Worth: $18.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Jason Mamoa, Stellan Skarsgård, Javier Bardem, Dave Bautista, Josh Brolin
Intro:
…a sci-fi epic that sets new benchmarks for what mainstream epic cinema can achieve.
Frank Herbert’s Dune has a history of being notoriously difficult to adapt for the screen. Iconoclast Alejandro Jodorowsky poured bizarre and occasionally inspired energy into his own take, to no avail, while fellow auteur David Lynch disavowed his own finished product due to studio interference. When Frank Herbert’s Dune, the Hallmark-produced miniseries made for the Sci Fi Channel, is leading the adaptation pack, it clearly shows the average success rate with this material.
Basically, there’s a lot riding on director Denis Villeneuve to get this one right; even with his recent run of magnificent sci-fi works in Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, this could still have gone horribly wrong. But against all odds, he has managed to do what (arguably) even greater filmmakers before him failed to do: Give the worlds of Herbert the cinematic treatment they deserve.
Something that will immediately hit audiences when watching this is just how massive this production is in all aspects. Between DOP Greig Fraser’s camera work, the meticulous attention to detail put into the set design, costuming, and even miniatures, and proper wizardry in the effects department, the world of Arrakis has a sense of visual scale and tactile reality that would make even the best of Star Wars jealous.
Then there’s how it sounds, both the work of sound designers Mark Mangini and Theo Green, as well as the soundtrack by Hans Zimmer. Together, they reinforce the visuals with an operatic, truly epic, weight, whether it’s the mystical choir and instrumentation, or the use of the very sand the characters walk on to create the exhaustive unease that never lets up.
But the main thing that gives this film its size is in the writing, courtesy of Prometheus co-writer Jon Spaihts, Academy nod magnet Eric Roth, and (for the first time since Incendies) Villeneuve himself. Villeneuve has always been more about showing his stories than just telling them; he thankfully avoids the exposition pitfalls that held back the 1984 version, and through some surprisingly natural interactions and exchanges, he manages to establish a lot of the larger ideas, lore, and political intrigue holding the story together.
Not only that, but even as only half of the full story (with a sequel greenlit for 2023), it can stand triumphantly on its own as a look at young Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and his struggles with the many destinies laid out before him. Politics, religion, environmentalism, and even a bit of Arrival’s extradimensional thinking (aided by Joe Walker bending time into a pretzel once again with his editing), all wind around each other to tell a story that manages to fit the sheer enormity of its frame.
As with Villeneuve’s other films, there is a certain degree of patience (and possibly more than one viewing) required to meet the film on its own terms. But for those willing to do so, Dune (Part One) is a sci-fi epic that sets new benchmarks for what mainstream epic cinema can achieve. Watch it on the biggest screen you can find and lose yourself in the rippling sands.
