You can’t talk about sci-fi cinema in 2021 that doesn’t begin and end with Sand dunes (HBO Max). So OK, Sand dunes. Directed by Denis Villeneuve, it’s a lot of great stuff: sprawling, Shakespearean, very sandy. The worms are incredible. Oscar Isaac was pretty naked, and then he was pretty dead. Timothée Chalamet, as Paul Atreides, falls in love with a girl, played by Zendaya, who appears on screen for seven minutes. (Total run time: 2 hours 35 minutes.) They barely speak; most of their flirting takes place in visions and hazy dreams — the safest thing about social distancing. The best game of Seven Minutes in Heaven ever.
Not that most teenagers in the real world would even play Seven Minutes in Heaven these days. If they don’t want to achieve Paul’s sexual awakening — from a distance — the past two years Covid-19 protocols will inculcate in their psyche the belief that a No Touch policy is not just about complying with the law but is ideal for so many of them. Flirting online is much easier than bottle spinning, an activity that is both germy and casual. So Sand dunes , in a way, is the perfect sci-fi movie for 2021: a young, innocent Zoom romance.
Even more minors, despite the star’s significantly older age, are means of Ryan Reynolds Free boy (Amazon Prime), which imagines the same far-reaching scenario as Sand dunes, except that the guy falls in love with the girl not through dreams but on an ontological level. He is an NPC in an online video game; She is one of the human players of the game. “I really want to kiss you,” Reynolds said to the woman, in Free boyThe most beautiful scene. “Isn’t that weird?” It’s correct! But she agreed, watching on her computer screen and trying not to dissociate when the avatar looked like she locked her lips with a sentient program. In other words, the future of first kisses is multidimensional.
Or Wednesday afternoon? In YA’s love story Map of tiny perfections (Amazon Prime), a guy stuck in a time loop meets a girl stuck in a similar time loop, and the girl says the girl won’t kiss that guy until she realizes the kiss As the final peak of the 4D hyperaddress map of perfect moments, its completion will free both of them from this “time anomaly”. There are many references to Groundhog’s Day, Edge of Tomorrow, and Which doctor?, all should feel forced but don’t. The famous line is also not taken from Take in this year’s other lovely time loop, Boss level (Hulu), starring Frank Grillo as a muscular ex-soldier with specific skill set who is forced to relive the same day over and over again, enduring death by all means of stabbing, shooting, beheading and exploding as he tries, with the help of Yang Ziqiong’s sword, to manages to rescue his ex-girlfriend (a confused Naomi Watts), kill the final boss (Mel Gibson is very confused), and save the world from the collapse of spacetime (source of confusion) . Again, love wins the day, even if Watts is in the movie as long as Zendaya is in Sand dunes.
Perhaps, at this stage, you want your women to be on the more visible side of things. If so, consider the French film Oxygen (Netflix), whose protagonist – almost exclusively – is a scientist played by the magical Mélanie Laurent. She wakes up in an AI-controlled frozen shell and must find a way out of it before it runs out of standard oxygen. Who put her there? Even where? over there? Before long, she began to remember a man. A husband. The love of her life. Who died in a terrible pandemic on Earth. Well, that’s it: She’s part of a mission to save humanity, predicted to be completely dead in two generations.
