Spider-Man: Brand New Day

Tom Holland's web-slinger, by now the surest bet in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, returns with Spider-Man: Brand New Day, an atypically well-crafted superhero film that dispenses with the flat virtual backlots and insincere humour that has come to define these later, less-successful phases. Director Destin Daniel Cretton, whose previous Marvel feature Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings seems to have been condemned to the continuity black hole that swirls at the centre of the Disney series, takes the reigns from Jon Watts, who steered Sony's previous three instalments. Although Watts started strong with Spider-Man: Homecoming, his follow-up episodes stumbled largely thanks to intractable demands placed upon this property. Spider-Man's newcomer position within a wider, exploding brand tracked into an insistence that the queasy militarisation of Iron Man was mapped onto the otherwise working class Peter Parker. The chopped-up, off-putting simulacrum of Covid-era filmmaking hasn't helped either.  

Despite lingering Starkism, Cretton's take is refreshingly distinct from its immediate predecessors. The director's most obvious contribution then is that this Spider-Man sequel plays like an event unto itself rather than a prolonged reassessment of past glories or a carefully rationed prologue for the next team-up. Quite the feat considering the amount of guest players that appear in Sony's tentpole: Jon Bernthal's lunk-headed Punisher intrudes, making a lot more sense when paired with Holland's bright and assured Spider-Man (Castle, driving around in an armoured van and blasting bazookas is surely a nod to a similar appearance in the 90s Spider-Man: The Animated Series); Mark Ruffalo's increasingly savage Hulk represents a worst-case scenario for Peter's mutating superpowers; while Sadie Sink, as an emissary of The X-Men, is utilised first as a terrifying new enemy, later as an unlikely confidant. If anything then, this new Holland episode appears to have inherited the care, not to mention the billion dollar machinery, that the Japanese electronics firm marshalled during their tenure with Daniel Craig's shaken but not spared take on James Bond. 

Naturally, we're not skipping from continent to continent like 007, but there's a level-headed confidence in how the clashing tonal bandwidth of computer-assisted vehicular pile-ups and more personal, human drama are navigated that speaks to a piece designed for a slightly more discerning audience than the usual Marvel staging. Although credited to series regulars (and future Avengers: Doomsday scribes) Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, stars Holland and Zendaya have eagerly shared that this draft was treated to a transformative, and uncredited, rewrite by director Cretton as well as Challengers and Queer screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes. Spider-Man: Brand New Day, as released, then not only gives Zendaya's workforce ready MJ more to play with than simple scowling, it also raises Marissa Tomei's sadly departed Aunt May to new heights of sainted, maternal radiance. Her flickering presence is presented throughout the film as the core, positive memory of a deeply depressed superhero. So powerful is this recollection though that it is able to be transmitted to others; to allow them to step into Peter's shoes and know what it is to be truly adored by a loving mother. 

The Odyssey

Writer-director Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is, as expected from the creator of the temporal pincer movement, a non-linear telling of the ancient poem that is steeped in queasy memory and elided thought. As with the director's own Oppenheimer, this Odyssey hinges on an individual who seems, for all appearances, to be an emissary from a forthcoming, dreadful new era of human extermination. Where J. Robert dreamed of quivering, sub-atomic galaxies, the lost king Odysseus chats candidly with the cosmic entities that bridge the hemispheres of his brain. Their faces are anchored in his own failings, while the thoughts they prompt demand consideration of his unholy ingenuity. Both Oppenheimer and Odysseus' visions relate to the application of an original but fundamentally terrible new thought, ideas that have rolling consequences; waves that crash and echo far beyond the sand on which they were plotted. The equivalent here to Oppenheimer's fission-based nuclear weapon is The Trojan Horse itself, a deception that works so well because, we are told, it undermines the most basic tenants of human decency. 

The sacking of Troy then isn't organised as a great or ingenious victory; it's a crime that damns mankind. Somewhat of a piece with the director's breakthrough film Memento, in that the present for Matt Damon's mislaid monarch is a fog of unconscious, reflexive action (he scours a blasted beach for signs of his ship or crew) and winding conversations with a woman, Charlize Theron's bronzed Calypso, in which critical information is deliberately withheld, prolonging his agonies. While Tom Holland's Telemachus steps away from a household packed with seditious suitors to brave a trip to Sparta, in the hope of hearing word of his absent father (finding little to nothing), a stirred Odysseus answers his child's queries but only for our benefit. Odysseus giving detail to a horrifying voyage premised on a desire to physically split with the ungrateful allies who share their wrongdoing. By straying from the shipping lanes, Odysseus inadvertently abandons himself and his crew to the Gods and the elements they personify: Zeus in the ferocious thunderstorms above them, Poseidon in the churning waves beneath. 

The light of knowledge that prompted Odysseus to pack himself into a holy object - apparently a gift for petty Gods, intended to curry favour - is absent on this expedition. In this section mankind's brightest, most devious mind is confronted with how much he doesn't, cannot know. Nolan's film then taking the island-hopping form seen previously in Don Chaffey and Ray Harryhausen's Jason and the Argonauts, only absent the certainty or good-natured bonhomie that kept the Argonauts from Jason's throat. In Nolan's telling Odysseus meets the men he has failed, including Elliot Page's Sinon, and is then cursed to know, by figures who emerge from black sands, how events can play out. The decisions he will be pressed to make and how lives will be lost on each path. Forced to treaty with powerful supernatural forces - from Samantha Morton's Circe, a witch who can remake men in the slovenly image of beasts, or a massive, one-eyed man who is Francisco Goya's Saturn Devouring his Son rendered in, as behind-the-scenes images would have us believe, Royal de Luxe-style puppetry - horror in Nolan's Odyssey is not just the unknown but the unknowable. All around them are thought and method that exceed the grasp of these pillaging sailors. 

Finally returned to Ithaca, Damon's king prospers again by deception, breaking another siege - this time of his own palace - by exploiting the social norms of the day. He enters his household as a beggar, a disguise that we are told is beloved of earthbound Olympians. Telemachus, desperate for any connection to a father who has been transformed into contemporary myth, repeatedly voices entreaty that acknowledges that the person he is speaking to has displayed some aspect, so beyond the norm, that it raises suspicion that they are Godly. Odysseus, again, uses this human reverence for something beyond themselves to his advantage. Anne Hathaway's Queen Penelope may weep at the straining sound of an unstrung bow; Odysseus tearing apart the challenge he has conquered only to clatter the jerry-rigged debris against the fleeing bodies of his enemies but the lasting impression of Nolan's film is its description of hubris. Damon's Odysseus as a man arrogant or foolhardy enough to consider himself in terms that are not instinctively beneath Greece's vengeful pantheon. Odysseus as an agnostic in the age of antiquity who, when judged against governing Gods who personify aspects of human life, makes a case for himself as a new deity of deceit. A line drawn from Prometheus, the fire-giver, and the failed sculptor Dolus to Odysseus. A figure so powerful he can even deceive himself. 

Dune: Part Two

When considering a sequel, or simply how this adaptation of Frank Herbert's intergalactic tragedy might continue, the key moments in the first part of Denis Villeneuve's Dune seemed to be those immediately following Jessica and Paul's escape from the invading Harkonnen armada. Made fugitives and buried under waves of sand, the mother and son wept and argued about their predicament. His previous standing in the feudal solar system smashed, Timothée Chalamet's Paul Atreides, now strung out on grief as well as an allergic reaction to twinkling narcotics, dreamt of golden violence. An army, under his command, crashing into then over his ivory enemies. Paul saw himself in a trance; dispassionately exterminating the greatest warriors in the galaxy with, seemingly, little effort. The visions travelled deeper into the future, focusing on pyres of burning bodies - either those of his recently ambushed clan or some enemy yet to falter - and himself, beatific and buoyed by the zealotry of berserkers. 

Paul screamed at his mother for making him into the kind of freak who inspires such deranged dedication. For failing to consider the personal toll of the Godhood she had stolen from future generations to give to her son. Jessica consoled her child, reassuring him that he was also the product of his father: a good and decent man, beloved despite his position in a choking, intergalactic royalty. The fallout from this huddle reverberated throughout the remainder of Part One. Rebecca Ferguson's concubine viewing her son with an increasing sense of disassociation and horror as his prophesised reign (slowly) began to take shape. Upon meeting the indigenous Fremen, it's crucial that Jessica's immediate plan is one of escape, using them to contact the smugglers and pirates that she assumes they know, to take them away from the desert planet of Arrakis. Placed in a position of danger and weakness, Jessica refutes the Bene Gesserit whispers that should herald her son's coming, preferring to play it safe and use her considerable martial and political power to go off into hiding. 

It's Paul who hesitates, embracing his visions of victory and, therefore, the slaughter to come. Following a delightful sequence in which Harkonnen scouts, dressed in black blast furnace suits, weightlessly traverse a rock face before meeting their doom, Dune: Part Two quickly settles in with the Fremen; describing the ways in which Paul and Jessica attempt to appeal to their new bedfellows.  Given the choice between euthanasia and drinking a third-eye opening poison, Lady Jessica chooses the latter, transforming herself and her unborn child into a bicephalic creature, one constantly in conversation with itself. In Villeneuve's film, drinking this sanctified Water of Life is very much a real kind of death and, during the ceremony in which her character sips this liquid, Ferguson's surging, shaking Jessica treats it as such. Although the physical body and a trace of its wider, familial connections remain, the original identity is either obscured or outright overwritten by the composite desires of countless, conspiring ancestors and a descendent yet to come. 

In the seconds before the water touches Jessica's lips, the dying Reverend Mother, that the concubine has been recruited to replace, is practically levitating with excitement. Some tiny fragment of herself will outlive this wrinkled physical form, trapped forever in the gorgeous monarch that now crouches captive beneath her. Post-sup, Jessica twists in terror-struck supplication until the cautious woman we met in the previous film is extinguished. The person (or persona) who remains is quick to assume the appropriated robes of her new office, to travel South and stir up war. Her body is adorned with runic spells written in Fremen script; her mouth dripping with manipulation and the threat of impending jihad. In David Lynch's Dune the inner monologues present in Herbert's text became hushed murmurs, whispered over the unfolding action. Villeneuve uses Jessica's pregnancy to relitigate some aspect of this device: questions and their answers carry over uteri landscapes in which an unborn, female messiah stirs. 

Surprisingly, Lynch's film, and the director's wider work, is referenced several times in Villeneuve's sequel. As well as Javier Bardem's Fremen warlord Stilgar inheriting lines specifically drawn from the 1984 movie, we also see a vanquished foe's body crawling with the Arrakian equivalent of hungry, Lumberton ants. The two adaptations even share a similar sort of storytelling apparatus when signposting the disconnect between the Paul who exists happily within the society that has adopted him and the Paul who is willing to use seeded superstition to his advantage, positioning himself as a leader of leaders. Following an attack on a Fremen holy site by Austin Butler's monstrous, albinoid Feyd-Rautha, Duke Leto's son steels himself and follows his mother by drinking the poisonous waters that promise a feminine, extrasensory insight. As Paul lies alone, decoding the toxins he has inflicted on his own body, the strange, structural frequencies of Lynch's film re-emerge: that feeling that a sequence of events has broken down and fresh information with only vague, visual purchase has survived the disruption. 

And so Zendaya's Chani appears from nowhere in a weathered, Arrakian helicopter (of no clear origin) to kneel beside her comatose partner and fulfil a previously unmentioned prophecy that she otherwise wants no part in. Following his reawakening, Paul portrays a kind of religious revelation when dealing with the Fremen. Like his mother before him, caution is abandoned to such a degree that it is clear that the Paul that remains is either, to some extent, reliving an experience he has already dissected then consigned to memory or the young Atreides has transformed into someone so convinced of their impending ascendancy that their every action reads as dangerously impatient. Paul then is a child inhabited by things that are already dead and, therefore, cannot know fear. Regardless, the remaining Atreides are no longer alone and shivering beneath a shifting landscape, they tower above it. Eyes fixed and boring through an atomic fire that they themselves have unleashed. 

Mother and son are now glowering, all-knowing fulcrums; pressing every socio-political and metaphysical advantage available to them to trample an indigenous faith beneath their bloodthirsty decrees. Viewers with a more comprehensive knowledge of Frank Herbert's cosmology might, in Paul's visions of endless, elderly faces, find trace of the path this new emperor will walk over the years (and films) to come; the terrible foresight that demands he make some attempt to take control of the inevitable carnage. Villeneuve though accounts for another, more human perspective to creep in: revulsion. Cursed with a total understanding of his own appalling genealogy, Paul connects with a barbaric, animalistic aspect as a way to reframe his own nature and satisfy his personal need for revenge. When the all-powerful mother and son meet again, their first order of business is this rotten lineage and what it means for their shared future. The Atreides name, the human greatness of a Duke Leto that inspired loyalty and devotion in all of his subjects, has been polluted forever and will, in the fullness of time, sink beneath a flag of boiling, merciless violence. Amen.