Nearly every time I watch a musician biopic, I can’t help but apply a weird test to the movie that I’ve used for the last 18 years - what I like to call the Walk Hard Test. Because in 2007, star John C. Reilly and director Jake Kasdan released what I consider to be the definitive satire of the genre, a decades-spanning commentary on how the movie industry tells stories about performers and the tropes used to make their complicated lives more digestible.
Read MoreVilleneuve’s script makes it obvious that no matter how much free will Paul attempts to display, his fate is preordained. He will rise up to lead the Fremen, even if that means setting off a chain reaction of events that begets ever more bloodshed. It’s proof of Villeneuve’s skill and the abilities of the cast that we’re hardly ever in the dark about the characters’ feelings – they don’t get lost amid the larger, bombastic action setpieces happening around them.
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