic. The best thing a prequel could do, and something many lesser prequels don’t, is the power to recontextualize the original. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga continuing with the insane blood-pumping energy makes the whole movie an intense parade of trials all leading up to the home stretch and final exhale that is Fury Road. A saga that gets more and more epic with every installment, both in its world and story, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga serves up adrenaline packed with sand and oil and a career best performance from Chris Hemsworth I haven’t even talked about yet. There is nothing like Fury Road and there is nothing like Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.
There is nothing like Fury Road, there will never be something like its world, design, energy, grit, and yet also slickness. This is like Fury Road. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is a prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road and gives the origin story of Charlize Theron’s Furiosa, here played by Anya Taylor-Joy. Much can be said about the worldbuilding, production design, costume, and chaotic action but it would feel like regurgitating what I feel about Fury Road. Because all those aspects carry forward the same level of quality, so I’d like to talk about how it differs from Fury Road. It’s plot heavy unlike Fury Road which was basically a whole chase stretched to movie length, and that makes Furiosa’s whole journey so ergonomic. The best thing a prequel could do, and something many lesser prequels don’t, is the power to recontextualize the original.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga continuing with the insane blood-pumping energy makes the whole movie an intense parade of trials all leading up to the home stretch and final exhale that is Fury Road. A saga that gets more and more epic with every installment, both in its world and story, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga serves up adrenaline packed with sand and oil and a career best performance from Chris Hemsworth I haven’t even talked about yet. There is nothing like Fury Road and there is nothing like Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.
5. Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron
This is about Hayao Miyazaki watching all his friends die, and it’s exactly as depressing as it sounds. Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron is a making-of documentary on Miyazaki’s latest last movie [his fourth attempt at a final movie before retiring] The Boy and The Heron and the eight years it took. I think even with the most rudimentary camerawork and primitive editing, Hayao Miyazaki is just a person so endlessly interesting that just putting a camera to him and recording is enough to make gold. Fortunately the camerawork here isn’t rudimentary and the editing far from primitive, as clips from his movies are spliced in as Miyazaki reckons with mortality and makes it evidently clear how much his real life dictates his internationally renowned movies. He has opened his brain jar for us to see. The only thing that rivals that crushing sadness of an old man realizing he’s outliving his loved ones is the booming triumph of seeing one of my favorite movies of the decade manifest into existence. A beautiful documentary about grief and morality but more importantly how the art we make is inevitably always comprised of an ineffable amount of ourselves.
This is about Hayao Miyazaki watching all his friends die, and it’s exactly as depressing as it sounds. Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron is a making-of documentary on Miyazaki’s latest last movie [his fourth attempt at a final movie before retiring] The Boy and The Heron and the eight years it took. I think even with the most rudimentary camerawork and primitive editing, Hayao Miyazaki is just a person so endlessly interesting that just putting a camera to him and recording is enough to make gold. Fortunately the camerawork here isn’t rudimentary and the editing far from primitive, as clips from his movies are spliced in as Miyazaki reckons with mortality and makes it evidently clear how much his real life dictates his internationally renowned movies. He has opened his brain jar for us to see.
The only thing that rivals that crushing sadness of an old man realizing he’s outliving his loved ones is the booming triumph of seeing one of my favorite movies of the decade manifest into existence. A beautiful documentary about grief and morality but more importantly how the art we make is inevitably always comprised of an ineffable amount of ourselves.
4. Sing Sing
Sympathy for prisoners is an unexpectedly more radical opinion I have than anticipated. There isn’t a lot of that going around, even among progressive circles. Sing Sing is a movie about a theater program in a maximum security prison, and it is exactly the kind-hearted human decency these people deserve that we on the outside usually never give. The message of art persevering even in the most demeaning and dehumanizing circumstances is not a new thing, but to see it in this setting with characters treated so robustly and straightforwardly human is an equation for a movie that has your heart doing things and being filled with things for the whole runtime. To make art is to be human and to be human is to make art, and these prisoners are human. It is infinitely heartwarming seeing these guys do the silliest of plays and seeing Divine Eye playing himself, who in real life was actually in a rehabilitation theater program, is achingly endearing. Colman Domingo as always surrounds every scene he’s in be it with a heartbreaking monologue or silent quivering lip, and offers a performance that the Academy would be mighty fools to snub. Sing Sing isn’t anything that hasn’t been done before but to dare to see these prisoners as human, it does something incredibly special.
Sympathy for prisoners is an unexpectedly more radical opinion I have than anticipated. There isn’t a lot of that going around, even among progressive circles. Sing Sing is a movie about a theater program in a maximum security prison, and it is exactly the kind-hearted human decency these people deserve that we on the outside usually never give. The message of art persevering even in the most demeaning and dehumanizing circumstances is not a new thing, but to see it in this setting with characters treated so robustly and straightforwardly human is an equation for a movie that has your heart doing things and being filled with things for the whole runtime. To make art is to be human and to be human is to make art, and these prisoners are human.
It is infinitely heartwarming seeing these guys do the silliest of plays and seeing Divine Eye playing himself, who in real life was actually in a rehabilitation theater program, is achingly endearing. Colman Domingo as always surrounds every scene he’s in be it with a heartbreaking monologue or silent quivering lip, and offers a performance that the Academy would be mighty fools to snub. Sing Sing isn’t anything that hasn’t been done before but to dare to see these prisoners as human, it does something incredibly special.
3. Challengers
How does a movie make you feel like you’re on seven energy drinks at once without being an action movie? How does a movie be the sexiest thing all year without a single sex scene? And how does a movie convince you that everything in life is tennis except for tennis where it’s about sex? Well just have it be directed by Luca Guadagnino, star three of the hottest people working in Hollywood, and do as much tricks with the camera and edit while pumping EDM music plays, that’s how. Challengers follows the love triangle of tennis horniness that is Zendaya, Mike Faist, and the returning Josh O’Connor over the span of two decades. This movie knows how attractive these three are and that’s something you rarely see nowadays. Movie stars are the sexiest they’ve ever been with their superhero bodies and barbie doll beauty, and yet the movies they star in never take advantage of that. But here they’re shot like they’re gods and it’s like the camera is ogling and drooling over them. It’s simultaneously so bonkers and in your face while being so minute and dead focused on man’s smallest nuance, where seething hatred and undying love is captured with a shouting match and a twitch in the eye in the very same scene. Half the time it feels like Luca Guadagnino just discovered you can film in all sorts of crazy ways and decided to pull every trick out, and what better movie to do it with than a movie where a tennis match feels like sex and sex, like everything else, feels like tennis.
How does a movie make you feel like you’re on seven energy drinks at once without being an action movie? How does a movie be the sexiest thing all year without a single sex scene? And how does a movie convince you that everything in life is tennis except for tennis where it’s about sex? Well just have it be directed by Luca Guadagnino, star three of the hottest people working in Hollywood, and do as much tricks with the camera and edit while pumping EDM music plays, that’s how. Challengers follows the love triangle of tennis horniness that is Zendaya, Mike Faist, and the returning Josh O’Connor over the span of two decades. This movie knows how attractive these three are and that’s something you rarely see nowadays. Movie stars are the sexiest they’ve ever been with their superhero bodies and barbie doll beauty, and yet the movies they star in never take advantage of that.
But here they’re shot like they’re gods and it’s like the camera is ogling and drooling over them. It’s simultaneously so bonkers and in your face while being so minute and dead focused on man’s smallest nuance, where seething hatred and undying love is captured with a shouting match and a twitch in the eye in the very same scene. Half the time it feels like Luca Guadagnino just discovered you can film in all sorts of crazy ways and decided to pull every trick out, and what better movie to do it with than a movie where a tennis match feels like sex and sex, like everything else, feels like tennis.
2. Look back
I don’t know how to talk about why this one is so special without spoiling it and I won’t. Which isn’t too bad because at a staggeringly short 58 minutes, you can finish the whole movie in less time than finishing an episode of Squid Game. Still this fact will leave this paragraph briefer than the others, unfortunate being my penultimate pick but I guess you’ll just have to take my word for it. Look Back is the story of two polar opposite people who form an unbreakable bond over their shared passion of making manga. It’s a beautifully drawn story of friendship, passion, and a third thing that would spoil and ruin it for you. One thing I can praise without censor is the animation which exhibits a quality I had not seen in traditional 2D animation since The Tale of The Princess Kaguya where every stroke is felt and carries the dynamic movement of these characters to such lively vivid depictions of their character and emotion. If a person is slowly overwhelmed in equal parts anxiety and joy, then you will see the lines popping in and out of motion effortlessly conveying such. It’s a breathtakingly gorgeous movie with such a guttural punch of pathos that makes that 50 minute runtime all the more impressive. It’s just 58 minutes, I highly recommend watching this gem.
I don’t know how to talk about why this one is so special without spoiling it and I won’t. Which isn’t too bad because at a staggeringly short 58 minutes, you can finish the whole movie in less time than finishing an episode of Squid Game. Still this fact will leave this paragraph briefer than the others, unfortunate being my penultimate pick but I guess you’ll just have to take my word for it. Look Back is the story of two polar opposite people who form an unbreakable bond over their shared passion of making manga. It’s a beautifully drawn story of friendship, passion, and a third thing that would spoil and ruin it for you.
One thing I can praise without censor is the animation which exhibits a quality I had not seen in traditional 2D animation since The Tale of The Princess Kaguya where every stroke is felt and carries the dynamic movement of these characters to such lively vivid depictions of their character and emotion. If a person is slowly overwhelmed in equal parts anxiety and joy, then you will see the lines popping in and out of motion effortlessly conveying such. It’s a breathtakingly gorgeous movie with such a guttural punch of pathos that makes that 50 minute runtime all the more impressive. It’s just 58 minutes, I highly recommend watching this gem.
1. Dune: Part 2
Never have I been flashbanged more by a movie than this in SM City Cebu’s fake IMAX screens. It’s been made note by many already that it seems that every twenty years an epic saga unfolds in film, with Dune joining Lord of the Rings and the original Star Wars trilogy. Dune: Part Two follows directly after the first movie and finishes the rest of that first Frank Herbert book, as Paul Atreides continues with his journey on Arrakis as he decides on what to do next after his family house fell. Typing this out, I want to be back in Arrakis, every now and again after first seeing it I wanted to be back in Arrakis. I rewatched the first one in preparation for this one and the day after watched it again just to be back in that world again. I loved the first one but like many was hopeful but a little skeptical with how completely Denis Villenueve committed to making a movie entirely of set-up. How those set-ups paid off was the real make or break here, and suffice it to say it paid off big time. The comparison to previous cinematic epics is well justified as every thread here weaves further in while also branching further out. Every intrigue sucking you into its universe and intricately detailed worldbuilding while expanding to themes and allegory of human nature at the same time. An action taken by a character reinforcing the idea that the world made here is as vast as any fictional world can get while also reckoning with ideas of the corruptibility of power.
Never have I been flashbanged more by a movie than this in SM City Cebu’s fake IMAX screens. It’s been made note by many already that it seems that every twenty years an epic saga unfolds in film, with Dune joining Lord of the Rings and the original Star Wars trilogy. Dune: Part Two follows directly after the first movie and finishes the rest of that first Frank Herbert book, as Paul Atreides continues with his journey on Arrakis as he decides on what to do next after his family house fell. Typing this out, I want to be back in Arrakis, every now and again after first seeing it I wanted to be back in Arrakis. I rewatched the first one in preparation for this one and the day after watched it again just to be back in that world again.
I loved the first one but like many was hopeful but a little skeptical with how completely Denis Villenueve committed to making a movie entirely of set-up. How those set-ups paid off was the real make or break here, and suffice it to say it paid off big time. The comparison to previous cinematic epics is well justified as every thread here weaves further in while also branching further out. Every intrigue sucking you into its universe and intricately detailed worldbuilding while expanding to themes and allegory of human nature at the same time. An action taken by a character reinforcing the idea that the world made here is as vast as any fictional world can get while also reckoning with ideas of the corruptibility of power. The grand scale of the dunes always accompanied by the grand scale of the epic. This combination is why fantasy and science fiction works such as this are so enthralling and Dune: Chapter Two does it perfectly. There is many to discuss of course, with the performances, visual effects, edit, and how it follows up on the literal movie amount of set up that was established and lands every single one of these things is impeccable. But that duality is the real genius here. Dune: Part Two goes infinitely inward and outward and soars to the top of what has been a pretty damn good year for movies.
The grand scale of the dunes always accompanied by the grand scale of the epic. This combination is why fantasy and science fiction works such as this are so enthralling and Dune: Chapter Two does it perfectly. There is many to discuss of course, with the performances, visual effects, edit, and how it follows up on the literal movie amount of set up that was established and lands every single one of these things is impeccable. But that duality is the real genius here. Dune: Part Two goes infinitely inward and outward and soars to the top of what has been a pretty damn good year for movies.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Breathless from your sight and also my pneumonia.