I agree, personally I consider the movie \'artistically bloated and creatively dead\'. There are nice imaginative scenes here and there like with the planet of the Sadaukar, but other than that, everything has been stripped to its bare minimum and just oversaturated with sepia tones. I may end up making my own review to express that better.
Please do! Most of the more critical reviews I\'ve seen still include a lot of praise for the film\'s visuals, so I\'d definitely be interested in seeing a different perspective on that. Personally, I\'m kind of mixed on them; it\'s typical Villeneuve, striking and muted as ever, but it\'s too barren for my tastes. The omission of the wet-planet conservatory contributes a lot to that. The Arrakeen manor is just too monotone and spartan to convey how truly decadent it is.
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A Dull, Utilitarian Synopsis
Denis Villeneuve brings his signature style to Dune: Arrakis is a place of imposing megastructures, sweeping deserts, and enormous otherworldly spaceships. It is also a place largely devoid of life or color, perhaps moreso than the director intended it to be.
Dune has always been a terribly daunting thing to adapt. There have been two attempts prior to Villeneuve's: the delirious decadence of David Lynch's 1984 film, and the high-effort, low-budget Sy Fy miniseries (the latter of which I have yet to actually watch).
The novel itself is sprawling, immediately dropping readers into the web of intrigue woven by the setting's various factions as they vie for control of the titular planet. Internal monologues abound, giving us rich insights into characters' values and mindsets. The setting itself is alien and bizarre like few others, and the novel devotes a great many pages exploring its intricacies.
In his attempt to grapple with such a sprawling work, Villeneuve opted for a very concise, straightforward depiction of the events of the novel. The broad strokes plot is all there, and it is largely intelligible despite its many, many omissions. But while the overall sequence of events have been well-preserved, the actors involved have been reduced to two-dimensional stand-ins of their literary counterparts.
Whereas Lynch opted for including characters' thoughts, albeit in brief, Villeneuve forwent exploring their inner worlds almost entirely. Some characters, like Jessica, suffered terribly for it. The incredibly subtle cues Paul shares with us in the book are replaced with scenes where she loses her composure entirely, breaking down to the point where she practically begins to sob.
Further, the Harkonnen plot to frame her as the traitor (and, indeed, the plot to expose the traitor in the first place) is cut. We do not see her spar with Hawat, nor do we see Duke Leto's own gambit to protect her. Her Bene Gesserit training, even, remains an informed attribute for most of the film.
This is part of a broader trend: the many, many scenes that would've let us better understand the cast were left on the cutting room floor. The dinner, Yueh's conversation with Lady Jessica about his wife, Gurney's nearly everything involving Mapes, and a great many other scenes were axed in favor of more dream sequences featuring Zendaya (who barely even appears outside of them).
As a consequence, we're left knowing almost nothing about the cast. They are little more than vehicles for exposition as the plot races from scene to scene, never giving them space to breathe or play off of one another.
Ultimately, we're never given a reason to care about what's happening to them. The tension evaporates like everything else on Arrakis does, and we are left with sweeping desert vistas and imposing brutalist metropolises, both of them lifeless and inhuman. Without any spark of life or flicker of personality to contrast the planet's inhospitality against, Dune becomes little more than a bleak, barren dustball.