Dune Review – Author: Dostrange

Rating: 5/5

That’s what finally happened yesterday and I saw Doon in the cinema. It was almost unreal that the film finally made its way to the screens. I save a table of contents for this point, because you either know it or can read it in many other places.

Since I don’t go into direct content: SPOILER-FREE

What Villeneuve speculates here is actually a bow to the work of Frank Herbert. After all, my biggest worry was that the litterateur would never be able to do justice to him again. The novel “Dune” was previously considered too heavy and difficult. The ’80s version of Lynch was also quite entertaining and had a great show value for its time, but at the end of the day it was only a rough outline or interpretation of Herbert’s work. But Villeneuve has already proved with “Blade Runner 2049” what he can do if you look at him and see…

DUNE (Part 1) is a visually stunning epic. A job that you don’t get to see everyday. Whether it’s the panorama images of Arakis, the giant designs of spaceships and other aircraft or land vehicles, the play of light and color, but also scenes in which the main focus is on the characters. Everything leaves the impression of something very special. Above all, everything is perfectly staged as Villeneuve doesn’t make any busy pictures. Each sequence gives enough time to properly capture the real splendor. So you can say that the camera work and editing is like perfection.

Nothing could have been better in terms of set design and costume. Minimal and basically admirably true, even the smallest of details are meticulously and lavishly created here. You can really notice how important this work is to Villeneuve when people work with so much love.

What would dunes be without sand worms!?! These don’t often appear in Part 1, but when these giants hit the screen, they seem like the epitome of epic bombshells. Definitely an improvement over the old movie version.

In terms of content, I also noticed a lot of small details that I can still remember from the book and in turn I didn’t see any major scenes that I would have missed from the template. The story couldn’t have been seen better for the film’s medium. A little anecdote on the shore… which I didn’t even see in the book: Bagpiper Landing in Arrakis and Accordingly Water World Similarities between Caledon and Latin Caledonia (Scotland).

Actors are confident across the board, even though Chalamet as Paul Atreides and Ferguson as Lady Jessica represent the central focus and therefore could shine more. Timothée Chalamet is an excellent choice for a lead role especially if you know the character Paul and you have a direct comparison in mind. Only Momoa was staged a bit as a “friend” to me as Duncan Idaho. I didn’t have it in my mind now, but you can leave that as an explanation, because I didn’t realize that you would be unfaithful to the “character arc”.

The sound was impressive and powerful, for example during explosions, and puts you in the center of the action. In quiet moments it is as pleasantly gentle as the wind whispering over the Arrakis dunes. So all is well. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of Hans Zimmer’s score. It’s discreetly imperceptible in the best moments, but often manifests much more penetratingly in more dynamic scenes, making it look like a mere “boom”. You can’t keep up with the class of pictures here, but at most moments you actually make your way through the film quite passively. As anticipated, the film score of the Lynch film, which was reputedly staged by Toto, is unmatched.

Since I have seen the film in 3D, I can also say that these effects are quite subtle. In my opinion it would not be needed and in theory I would prefer to see a 2D version. (didn’t work for us) So I would rate it as neutral. No added value, but not negative either.

Conclusion:

As MJ himself wrote… Frank Herbert would be proud of this movie. Villeneuve managed to adapt the work “Dune”, despite its “heaviness”, to the screen as massively and honestly as possible. The film is an epic masterpiece whose likes haven’t been seen in cinema for a long time for the scifi genre. So you can already talk about the film of the year, as there is no competition in sight, which will come even closer to the orbit of Doon.

Film is definitely not mainstream as we know it nowadays. The film is too quiet for that, too slow and has very little “boom boom”. But “Dune” comes across as a time when SciFi told stories that work even beneath the surface and like to raise philosophical questions.

Of course we’re only talking about Part 1 here, but with regards to the range and quality of this debut, I’m no longer worried about implementation.

My Rating: 10/10