In short: Dune: Part One (2021)

As regular readers will know, I’m not as big of a fan Canadian director Denis Villeneuve as most of the critical caste seem to be. Instead of the intelligent and deep filmmaker others see, apart from the Blade Runner film I’ve mostly encountered movies I found pompous, painfully slow and self-serious, and lacking a spark of humanity, exclusively populated by characters who never smile or laugh and really love staring off into the distance dramatically. And please don’t ask me about what Arrival did to its source novella.

However, this time around, I’ve come to praise Villeneuve and not to make fun of him. Ironically, you can still use most of the points of criticism above against Dune: the characters certainly seem to be lacking in any sense of humour whatsoever, the film moves slowly, and Villeneuve takes things so very seriously indeed it could border on the ridiculous. It’s just that all of this works in the context of Dune in a way it very much didn’t in something like Sicario or Arrival. For once, the heightened tone is actually perfect for the source novel’s still peculiar and wonderful mixture of very old and very new (at least at its time) ideas and themes, something that aims for the mythical while at the same time trying to show how myth is a constructed thing.

Villeneuve is certainly better when it comes to constructing myth than criticising here, but then, pulling things down to Earth was really the job of the second novel and need not concern us with this film (or its sequel).

The film is most certainly a masterpiece of visual worldbuilding, creating the mood and feeling of its far future made out of things taken from many different pasts through fantastic production design, an often pleasantly peculiar Hans Zimmer score, and camera and editing rhythms that take their time to create the heft of reality.

Really, the only thing I’d wish I could change about this Villeneuve movie is the casting of Thimothée Chalamet as Paul; his range seems to lie exclusively between mopey, super mopey, and extra special mopey, which could become a bit of a problem in the second film when the kid’s supposed to be charismatic.

But then, nothing’s perfect.