Anmole Prasad

The worn fantasy of an America-centric future with the central white male named inevitably after one of the Apostles-in this case Paul and not John, James, Michael, or Thomas, the brown sidekicks that have been inexistence since the Lone Ranger, the Church in the form of Reverend Mothers, a nod to Greece and Rome as the founts of Enlightenment and an obviously Arab native population that serves simultaneously as the exotic and the primitive other. Villeneuve, never a director who knows when to stop, claims his extravaganza to be inspired by, amongst other classics, Lawrence of Arabia-but desertscapes and whooping war parties aside, there is no resemblance. Released in the midst of the cruel wholesale butchery of Palestinians in Gaza, this film with its Orientalist representations of Islam and the Arab world, its obviously Anglophone saviour [more hobbit than Spartan notwithstanding], its crude depictions of Slavic stereotypes as archvillians and its overall GameofThronesy view of the world cannot but fail to disturb. Steve Bannon will love it.