DUNE - A review

If you’ve been reading these reviews for a while, you’ll know that Dune was my most anticipated film of this year. Coming from an excellent director, an amazing franchise of books, and an ensemble cast to rival God, Dune looked to be the perfect combination of nerd filmmaking glory with blockbuster action.

Being delayed for release twice, I saw it in IMAX Melbourne, in a cinema absolutely packed with fans – some loved the books it was based on. Some like me came for Villeneuve. Some came for the explosion. Some came for the hot Chalamet action. What was definite about Dune wasn’t its specific appeal, but rather its promise of an amazing experience. And for the most part, it was.

For those unfamiliar, Dune is set in the 100th century, where the universe is colonised by humanity and ruled over by fiefdoms of powerful families under one emperor. Powered by a mysterious mineral called spice grown on the planet Arrakis, the empire sends these families to supervise mining, inevitably leading to conflict and interstellar warfare. Within the film, the new family of house Atreides finds themselves in charge of Arrakis, and chaos ensues.

Dune was a book series notoriously considered “unfilmable” for many years, and had already seen a catastrophic 1984 adaptation by David Lynch (although it has seen some re-appreciation) and a decent TV miniseries. With the backing of an enormous budget and a director as talented as Denis Villeneuve, Dune looked to be finally done in a way that did justice to its devoted fandom. They absolutely proved themselves worthy.

Dune’s deep lore and dark imagination are conveyed amazingly through its cinematography and production design, with incredible creativity given to every set. The photography gives everything such a huge scale, especially on an IMAX screen, and seeing these ant-like people walking around the giant sandworms or the insectoid starships is just incredible. Meanwhile, the sound and music reverbs around the cinema like a monster roaring to life in your ear. It’s worth seeing this in IMAX alone just for the sheer chills that pass over when you see it.

It's not just the beauty of the sets that strike you, but rather their tangible communication of character in the detail and lighting within. The internal spaces of House Atreides are deeply arcane and running with an undercurrent of bizarre sorcery, giving a high fantasy feel rather than a sci-fi epic feel. The sets of Arrakis, largely practical like Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, look like interlopers which are only just surrendering to the uncompromising desert that does not want them there. The alien angles and darkness of Harkonnen’s lair display a corruption of the soul that can never be shaken. These sets feel like you could walk up to them and touch them, feel their souls within.

Not content with just having pretty sights and sounds like many other directors would, Villeneuve directs his movie with an astounding sense of tension. Similar to Arrival and Sicario, Villeneuve shirks away from abject horror to merely the suggestion of terror, using wide landscape shots to encourage the audience to scan the screen out of nervousness, wondering if something wicked is coming. Amplified by magnificent sound design, tension is palpable and bleeds out of the screen.

This tension would not exist if it were not for a solid cast of characters, though, and Villeneuve does a strong job of providing us plenty of reason to care for these people. Everyone’s acting at top level here, especially Timothée Chalamet, and the script gives them plenty of diegetic characterisation rather than just spelling it out for us. This allows Dune to constantly magnetize us to the screen and keep us marvelling there…for about 90 minutes.

Up until the 90-minute marker, I was blown away by Dune. But when that incredible destruction of the midpoint ends, the movie shuffles to a crawl. Unable to match the sheer awesome power of what came before it, Dune’s second half shuffles the characters from uninteresting setpiece to uninteresting setpiece without much explanation or convincing connecting thread, resulting in an extreme anticlimax of an ending that caused several of the people behind me to start laughing. Imagine if you watch a Marvel movie and the final fight is just a silent shiv fight in a prison somewhere. That’s how I’d put it.

Until that point, Dune felt like a coherent whole, an epic saga, an intriguing allegory of the harsh nature of colonialism and capitalism. But after 90 minutes, the movie downgrades from great to just okay hard. That may be making me a little more resentful in my recollection, so let me reassure that the opening of this movie is astounding.

I should also explain a bit about the IMAX format by comparing Villeneuve’s use of it. A great filmmaker like Christopher Nolan shoots the entire movie or entire unbroken sequences using just the IMAX format, so the entire thing looks incredible. Meanwhile, a terrible filmmaker like Michael Bay shoots the same scene with three different aspect ratios and cameras, resulting in the screen flickering like it’s having a seizure. Villeneuve lands between the two, but more to the Bay side.

During scenes, Villeneuve will intercut between standard 2.35 ratio and IMAX in the same action setpiece. In IMAX, because the screen is so wide, your eyes are naturally drawn to the sheer scale of events in the corners and at the top and bottom of the screen. But in Dune, the cut back to regular film forces you to snap back to the centre of the enormous screen, and the crosscutting happens so often that I actually got physically tired after a while.

This is an interesting point, as in an interview about Mad Max: Fury Road, director George Miller noted how he always positioned the action at the centre of the screen so the audience wouldn’t tire out by snapping their eyes everywhere. Villeneuve didn’t take the note, so you may need a good nap afterwards.

Nevertheless, Dune is a darn good movie. It’s part one of a duology, and the second movie has already been confirmed. When it hits screens in October 2023, I’m jumping in front of it. Go see it in IMAX at the Museum if you can. It’s worth it.

I’m giving Dune a B+.