Saw it again tonight.
I really appreciate the visual language Villeneuve excels at; I find his style often a tad lingering, pensive, somewhat meandering, oftentimes to detriment but not here……it’s perfectly adept at encapsulating and enforcing Dune’s placement and sense of gravitas. I can understand some of the criticisms laid at the feet of character development and pacing, perhaps these will be better addressed in the broader context sequels afford, but this is the universe I’ve always envisioned best aligned to Herbert’s inception. I absolutely adore the art direction and costumes…..brilliant. The Fremen’s look is flawless.
But I will admit, if one hasn’t read the novel, I can completely understand how this wouldn’t grip somebody or would leave them ambivalent or leave them with a sense of bewilderment and…emptiness? Dune is a heavyweight on so many different levels, and any film adaptation is going to be, at best, a cursory glance on the surface of the depth available of this world. To that, I find this film a nice compliment to its source material, but maybe a bit too much to achieve much merit in the medium it seeks to inhabit here. Cinema is simply too constrained to address this to the degree deserved, much less required. But I’ll take it in the understanding of a compliment, because I think that’s honestly the best we are able to get.
I love this film.