Director: Denis Villeneuve
Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Zendaya, Austin Butler
Have I Seen it Before: In as much as I’ve read the novel and seen all of Dune (1984) I’ve been through all of the story beats, but no. I worry I missed it on IMAX…
Did I Like It: Somewhere between seeing the movie and writing this review, someone asked me what I thought of the movie, and I said “it was more of part one.” That seems reductive, but it is meant in a positive way. The scale is epic, the movie is not weighed down by a too much*, and the performances are uniformly pretty great, even in the context of a story where one might have been forgiven (I refer again to the David Lynch original) for appearing to be slightly embarrassed by the whole affair.
As with most adaptations, the more interesting parts are where the filmmaker decides to make things different. In the novel Chani (Zendaya) is shunted aside almost glibly (you might disagree with that interpretation) but the film goes out of its way to give her agency and a measure of righteous rage. Those decisions aptly introduces the idea that the Muad’Dib (Chalamet) might be just another villain in the piece.
Maybe he’s a well-meaning villain, but I’ll just have to read further into Herbert’s saga to make that final decision. That is ultimately the best thing I can say about the movie. It might be more of the same, and lose a bit of its surprising qualities in the process, but any movie that would make me want to continue with such a densely packed series of novels clearly has something going for it.
*It’s probably impossible to completely shed all of the silly exposition when one is adapting Herbert’s novel.