Dune * (2021, Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgård, Dave Bautista) – Movie Review

The $250million+ remake of Dune has on its side Blade Runner 2049 director Denis Villeneuve and an ensemble of good actors.

Director Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 science fiction film Dune should have been a firecracker but it is the dampest of squibs. It is far, far less coherent and involving than David Lynch’s much maligned 1984 Dune, and much less quirky, imaginative or fun. You sit there for an hour and half waiting for the story to start and the characters to be explained, and then it stops with a plug for Part Two. Oh, and just before it just stops, there is a very weak climactic fight that fails to provide a climax. Dune certainly doesn’t work either as a serious-minded action thriller or a fun entertainment.

An ensemble of good actors are stranded, and Timothée Chalamet, as Paul Atreides, is a little boy lost at the centre of it. Some of the actors have too much screen time and too little to do, others just have too little screen time to do anything. Rebecca Ferguson as Paul’s mum Lady Jessica and Oscar Isaac as his dad Duke Leto Atreides are up for it, but what can they do? Remember how much fun Kenneth McMillan is as Baron Vladimir Harkonnen in the 1984 Dune? Now poor Stellan Skarsgård is miscast and no fun at all.

The screenplay by Jon Spaihts, Denis Villeneuve, and Eric Roth is deficient, with weak, sometimes risible dialogue that the actors can’t get to grips with. It all takes itself so seriously, but has nothing to be serious about. It gets bogged down in all its weird details and doesn’t tackle the bigger picture. Why can’t it just get on and tell its story? Of course Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel is famously dense and unwieldy and was always going to be hard to handle or control on screen. But, if you are going to do it, you are going to have to be able to do it.

It’s a nice-looking package, but it is empty inside. It looks eye-catchingly splashy (cinematography by Greig Fraser), but the endless CGI makes it look fake. But, of all its downsides, the score by Hans Zimmer is the film’s worst aspect. It’s awful, and it never shuts up, often drowning out the dialogue, though that is a good thing and may even be deliberate.

Although it is way, way long enough at 155 minutes, actually way too long, slow and boring, it turns out that is only the first of a planned two-part adaptation of the 1965 novel of the same name by Frank Herbert and covers only the first half of the book.

The main cast are Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgård, Dave Bautista, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Zendaya, David Dastmalchian, Chang Chen, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Charlotte Rampling, Jason Momoa, and Javier Bardem.

The original adaptation of the novel was done by Eric Roth and then Jon Spaihts left a separate Dune TV series to write the final draft of the feature film.

It premiered at the 78th Venice International Film Festival on 3 September 2021 and was released internationally on 15 September. Its US release is on 22 October, with a simultaneous release on the HBO Max streaming service.

Denis Villeneuve is also the director of Arrival (2016) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017).

Derek Winnert 2021 Movie Review

Link to Derek Winnert’s home page for more reviews: http://derekwinnert.com/