(95)
Sometimes you just rewatch something and fall in love with movie magic again, even if you never fell out of it in the first place. Only on this particular rewatch have I finally found a lot more appreciation for this movie’s more meditative first act before it explodes into life about an hour in. For something so grand that the only suitable way (I thought) to watch it was on an IMAX screen, you’d think watching it on a much smaller screen wouldn’t translate well (like Gravity, for example), but if anything it’s just as ravishingly intimate as it is grand. Tactile world building aside, this is everything that something like The Return of the King isn’t in the best way. Tolkien - and by extension Jackson - is very concerned with setting the pieces up and figuring which way they’re going to topple, but Villeneuve (and Herbert) is more interested in which pieces relate to which, and which ones fall with the others. LOTR is very earnest, old-fashioned filmmaking while this is austere and cynical, one ends in black-and-white victory while the other ends in a victorious defeat, subdued in many different shades of grey. One is very busy in trying to get you to fall in love with fantasy and the genre it came to define, the other is more preoccupied with tearing that illusion down. Both movies are completely perfect, both are completely necessary, and both are completely different - and perhaps that’s what makes them so special.