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    Review: ‘Dune: Prophecy’ Is Still Looking for Its Voice

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    A long-gestating prequel, about the women who seek to guide a galaxy, is splashy, somber and insufficiently spicy.“Dune,” the multi-novel, multi-movie saga, is in part about the battle for a precious commodity hoovered up from a desert planet to enrich the rapacious nobility. It’s called spice.“Dune: Prophecy,” the six-episode prequel series beginning Sunday on HBO, also concerns a valuable resource hoarded by empires and processed through machinery. It’s called intellectual property.Spice is a dangerous substance, controlled through violence, but at least the universe gets something out of it. Its mind-expanding properties make hyperspace travel possible and can induce prescience in the user.I.P., on the other hand, tends to simply give us lavish, lesser copies of things we already have. “House of the Dragon” is “Game of Thrones: Blonder and Blander”; “The Rings of Power” substitutes the mystic wonder of “The Lord of the Rings” with C.G.I. and metalsmithing.“Dune: Prophecy” is set 10,000 years before Timothée and Zendaya strode the sands. Its action unfolds shortly after an uprising against “thinking machines” that enslaved humanity. But the series itself is securely in the control of the I.P. machine.Its focus is the Sisterhood, the precursor to the Bene Gesserit of the films, now overseen by the ruthless and subtle-minded Mother Superior Valya Harkonnen (Emily Watson). A combination of deep-state apparatus and deadly yoga colony, this secretive society of female mentalists provides “truthsayers” (human lie detectors) to the ruling nobles while guiding history with a genetics program designed to breed ideal rulers. (Humankind may have faster-than-light spaceships, but the galaxy remains a patriarchy that women can influence only by stealth.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Dune: Prophecy’ Faced a Pitiless Terrain: Adapting Anything ‘Dune’

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      The novels were famously tough to adapt until Denis Villeneuve came along. Can an HBO prequel about the origins of the Bene Gesserit follow suit?For over 50 years, Frank Herbert’s best-selling science-fiction novel “Dune” was a puzzle no one in show business seemed able to solve. Published in 1965, the book had inspired a shelf full of sequels and prequels — along with scores of imitators — yet it defied every attempt to turn it into a blockbuster film or TV series.In the 1970s, the beloved avant-garde filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky spent two years and millions of dollars developing a movie and never shot a single frame. David Lynch tried next, but the resulting film, released in 1984, was a personal and box-office catastrophe. The story’s vastness and exoticism proved as perilous to storytellers as the fictional planet Arrakis, whose hostile deserts inspired the franchise’s name.When the HBO series “Dune: Prophecy” was announced, in 2019, its prospects seemed just as murky. Indeed the production struggled to find its footing. By the premiere, it will have seen four showrunners, three lead directors and high-level cast changes — not to mention a pandemic and two crippling industry strikes.But then in 2021, the French Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, who was set to direct the pilot, released Part 1 of his two-part adaptation of “Dune.” Critics were ecstatic, and the film grossed over $400 million worldwide. Suddenly a “Dune” franchise looked viable. Villeneuve’s team had offered a blueprint for other creators to work from, tonally, aesthetically and narratively. (The studios behind the film, Legendary and Warner, which owns HBO, are also behind the series.)Perhaps more important, there was now a huge audience that had never read Herbert’s famously dense novels but had become invested in the story and characters. The resounding critical and financial success of “Dune: Part Two,” released in February, indicates viewers are still invested in the franchise.“I think Denis really unlocked this universe for people in a way that was relatable,” said Alison Schapker, a “Westworld” veteran who took over as the sole showrunner of “Dune: Prophecy” in 2022. “He grounded it. We wanted to tell a story that takes place in that universe.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares124 Views

      in Movies

      Cillian Murphy, from ‘Oppenheimer’ to ‘Small Things Like These’

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      Cillian Murphy of “Oppenheimer” fame plays an Irishman interrogating a system of abuse and forced labor, despite everyone’s warnings to look the other way.“Small Things Like These” plays just a little like a gangster film, except the web of power at its center is spun by nuns. Set in 1985 and based on Claire Keegan’s 2021 novel, it is a story about how people create and maintain control and the many shades of complicity that result. In this case, the setting is southeast Ireland, and the nuns’ control has woven its way into every aspect of life in a small town.Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy) sells and delivers coal and fuel in that town, an occupation that barely supports his wife, Eileen (Eileen Walsh), and a house full of daughters. But they’re doing OK. He can put food on the table, and they have a happy home life. One day, however, something changes inside Bill: He sees a young woman being nearly dragged into a building near the local convent, and it troubles him. He suspects that she is pregnant and unmarried, like his own mother was, and is being brought to the nuns by her horrified family. She is, quite literally, kicking and screaming. Bill can’t stop thinking about her.Much of “Small Things Like These,” directed by Tim Mielants from a screenplay by Enda Walsh, happens in flashbacks. After Bill sees the girl at the convent, he drives home and notices a small, hungry-looking boy by the side of the road, and these two sightings seem to trigger some memory in him that he can’t shake. Even his wife notices his change in mood. It’s Christmastime, but the customary comfort and joy seems beyond him; instead, he keeps dissociating, slipping into a reverie about his own childhood. It wasn’t all sad: His mother was able to keep him with her, thanks to a kind employer, which meant that Bill was, in a sense, lucky. Yet there were mysteries he never quite understood.Murphy, fresh off his “Oppenheimer” Oscar win, is both producer and star of this film. His performance is unsurprisingly searing and nuanced, especially since Bill is not much of a talker. A lot of his performance is in extreme close-up, his panic showing up like lava pooling below a thin surface, ready to burst through at any moment. He’s buried his grief and fear, but not nearly as far as he thinks, and the girl outside the convent has brought it all to a head. He’s a little bit like a synecdoche for his whole country.Slipping inside the convent one day to deliver an invoice, Bill starts to suspect that the nuns, led by Sister Mary (Emily Watson), are mistreating the young women waiting out their pregnancies there. His dissociation turns into panic attacks, especially when he realizes there’s very little he can do to change the situation.From the distance of history, it’s quickly obvious that this convent was one of the so-called Magdalen Laundries, institutions run by orders of Roman Catholic nuns as homes and profit-making laundry facilities. Text at the end of the film dedicates it to the more than 56,000 young women who were sent to the institutions between 1922 and 1998 for purposes of “penance and rehabilitation.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      At the Berlin Film Festival, Reconsidering the Power of Doubt

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      At a festival that is having an identity crisis, some of the best movies suggest that lacking certainty isn’t always a bad thing.Doubt gets a bad rap. Doubt is fussy and forgetful, whereas certainty strides around, all action and achievement. As a film critic, swift, declarative certainty is a quality I’ve learned to aspire to. And at times, to fake.But this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, which runs through Sunday, has been buffeted outside and in by political turbulence and organizational shake-ups. And so perhaps because the event itself is experiencing such uncertain times, the films made me reconsider — actually, doubt — my dismissive stance on doubt.Doubt is etched on Cillian Murphy’s hollow, striking features in Tim Mielants’s grave and moving “Small Things Like These,” which opened the festival last week. Based on a novella by Claire Keegan — whose “The Quiet Girl” was adapted into an Oscar-nominated feature in 2022 — the film is set in 1985 in the town of New Ross, Ireland, which is home to one of the Magdalene laundries, the infamously abusive church-run institutions to which pregnant, unwed women and girls were sent in shame to have their babies, who were then taken from them. In this case, the chief perpetrator of the abuse is Sister Mary (a frostbitten Emily Watson), who has clearly never had a doubt in her life. But the movie is really about Murphy’s quietly anguished coal deliveryman, Bill, and his deepening crisis of conscience.It takes considerable bravery for Bill to go against the unspoken rules of a community conspiring in silence. But as a man and a family patriarch, it is an avenue available to him. In Maryam Moghadam and Behtash Sanaeeha’s sweet and funny “My Favourite Cake,” the options are different for the Tehran-based widow Mahin (Lily Farhadpour), even if her spirit, too, is chafing against an oppressive religious social order. Her instantaneous love connection with a similarly lonely taxi driver challenges Iranian conventions in this glowingly performed rom-com that turns unnecessarily dark late on, when Mahin is punished for the act of gentle rebellion that the movie otherwise celebrates.Lily Farhadpour, left, in “My Favorite Cake,” directed by Maryam Moghadam and Behtash Sanaeeha.Hamid JanipourFor a more satisfying, if low-key, depiction of lonely social outcasts finding a spark of solace in each other, there is the Japanese director Sho Miyake’s lovely “All The Long Nights.” Mone Kamishiraishi plays Misa, whose debilitating, personality-altering PMS makes adhering to Japan’s rigid codes of politeness mortifyingly difficult. But the friendship she strikes up with a co-worker who is plagued with panic attacks becomes a source of mutual support: It will likely be one of the most touching platonic relationships of the moviegoing year.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      ‘God’s Creatures’ Review: A Crisis of Conscience

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      Emily Watson is terrific at telegraphing how a mother’s love grinds against her moral code in this atmospheric seaside drama.“God’s Creatures,” a sparing, atmospheric drama, opens underwater. We see a burst of bubbles and hear a muffled bellow. Then the image cuts to the ocean surface, where gentle wavelets belie the turbulence below.The same might be said of the insular Irish fishing village where the movie takes place. Though the story begins with a drowning, the parochial residents of the region retain high spirits, whether carousing at the townie bar, harvesting oysters for sale or relishing the angelic warbling of Sarah (Aisling Franciosi), a local songstress. Yet a baleful score and slow, forbidding shots of the landscape suggest that evil lurks nearby.The film centers on Aileen (Emily Watson), an affectionate mother and factory worker — she toils on an assembly line alongside Sarah — whose prodigal son, Brian (Paul Mescal), moves home unexpectedly after many years abroad. Aileen is delighted about the return of her golden child, until a devastating crime leaves her unsure of whether she really knows him at all.The directors, Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer (“The Fits”), are skilled engineers of apprehension. As news of the offense spreads through the town, a chasm opens between Aileen and Sarah, and the filmmakers shepherd us down its center with a series of sinister sounds and images. Every maritime mundanity — the clack-clack-clack of oysters dropping into a bucket, say — pulses with pain or menace.“God’s Creatures” is ultimately a movie about the collision between a mother’s fidelity and her moral conscience, and Watson is terrific at telegraphing how these instincts grind against each other to terrifying ends. Even in a simple story line that sometimes wants for psychological clarity, the power she wields is undeniable.God’s CreaturesRated R. It has the mouth of a sailor. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More