Welcome to The Morning After, where I share with you what movies I’ve seen over the past week. Below, you will find short reviews of those movies along with a star rating. Full length reviews may come at a later date.

So, here is what I watched this past week:

Dune

Science fiction is a way to look at the current political landscape far removed from actual events and shine a bright spotlight on problematic behaviors. Frank Herbert’s Dune is a perfect example of this and in many ways so much more than this. The novel looks at falling republics, ecological malfeasance in the pursuit of oil, and religion and how seamlessly it can be integrated into a society. The difference between a novel and a movie is built on how you can actually review the material and reflect on it. With literature, you can stop and look up relevant terms, learn peripheral information, and absorb what you’ve read. With a film, all of that introspection must be done after the fact and you are required to be entirely present in the movie and be able to make notes of any unusual situations or ideas that you need to look into later.

For a casual moviegoer, a lot of that information is missed and left merely as confusion. Director Denis Villeneuve tries to convey that as simply as possible and he does an admirable job with it, but without the core foundation of the written work, some of the minutia and subtlety is sometimes missed. Dune is a film that is largely faithful to the source material and like The Lord of the Rings, which defined how a fantasy novel could be adapted, it leaves out some of those details to streamline the film.

Being a film based only the first half of the Dune novel, there’s perhaps more to be learned from the inevitable sequel than could be assessed ahead of time and the movie provides plenty to chew on in the interim. The break feels natural and the events to come will be rather interesting to see, but it also feels incomplete, mostly because a lot of the religious commentary and mysticism isn’t given its proper due in this film and while some of the political machinations of collapsing empires is present, that too needs fleshing out in the subsequent film. Solid performances and some gorgeous visuals help absorb the audience into the narrative in ways that would otherwise be challenging. Villeneuve does well at avoiding over-explanation of the plot and conveys much of what makes the source material involving, but in the end, it’s a movie that needed more entry-level information than could easily be experienced in the brevity of the motion picture form.

The Batman

In the pursuit of making comic book adaptations fun and engaging pulp entertainment, some of the nuance of the source material and character are lost. Sure, there are enigmas to be unraveled in the course of those films, but they feel perfunctory rather than essential. Matt Reeves’ The Batman brings us closest to the essence of the Batman character that any film adapted from the DC comics have yet with Tim Burton’s inaugural Batman in 1989 being one of the few to really approach that.

DC stands for Detective Comics and was abbreviated long after the character of Batman was introduced. Batman with all his fancy gadgets and gizmos is an investigator, a detective who follows the trail of perfidy and malfeasance to its source in order to attempt to thwart the villain. The Batman distills that mystery thriller down to its essential parts and crafts an involving and often riveting adventure narrative pitting Bruce Wayne’s vigilante alter ego against one of his most challenging and clever foes: The Riddler. Robert Pattinson brings the brooding he’s often made famous in other works to bear on a character who is weary of his role as defender of the city and fears that his attempts to rid the streets of crime are all for naught. Paul Dano is far superior as the incomparably brilliant Riddler who wants to bring down the institutions that allowed him to become stuck within the bureaucratic nightmare of orphanhood.

The story revolves around a series of high profile killings that expose corruption at the heart of Gotham City’s power structures, including the offices of the mayor and district attorney all the way into the heart of the police department. A venal, corrupt landscape into which Batman has been reticent to inject himself, focusing on petty street-level crime. The Riddler has other ideas and believes he and Batman are sympatico in wanting to cure the disease that has tendrils reaching into the upper echelons of the city. Their ideals aren’t far removed from one another, but execution is the clear distinction, but Batman can’t help but see the similarities and its his struggle to avoid them that keeps him in pursuit of answers, which may well include painful truths about his family’s legacy.

Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore

The rocky history of J.K. Rowling and Warner Bros.’ attempts to keep the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in constant production has led to an uneven batch of semi-prequels. Originally slated to be a single film and then split into several, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is ostensibly about Newt Scamander, a foremost creature expert in the original books and author of a book of the same name. That titular association helped launch a solid opening film, but the subsequent two films have tried to shoehorn in Newt and his creatures amidst a widening World War II-era story about the impending wizarding duel between future Hogwarts Headmsater Albus Dumbledore and the villain-who-came-before-he-who-shall-not-be-named Gellert Grindelwald.

This third film presents an interesting battle between the pair that will ultimately be dwarfed in comparison to their final duel. While the gay subtext of the first film is blown wide open in this third with Dumbledore directly telling Grindelwald that he had loved him, we’re in a brave new world where gay Dumbledore is a standard-bearer for the LGBT movement even if Rowling wants to erase the T in that movement. Matter of fact whereas the original Harry Potter series was notable bereft of major minority characters, this film has two (one and a half if you can really consider now-mustachioed Yusuf Kama a major character here). It’s a brave new world for diversity.

Sarcasm aside, the film does well at presenting a complex world that hews very closely to the real world events taking place simultaneously. Grindelwald is attempting to purge muggles from the world to create a wizard-pure environment where secrecy is no longer required, not unlike Adolf Hitler’s pogrom against Jews, Africans, and gays. It’s no surprise then that Rowling, who never met a parallel she couldn’t exploit, positions the rise to power of Grindelwald by way of the German ministry of magic. The obviousness of this decision isn’t lost on a particularly well educated viewer, but younger audiences might not get the comparison, but that won’t impact their understanding of just how dire the situation will be.

Rowling’s skills as a writer are strictly limited to the written page. Her Harry Potter novels are fantastic works of fiction, written for younger audiences, but pleasurable to read for older ones. As a screenwriter, however, her abilities are a bit leaden. Even Steve Kloves can’t work out many of the bugs in her prose, which is presenting more youth-friendly dialogue and situations in a more adult-oriented series of pictures. As such, the dichotomy between cute critters and simplistic machinations isn’t well balanced against the dark and insidious events that are happening on the screen. For Potter fans, there’s plenty of new information to engage their minds, but like the feeling of depreciation that followed the release of The Hobbit films, fans are likely getting a bit tired of being treated like commodities rather than engaged audiences.

The production values are as always spectacular and director David Yates does a tremendous job keeping the narrative moving and hitting all the major beats with emotive skill. James Newton Howard’s score does some heavy lifting near the end, but otherwise blends into the background, the strains of the Harry Potter theme occasionally piquing an observant viewer’s attention. Even the symbolic parallels between this film and the The Sorcerer’s Stone with Newt arriving by lantern-lit wooden raft at the opening of the film are agreeable. So to are the performances, each actor giving a deeper and more compelling performance than in previous films, the gravity of the situation weighing more heavily on each of them.

Special note must be made of Mads Mikkelson standing in as Grindelwald. He’s the perfect villain for this kind of film. He has the look, demeanor, and intelligence of a dangerous villain and plays him in such a way that his charm and knowledge help sell the notion that this man could convince so many of the righteousness of his cause. A welcome replacement for a character that had been presented as a moustache-twirling egomaniac previously. While it might have been nice to have Colin Farrell back in the role, there’s no question that Mikkelson is a perfect transitional figure.

Free Guy

For generations X and younger, video games were an integral part of their childhoods. They grew up playing in various fictional settings. As technology has improved, so too have the worlds in which our lives have been lived. For some of the older generations, such pursuits aren’t as readily understandable as they would be for younger ones, which makes Free Guy an incredibly niche feature that won’t play well to anyone who’s never delved into the depths of modern video games.

The game in the film is called Free City, a type of Grand Theft Auto simulacrum with far better graphic output. Ryan Reynolds stars as Guy, a bank teller who goes about his daily live unaware that he is simply an Non-Player Character (NPC) in this video game and that the sunglass-wearing vigilantes that knock over his bank on an hourly basis are the player characters people in the real world are inhabiting. When he catches sight of the woman of his dream, he tries to break free of the programming that has kept him blissfully unaware of his identity, stealing a pair of sunglasses and discovering the truth about his existence. Somewhat. The truth is, he still doesn’t realize he’s an NPC, rather he believes the he has a hero like the others he can now emulate. As he attempts to become friendly with the PC Molotovgirl (Jodie Comer), her initial frustration helps push him towards becoming an iconic figure in the real world and setting up the course of events for the film.

Real world Millie (Comer) has been digging into the Free City world in an effort to locate proof that the man (Taika Waititi) who bought her and friend Keys’ (Joe Keery) proof of concept used that code as a foundation for the game he’s made a mint from. Guy’s part in this plot becomes pretty obvious early on, but it’s Reynolds’ trademark personality that keeps the audience engaged long after the viewer understands what’s going on. Unless you’ve delved into video games in general, understanding the sight gags and innuendos at play or even picking up the exterior references that come on fast and obvious late in the film, a lot of what makes the film fun is going to be lost on you. Even Reynolds’ exuberant charm can’t make the whole affair more interesting.

The film was completely deserving of its Best Visual Effects nomination as the rich tapestry of effects shift from photorealism into mind-bending excess with surprising ease and credibility. The soundscape is equally solid as are Reynolds and Comer’s performances. Many of the in-jokes are quite amusing if you catch them, but if you’ve never really gotten into the video game aesthetic, they will be utterly lost and much of the enjoyment goes out the window with that.