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02 Mar

Dune 2: The Missing Book Characters Cut From the Movie

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This Dune article contains spoilers. Broadly speaking, Dune: Part One and Dune: Part Two represent the best adaptation ever of the first Dune book. But this isn’t to say that these films are the most faithful versions of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi masterpiece. Back in 2021, director Denis Villeneuve told Den of Geek, “I had to condense some ideas to tell the story in the most eloquent way possible so that it will be understood by everybody…When you adapt it’s an act of vandalism. You will change things.” This means that while Dune: Part Two is true to the spirit of…

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02 Mar

What Napoleon Leaves Out From the Real History of His Egypt Conquest

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When director Ridley Scott was promoting his latest—and we might argue funniest—historical epic back in November, the filmmaker spoke with pride about the film addressing Napoleon Bonaparte’s legendary campaign into Egypt. As Scott pointed out to Deadline, no previous film about the Frenchman who plunged Europe into decades of war had also addressed his misadventures in North Africa and the Near East too. “I saw these wonderful two paintings,” Scott said at the time. “One was of a man sitting on a horse staring at the Sphinx, and it was Napoleon. So I thought I had to have that because…

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02 Mar

Why Is Starship Troopers Still So Misunderstood?

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“You get me?” barks Career Drill Sergeant Zim (Clancy Brown). The young, beautiful, and vapid recruits giving him their full attention answer in kind: “Sir yes sir!” Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) and his fellow roughnecks might get Zim, but most people do not. Since its first theatrical run through today, viewers misread, misunderstand, and, frankly, misattribute Starship Troopers time and again, failing to see the cutting satire at work. The most recent example comes from author Isaac Young, who took to Twitter to critique the film’s approach to satire. Young argued that director Paul Verhoeven failed to make fun…

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01 Mar

Dune 2: What the Anya Taylor-Joy Scene Means for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune 3

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This article contains massive spoilers for Dune: Part Two (and possibly Dune: Part Three). If you have seen Dune: Part Two, then you know that Anya Taylor-Joy (Furiosa, The Witch) pops up for a very brief, and very important, vision of Paul Atreides’ yet-to-be born sister, Alia. It is a nice bit of seed-planting for an eventual Dune 3, which will be based on Frank Herbert’s novel Dune Messiah. In that book, a teenage Alia plays a critical role where she is almost as deified by the populous of Arrakis as Paul himself. When we spoke to director Denis Villeneuve,…

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01 Mar

Spaceman Ending Explained: Making Sense of Hanus the Spider and the Chopra Cloud

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This Spaceman article contains spoilers. Jakub Procházka (Adam Sandler) has lofty goals. The first astronaut in the Czech Space Program, Jakub is on a year-long solo mission to study a strange violet phenomenon in deep space, dubbed the Chopra Cloud. “As I enter the Chopra cloud,” he tells the public via video-link from his ship the Jan Hus-1 (named from the 14th century proto-Protestant theologian), “I might just unravel some secrets of the universe.” Despite Jakub’s grand ambitions, Spaceman director Johan Renck and screenwriter Colby Day, adapting the novel Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfar, intend instead to explore the…

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01 Mar

How Dune 2’s Biggest Changes Improve on the Frank Herbert Book

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This article contains massive spoilers for Dune: Part Two. Author and producer Brian Herbert is no stranger to the world of Dune. As the son of Frank Herbert, the visionary writer who published the first Dune novel in 1965, Brian saw firsthand his father create the mythology of Arrakis and the legend of the Kwisatz Haderach. He also would go on to add to that mythology, with Brian co-writing numerous Dune novels of his own. So it should not be taken lightly when he praised this past week the completion of Denis Villeneuve’s two-part Dune adaptation. “I saw Dune: Part…

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01 Mar

Dune 2 Ending Explained

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This article contains major spoilers for Dune: Part Two and minor spoilers for the next book in the series, Dune: Messiah. When the story of Dune: Part Two ends, Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atredies has everything you might want in the universe: the love of his life, the betrothed hand of a princess—who, for the record, is not the same woman—and the literal throne to the galaxy. There’s all that and more, so why does the second half of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of this iconic novel end on such a feeling of despair and doom? Well, the legions of Fremen fanatics…

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29 Feb

Emma Corrin’s Deadpool & Wolverine Villain Is a Surprising X-Men Deep Cut

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The casting of The Crown’s Emma Corrin in Deadpool & Wolverine’s in a lead role has led to plenty of speculation as to whether they’re playing the film’s villain. Although some thought she’d be playing a variant version of Deadpool to give a twist on Lady Deadpool, others were adamant she’d bring Cassandra Nova to the party. Now, it looks like the latter has been confirmed. As seen on the US Copyright Office site, Corrin’s character is listed as “Cassandra Nova,” seemingly confirming they’ll be playing the villainous twin sister of Charles Xavier. Introduced in 2001’s New X-Men #114, Cassandra…

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29 Feb

Can a Neuromancer TV Series Still Work After The Matrix?

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After weeks of moving through scuzzy bars with off-beat cybernetic accouterment, toiling under a static-grey sky to gain control of cyberspace, our heroes have made it to Zion. The Rastafarians who greet these travelers from a ship named for an important historical figure pay little mind to our male protagonist. However, they cannot believe their luck in meeting his female companion, whose reputation far exceeds his. Regardless of the chilly reception, the protagonist remains undeterred. Zion is, after all, a key part in mission to understand a powerful AI controlling reality. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the above description…

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29 Feb

The Anakin Moment You Didn’t See in Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith’s Younglings Scene

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You don’t have to go too far into the biographies of bad boy New Hollywood directors to find examples of impropriety. William Friedkin tossing around poor Linda Blair for The Exorcist. Francis Ford Coppola going full Kurtz for Apocalypse Now. Paul Schrader doing… well, Paul Schrader things. But there’s one guy who doesn’t fit the bill, despite palling around with the others: George Lucas. For better or worse, the soft-spoken and intellectual Lucas doesn’t seem to push his actors to extremes (well, there were a few not okay comments to Carrie Fisher). And yet, that’s exactly what had to happen…

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28 Feb

The Crow Reboot: First Photos Reveal a Drastic Updated Look for ’90s Icon

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If you were a teenager in the 1990s (like me!), few things mattered to you like The Crow. The 1994 film captured goth/grunge cool. From its origins as an indie comic book to its legendary soundtrack to its tragic production, The Crow captured the mood of a generation. Which is to say that the first look at Bill Skarsgård in the upcoming remake of The Crow might be a bit of a shock. And if you were a teenager in the ’90s, your heart isn’t what it used to be, so you might want to sit down. Have a look…

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28 Feb

Denis Villeneuve Explains Why Women Are ‘the Epicenter’ of His Dune Universe

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This article contains mild spoilers from the Dune novel. Director Denis Villeneuve faced many dilemmas when crafting the finale of his two-part Dune adaptation. Frank Herbert’s narrative is sprawling, and the climactic confrontation between Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and the forces of the Emperor (Christopher Walken) was full of landmines in terms of excessive exposition and outdated sensibilities. In fact, as last lines of a famous book go, we’re not sure if “we who carry the name of concubine—history will call us wives” would have flown for modern audiences buying tickets to this weekend’s Dune: Part Two. So it is…

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28 Feb

Why Star Trek Uniform Colors Changed From the Original Series to Next Generation

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Even if you don’t know an El-Aurian from an Illyrian, even if you can’t tell the original Enterprise from the Enterprise-D, you’re probably familiar with one of the fundamental rules of Star Trek: redshirts always die. Unlike many of the popular misconceptions about the series (Kirk doesn’t actually chase women, for example), the redshirt stereotype does have grounding in the show. Over the course of three seasons in The Original Series, 26 characters wearing red tunics died, as opposed to 15 wearing gold and blue combined. But that trend stopped with the Star Trek movies, and continued to fall away…

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28 Feb

It’s Harder to Sympathise with Wicked Little Letters’ True Story

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Warning: contains spoilers for Wicked Little Letters. Wicked Little Letters is remarkable for two things: being stuffed with the kind of language to make a sailor blush, and generosity to the real-life figures who inspired its story. If the film had told the complete tale of the poison pen campaign that scandalised 1920s Littlehampton, audiences may not feel as ready to empathise with Edith Swan or Rose Gooding. As played by Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley – two actors who never stop reminding you that no matter what despicable things their characters say or do, they’re flesh and blood people…

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27 Feb

Dune 2 Review: Denis Villenuve Makes the Bleakest Sci-Fi Masterpiece in the Galaxy

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For all its influence and vision, Frank Herbert’s original Dune novel never quite hit the note the author intended. With its sweeping sci-fi vistas of desert worlds and space age T.E. Lawrences, it’s easy to see why some readers got lost in the adventure of it all—or simply extracted those fun bits for their own riffs on galaxies far, far away. Still, it was never Herbert’s goal to pen a white savior narrative about Paul Atredies, a boy hero plagued by prophecies of genocide. After viewing the second volume of Denis Villeneuve’s grand but immensely foreboding adaptation of Dune, it’s…

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26 Feb

Star Wars Characters That Definitely Deserved Better

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It’s hard to believe it’s been 47 years since we first witnessed the adventures of Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, but across the nine-movie Skywalker saga, two standalone movies, a multitude of TV series, and one questionable Holiday Special, we’ve learned it’s a big ol’ galaxy out there. With enough characters to fill a Death Star, it’s inevitable that not every player in this grand space opera would get the same attention as Luke, Han, and Leia.  In fact, the franchise has allowed a few characters to slip to the sidelines. From major players who were discarded into the trash…

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26 Feb

The Dark Knight’s Most Famous Line Was Almost Cut by Christopher Nolan

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Within weeks of its release in the summer of 2008, The Dark Knight cemented its place in popular culture. People were quoting the Joker, debating Batman’s questionable surveillance tactics, and praising the film’s grounded take on superheroes, even before the movie hit home video. Obviously, The Dark Knight means a lot to everyone who sees it. Well, almost everyone. A key part of the movie doesn’t mean anything to one of the most important people involved in the movie: director Christopher Nolan. “I’m plagued by a line from The Dark Knight, and I’m plagued by it because I didn’t write…

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26 Feb

Anne Boleyn Actors Ranked From Low-Rent to Regal

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Anne Boleyn has been played on screen since the silent movie era. She’s been portrayed as a six-fingered boo-hiss villain, a Saturday Night Live punchline, a ghost haunting Princess Diana, and in recent stage musical Six, a Kate Nash-style aitch-dropping popstrel. Now, Henry VIII’s second wife is trending on TikTok as a new generation gets sucked into the scandals of the Tudor court and stakes their allegiance to her, the Spanish queen unseated for her, the simpering virgin who followed her, or any other player during this eventful period in history when the king of England made the position of…

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24 Feb

What Was Your Most-Watched VHS Tape?

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Before Blu-ray or DVD, before you could just open up an app on your phone and stream things, there was the beloved VHS tape, that most bulky of physical media. Whether you rented them from Blockbuster, owned a library of them and organized them neatly in the shelves running alongside your home entertainment center, used them to record your favorite movies or TV shows, or simply prayed for your teacher to pull one out on a Friday afternoon in middle school, the VHS tape was king of ’80s and ’90s home media. There was simply nothing better than the experience…

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24 Feb

Hallmark Brings the Black Diaspora Into Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility

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Hallmark Channel is capping off a month of original films themed around Jane Austen’s works with the premiere of a new feature-length adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. The classic story about whether young women should choose husbands based on romantic notions of love or practicality has been adapted for both television and film several times before. Many fans may remember either the 1995 film adaptation directed by Ang Lee or the 2008 BBC and PBS television miniseries starring Dominic Cooper and Charity Wakefield.  This Sense and Sensibility stands out from the other recent period adaptations of Austen’s works, however, as…

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