It's yet another in a solid run of movies by Villeneuve -- better to me than Blade Runner 2049, if perhaps not quite as strong as Arrival. But even a statement like that sums up my overall feelings about Dune pretty well: pointing out what little might be "wrong" with it is quibbling over fairly minor details.
There's a lot this new Dune does with unassailable excellence. It's loaded with amazing visuals, dynamic and striking, and managing to seem alive even working within the narrative constraint that most elements are supposed to be brown. The execution is great in taking a lot of incredibly cerebral and inherently non-cinematic concepts from the book and transforming them in a perfect way: preserving the underlying meaning while presenting them more visually. That's maybe a long-winded way of saying that, for the most part, it is an incredibly faithful adaptation. Even scenes that are invented wholly are there to effectively convey meaning from the book. And the occasional story tweaks here and there (for example: changes to Liet Kynes, and not just making the character female) often feel like improvements on the book that remain tonally consistent.
The cast is excellent and extensive. I found Rebecca Ferguson as Jessica to be especially moving, Oscar Isaac as Duke Leto to be every bit as charismatic as the internet identified from the trailer, and Jason Momoa as Duncan Idaho to be (perhaps surprisingly) some much-needed lightness and levity in an otherwise extremely serious tale. But there's no weak link anywhere in the cast; if anything, the weakness is in not getting to see enough of many of them.
And that steps into where the shortcomings of this movie might lie. It's an incomplete story, even beyond "ending on a cliffhanger." It just sort of ends, not at what feels like a "right time," and it's hard to know what "the right time" might have been. I'd consider arguing that something like the last 15-30 minutes of the movie are the letdown, ending things on decidedly less adrenaline-pumping action than came earlier in the movie. On the other hand, there's important character growth in this last chunk, and without it there, you'd see even less of characters this movie short-changes. Regardless, you know what would fix this? If Villeneuve and this cast get to make "part two" and finish the first novel, rendering the question of "where the story break should fall?" nearly moot, and bringing us more of characters we deserved here.
Another small quibble? There's a betrayal in the story that is played for "ominous dread" in the book, where the movie opts for "surprise." The latter choice leaves the motivation for the betrayal thinly explained, and blunts the magnitude of the betrayal considerably. Also, I found Hans Zimmer's score to be oppressively loud in the sound mix -- at least, in the particular IMAX theater where I saw the film. It being so prominent made me appreciate it less; it felt like the same "BWAAAAAAAA" he's been delivering us for a decade, with just a sprinkling of Middle Eastern flourish on top.
But to harp too much on those quibbles would be to lose sight of the overall achievement here. Dune has long been considered to be unfilmable, and any look at the past efforts (the abandoned Jodorowsky version, the David Lynch film, the Sci Fi Channel mini-series) would only confirm that assessment -- those efforts did not succeed in making others see what fans of the book love. This movie feels like it can, and I would eagerly look forward to any sequel(s) this director, with this cast and crew, could produce. I'd give Dune a very strong B+, which I expect to rise on repeat viewings (or if we do get a follow-up).
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