SkullWriter
Since: Mar, 2021
11/18/2021 00:00:00
As someone who has read the novel, this hurts. Not because you\'re right, but this means that the movies got the novels completely wrong. (Also I agree, and I wrote about all the spectacle versus lack of depth)
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The Trick is Not Minding it Hurts
Right out of the gate, the Dune 2021 wrong foots me. The posters all call this Dune, and it is not until you've paid for admission and the title credits roll onscreen that the movie chooses to adds the subtitle "Part One". Oh gee thanks movie. I didn't know I'd have to be paying out for sequels to get a full story. It's not even the only time the movie tricks its audience. See how Zendaya prominently features in the poster? Well she's not actually in this movie at all, save for some repeated dream sequences and a reveal in the last ten minutes. Zendaya was the one thing my wife was looking forward to with this film!
Dune is a big serious sci fi epic about the fraught attempts of an empire of sexy people to colonize a desert planet, so as to harvest super valuable "spice" at the expense of the natives. I've not read the book or watched any other version, so I can't say how accurate 2021's Dune is to the source material, or how much I can blame the problems of the film on the source material.
What I can say is that Dune is a somewhat good movie that is let down by being drawn out to the point of absurdity. This isn't a particularly complicated or nuanced story; the bad guys are literally monster orc people with black armour and sacrificial blood pyramids. The plot itself feels like an overly extended Avatar/Pocahontas situation in which a bunch of imperialists exploit a native population for their resources, and where the handsome white protagonist is prophesied to be some sort of champion/messiah to a group of credulous, noble savages, bagging a hot local girl in the process. Whilst I can summarize it easily here, the movie takes a painfully long time to go through the motions. It's not like there is even a lot of wit or wisdom to the script to distract you; whenever there is a danger of a character saying something cryptic or thought provoking, there will always be some guy in the room to bluntly paraphrases the point in plain English, for the sake of us idiots in the cheap seats. Subtext is for cowards!
What is eating up all the run time is the World building. The movie goes to great lengths to give us a thorough understanding of at least four vast alien cultures. Sometimes we are shown National Geographic style documentaries to plainly explain how these civilizations work, but for the most part it is done through fabulous vistas, brilliant costumes and exotic wailing music. For the most part, this is the strong point of the movie. I'm easily distracted by all these things. I guess that again, like Avatar it thrives on spectacle and setting at the expense of everything else.
So in summary, Dune a worthwhile movie if you like sci-fi and are prepared for the workmanlike and perhaps problematic story. Like its villain, it is a great bloated thing that gracefully soars; it is an impressive achievement certainly, but a bit sluggish all the same.