Dune is a movie I went in expecting to love and merely ended up liking a lot, which has somehow managed to be one of the most disappointing movie watching experiences of my life. Perhaps my expectations were skewed, given this is a movie in a genre I adore and I’ve had four years of hearing nothing but acclaim for this movie. The possibility that there were aspects of the movie that weren’t perfect was something that quite frankly hadn’t really crossed my mind.
But that feels a bit too much like getting ahead of myself, because I should really emphasize the point that I liked this movie a great deal, in particular the first half or so. It just wasn’t an experience on the level of watching The Lord of the Rings trilogy for the first time, which was what I expected going in. A large part of this, I think, is that Dune by itself is so influential and far reaching that while I was watching this I couldn’t help but think of the aspects of this movie that were simply done better somewhere else.
Spoilers ahead.
I’ll start by heaping on some praise for the movie though, because as much as I am frustrated at it for various things it does so much so well. The two standouts for me were the visuals and (most of) the acting. Everything thing in this feels so real, from all the sci-fi Freman tech, the various spacefaring vehicles, and the giant sandworms. In this aspect at least, the movie delivered in spades. Very rarely does a movie manage to make so many strange concepts feel so plausible, and Dune manages to do it through simply watching it which is a feat worth commending. For me it’s on the level of something like Dynamo Dream in terms of making sci-fi objects just feel real. But it’s not just the designs and function of the objects in this movie that look good, but the cinematography and the lighting is just on point throughout the whole thing. Every space the characters occupy has so much sauce, despite so many of them feeling so empty. It’s remarkable how it manages to take so many large empty indoor spaces and still manages to contrast these with the openness of the desert once we spend more time in it after the House of Atreides falls.
I could go on about all the little details that went into making this movie looking good, but I’m rather sure that has been discussed at length elsewhere, so I’ll refrain for now. What else I’m sure has had heaps of praise lofted upon it is the acting in this movie, because pretty well everyone was operating on another plane of existence. Standouts for me were Rebecca Ferguson, who through her expressions alone manages to convey such a strong conflict within her character between her care for her son and her allegiance to the Bene Gesserit. Other highlights include a beardless Jason Momoa, whose lack of beard really helped my immersion with him being in the movie, and Oscar Isaac, who I feel finally gets to be in a blockbuster movie whose overall quality is on the level of the performance he gives in it. I’ll give one final shoutout to Stellan Skarsgård, who quite possibly is now my favourite actor after this and Andor.
What was simply great and not exception from the movie was the worldbuilding as a whole, a part of it that I think the movie could have spent so much more time on and it wouldn’t have been enough. I rarely feel compelled to go read the book after watching a cinematic adaptation but in this case I feel like I did the movie disservice by not having read the book beforehand. There’s clearly so much more going on than the movie was able to convey, even with some occasional moments of clunky exposition.
And here’s where I start to get into the parts of the movie I felt more negatively about. I’ll start with the soundtrack, which I think is probably the critique I have with this movie that is most personal to me. Historically, Interstellar aside, I haven’t loved most of Hans Zimmer’s scores, and unfortunately this one isn’t an exception. No songs ever really stuck out in a good way, though they also didn’t stick out in a bad way, which can’t always be taken for granted. I just personally couldn’t help continuing to think of Star Wars, whose Dune-inspired desert planet felt better scored by the work of John Williams, or even what Ludwig Göransson did for The Mandalorian. But I’m more than willing to concede that the score was mostly fine, and for most people that aren’t me it’s even great.
I also thought about another movie quite a bit during this, which was Mad Max: Fury Road, and the rest of the Mad Max movies to a lesser extent. Beyond both the movies taking place primarily on a desert planet, the thing that kept me comparing the two movies is that I think Fury Road does a much better job of selling how scarce water is and how dangerous the desert can be. Sure, Dune doesn’t have gangs of marauding Australians running around crashing cars into whatever poor unfortunate sap happens to be stumbling around on the sand, but it does have giant sandworms and a sun that we keep getting told is absurdly dangerously hot, and yet no one ever seems to be sweating. Hard for the stillsuits to recycle sweat when no one sweats, an odd misstep for a movie that put so much effort into so many small details. In Mad Max you really feel the desperation for water and the danger of the desert, an important detail I think Dune really struggled to nail.
Another aspect in which Mad Max: Fury Road exceeds is in the hand to hand combat, which is the aspect of the movie I feel like had the most potential that it didn’t live up to. A key aspect to the duels in Dune is that the shields they wear only allow weapons to pass through if they are moving slowly, and while it seems like there was some attempt made to have this aspect come through in the hand-to-hand combat I felt the attempt landed flat. Most contact between combatants felt either like the hits were too fast to make it through the shield, and they would anyway, or that they were trying to move weirdly slow in a way that made the fights feel floaty and fake. Not to mention that in a lot of the fight scenes, the cutting was fast and awkward enough that I wished I was watching a Jackie Chan movie instead.
Plot-wise I feel like this movie has a hard task being an adaption of half of a book, but I feel like the pacing of the movie really struggles because of it. Post the fall of the House of Atreides I think the movie lacks enough interest to make the ending feel satisfying in a way that makes the movie feel any way complete by itself. To compare it to another recent movie that is a first part, Spider-man: Across the Spider-verse ends with a rather large cliff-hanger, but that movie has such a strong arc for Gwen Stacy that gets resolved by the end of the movie that it feels like the movie has merit to itself beyond its place in the whole. Dune struggles with this because none of its characters really grow or develop over the course of the movie that feels complete, and neither is there a strong plot moment to end the movie. The fall of the House feels like the end of an Act 1, the step into the unknown and the beginning of the journey, and the end of the movie feels like we’re stuck in limbo in the middle of Act 2, which makes the ending of the movie fell deeply unsatisfying by itself.
The final nail in this coffin, I think, is that with the death of so many characters as the House falls, so much more of the burden of the interest of the movie falls on Paul Atreides, and I don’t think his character nor Timothée Chalamet’s portrayal of him are interesting enough to overcome the problems with the structure of the story. There isn’t much for me to say here with regards to his acting; it didn’t really work for me. As for Paul, I think as a character he lacks enough of a desire for anything to really feel an interest in following him along. At this point the strongest compulsion for me to continue watching is to learn more about the Freman, the spice, and the intergalactic conflict the movie is setting up. But again, so little of the interesting stuff happens in the back half of this movie that it feels deeply incomplete by itself.
More than anything, I think watching Dune has me the most interested in how I’ll feel about it after watching Part Two, and likely reading the book after I watch that. A lot of what I feel the movie got wrong could be resolved through the second half of the movie, and similarly I think so much of the story and the world would sing so much better with the added detail and context a novel can bring. As it stands though, Dune is simply an incomplete story with phenomenal visuals and acting, a soundtrack that did little for me, and a strong hook into its universe.
4/5