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| Hadrien Pierre Mazelier, probably photographed by Jannis Tsipoulanis, and doing his bit for transatlantic goodwill |
The decision to go full Stranger Things was brave and mostly worked. Wolfhard now plays horny teenage everynerd more or less pat, though his character is underwritten and underused. He's basically the new Peter Venkman except that he fails to get into the girl's knickers. And of course he's not funny either. His consolation prize - and it's a fairly meagre one, given that he's the only one of the "kids" who can feasibly do it - is that he gets to drive the Ectomobile. (Having him as an anaemic Michael Taylor at least meant we were spared a Short Round.) The younger children are also OK. The girl is better than the boy: she's Spengler's granddaughter and a reasonable stand-in for her grandpa, and the boy just about captures Stanz's slow-witted, well-meaning enthusiasm. Only the token black girl - who by process of elimination is there to be a female Zeddemore* - really lives down to expectations.
In theory of course Ghostbusters as a concept should work just as well with any group of early middle-aged, middle-class white men (and their token black friend) who are down on their luck (sacked academics dressed like plumbers going into business in the real world) but make it big by doing something whackily fantastical in a relatively cool, deadpan, Noo Yawk sort of way. In practice though, the camaraderie between Egon, Ray and Venkman was something special, and the real-life friendship between Ramis and Murray was extra special. (Murray's double take at the end of Afterlife when Venkman sees Spengler's ghost is funnier and more emotional than anything else in the whole film.) The first film was originally envisioned for Belushi and Eddie Murphy, and it would no doubt have been perfectly good with them. But without Bill Murray it would only have been half the film it turned out to be, and even today Murray could almost certainly improvise his way half-way through a Ghostbusters film without breaking sweat.
Including the original Ghostbusters at the end was the right decision. Unfortunately in just a couple of minutes they demonstrate what was lacking in the movie - which was, of course, them. Murray in particular proves quite how much of the original film really was just him, and manages to improvise in the space of a few lines more humour, charm, pathos and excitement than the rest of the cast does in the previous hour and a half.
*Winston Zeddemore was originally supposed to be ex-military. By the time of the videogame he's got a PhD. In practice he arrives only just in time to be the straight man (i.e. just before Sigourney Weaver becomes a dog), albeit only narrowly avoiding being the "comedy stupid one" (and let's face it, that's more or less what he is in Ghostbusters II).
The characters mumble. Not much of the book's "poetry" has survived. And in fact the film generally is altogether so artsy that a lot of it is literally too dark, too blurry, too indistinct and, quite simply, too cool.*
Conversely all the female characters seem to have been miscast. None of them is remotely so cool as in the book or, for that matter, as in the Lynch version. (The Spice Girls they ain't!) Obviously no actress has ever been so cool as Siân Phillips. But Jessica has been reduced from being an elegant and invincible matriarch to being a scowling, whingeing Karen. And Zen-dire, who plays the same character she plays in the Spider-Man films, is never so cool as she thinks she is anyway.
The Fremen, meanwhile, are "diverse". No attempt has been made to make them into a realistic race of people, or indeed to subvert expectations. Why not have a black Paul Atreides and the Fremen all blond-haired and, er, blue-eyed? It could have been interesting, at any rate.
Duncan Idaho on the other hand is cool. (Jason Momoa is cool. Duh!) So why does he have a crap death scene? (Actually that whole subplot is fairly boring and could easily have been cut, as it was in the Lynch version.)
I never noticed the Atreides' hyper-masculine homoerotic thing before. But why don't we hear Gurney Halleck sing? (Can Josh Brolin sing?)
In fact there's actually too much prophecy in the film, so that by the end of Dune: Part One we already know what's going to happen in Dune: Part Two before it's even begun filming.
And the Harkonnens' "pet"? WTF? Is Villeneuve trying to make up for the lack of Guild Navigators, not to mention heart plugs and cat-milking?
Finally, the "voice" is realised on screen just as stupidly here as in the Lynch version. And in fact there's still too much of Lynch's Dune altogether. There's no real conflict between the "liberal" materialism of the Harkonnens and the traditionalist honour of the Atreides. There's none of the book's "Ruritania in Space", which even Lynch (and George Lucas!) kept a certain amount of. And yet, sed contra, Lynch at least made the effort to explain all sorts of things, such as the Mentats, and indeed why the spice is so valuable. This is crucial plot background that never so much as seea the light of day here. So the book's poetry has gone for a burton, but there's precious little of the book's "science" either. (Maybe there'll be more in Part Two!
The Good
The military stuff is all good, and in practice I quite enjoyed all the homoerotic hypermasculinity.
I loved the ornithopters.
All the goody male characters are actually well cast, including Duncan Idaho. Chalamet, strange but true, actually has a lot of youthful gravitas.
Yueh is Chinese. WTF?
Hans goes Wagnerian in the final scene.
The sign language and the Fremen walk are well realised.
And whereas Lynch's worms were giant willies with giant foreskins Villeneuve's are proper trad vaginae dentatae again. Nice!
*Elizabeth Bachmann in Stranger First Things observes somewhat archly 'due to cool, blue-toned lighting, some unconvincing CGI, and the fact that the actors rarely broke a sweat, Villeneuve’s desert left me feeling rather chilly.' Touché!
Only one of the following countries is not using Covid passports. Can you spot it? 🧐 pic.twitter.com/HX22yTspA2
— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) November 12, 2021
John Cusack is there. He's still pretty much got it. In fact he's as good as he ever was. And as a leftover 1980s teen heartthrob par excellence (albeit better known to "my" generation as that guy from The Grifters and Wesley Crusher's dead older brother in Stand by Me), he fits his role perfectly. He's now doing the quintessentially cool amoral 1990s thing - which is of course contract killing. (Hey! After the '80s even Bond was little more than a hitman - witness Dalton and Brosnan in Living Daylights and World is Not Enough!) And indeed 1980s top funny man Dan Ackroyd is there too, also great as ever (and even getting a throwaway Ghostbusters-type line about astral projection and telepathy).
So if you ever wondered what happened to John Hughes' kids, well, they got hip, they got cynical, they got cool... and they warmed up for Fight Club ("I don't think what a guy does for a living reflects who he really is", "You can never go home again, but you can shop there.") and (of course, "killing a lot of people"!) American Psycho. (Did mini-marts even in the '90s have Blistex and Trojan condoms on the front counter? Funny how it's always the most recent past feels the most alien!)
So Cusack plays a hitman called Martin. He wears black. His surname is 'Blank'. Get it? He's not a real person. He's a Man in Black. (This was the era of classic X-Files, remember, and before Men in Black the movie! In fact his secretary - played gloriously by Cusack's own sister - even has Scully's outfit and hairdo.) But is he also firing blanks - metaphorically in as much as he wants to quit the cool job that he's now too cool for? (I do really like Blank's office though. In those days even "old school" could still be cool!)
The actual gags though are also fired off thick and fast, and a surprising number are palpable hits. An assassin who sees a shrink was way ahead of Analyse This (and a much gentler but more incisive dig at the post-'80s "kinder, gentler" 1990s craze for counselling and "caring"*). And the one-liners are smart and daring. Greatest disappearing act since white flight? (WTF? Couldn't get away with that nowadays!) Live and Let Die on the soundtrack? Cheeky! The Story of a Mediocre Genesis? Nice!
And that Kipling quote is way, way deep!
*In reality it was little more than the boomers' moving on from their '80s physical exercise loopiness to trying to fill the spiritual void a decade later with neo-Freudian, New-Age bullshit.
My list goes something like this:
