Dune, my review:
[TEENAGER MODE]OMG! OMG! OMG! 11/10![/TEENAGE MODE]
Normal service resumes:
I went to our local IMAX to see it with the memsahib, the first time I've been to the cinema in years. I went in with the same type of reservations I experienced when sitting down to watch the first Jackson Lord of the Rings: The fear that a favourite book of my early years would be ruined. Quite the opposite: my expectations were exceeded tenfold.
Looking back, I really can't find anything about which to complain. I had doubts about the casting, but they were rapidly swept away. From my memories of the book, I don't think I could have done any better from the palette of options available to today's directors.
Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard team up again after their triumphant work on the Gladiator soundtrack. Simply superb.
The SFX? Pick any cliché: Jaw-dropping? Mind-blowing? All of the above.
Cinematography? Sets? Costumes? Flawless.
I'd give it 10/10 except that that score denies the possibility of the next one being better, so an enthusiastic 9.9/10
maximus otter
I've spent the past fortnight reading the book, slowly, night by night, and I've just watched the film.
The book was very good (the best thing I've read this year), but I have a few significant reservations about the movie adaptation.
Visually, cinematically, music, sound design, special effects, as you say, Maximus, it's brilliant, but there are a few things that I'm afraid left me disappointed--core directorial decisions mostly:-
First and foremost is the dialogue. Some of it is
bad (Kynes:
'He's locked the door' half a second after we watch Duncan
lock the door in 'pseudo-300-dramatic fashion')
, but more seriously, both writing and delivery are far too
contemporary. It's not just the accents, it's the syntax, the idiom and the enunciation: this style of speech (as far as it exists in the world beyond Hollywood/Marvel) won't last my lifetime before evolving significantly, let alone survive 20,000 into the future. Some of the Hollywood actors here sound as if they are trying to deliver their lines
in a cool and quotable way.
This is not acting.
Off the top of my head, Duncan Idaho sounds like a surfer part of the time:
I'm not gonna die...
Worse, Paul sounds like an American high-schooler; when he called Leto 'Dad' instead of father, my toes curled. I understand that we are to witness his journey from diffident youth to man and messiah, but when he's discussing the death of his father and the flames of a future jihad, he has the same tone as a teenager emoting over his girlfriend who got mad at him at the mall. He's also addressed by some of his father's lieutenants in a horribly casual fashion; the backslapping and winking jokes are a major departure from the formality that is underpinned by their various vows and pledges to the Atreides family. Yes, there is a love between them and him, but Paul is the heir to the Dukedom, and that enforces a distance, especially in public.
Elsewhere, even the supposedly aged Thufir Hawaii managed, "We're good to go!", while Leto came out with 'ass' and 'hellhole' and didn't 'give a damn' among others.
This I did not enjoy.
The Brits get in on the act a little, too, with the weird British computer voices sounding like the safety announcements from B.A. flights, and one Harkonnen henchman coming out with a Cockney 'shut up'.
The reason none of this works for me is that one of the things that surprised me so
pleasantly about the book was that the dialogue Herbert wrote actually contributed to the world & myth-building: it was English, of course, but there was a nice cocktail of moderately high formality, lovely neologism (comparatively little of this has made it to the film) and earnest internal monologue that gave the whole story the feel of a futuristic Greek tragedy. Villeneuvre has Leto
looking perfect for a future Agamemnon, but the monologues are mostly absent, and everybody sounds as if they're very modern with correspondingly modern concerns.
I've had to read quite a lot of 50s and 60s American literature over the years, and one of the reason I can't stand the inferior end of it is that a lot of the stuff I've read is so linguistically tied to the time in which it was written: the characters speak in such a contemporary fashion that the stories themselves feel pinned to that era too securely. The best of them transcend this limitation with various techniques, the very best actually
exploit this to say something universal. My impression while reading the book was that Herbert only once or twice dropped a clanger in terms of idiom that immediately dated the work to 1965.
This dialogue will not stand the test of time. Give it ten or fifteen years and it's going to sound as much a product of the early 2020s as Oasis were the early 1990s.
The other issue is tonal: there is no joy here.
There was in both the Lynch adaptation and Herbert's book a tonal shift. The Atreides were full of trepidation about the move to Arakkis from the outset, but the long spells of tiredness and anxiety that characterise the first weeks on the planet (here highly accelerated, Hawat and Leto seeming under no especial strain) are peppered with moments of hope, insouciance and a general determination to succeed against the odds (
Born to lose, live to win, as a great man said). I
really liked that Leto and felt grieved that he had to die; I
really liked Jurgen Prochnow's portrayal of him in the Lynch version; Villeneuve's character? Didn't really care.
Similarly, Gurney.
Whence the songs? Whence the smile and the wry quotation? Whence the damned baliset!?
The Baron? Is it me or was there a conscious visual reference to Marlon Brando in
Apocalypse Now with the bald head-rub? The fact that he's a gourmand is already apparent by the fact that he's mammoth, but here his only greed is gluttony (and oil baths?) and he's somewhat inert; indeed most of the sexual elements of the story seem to have been curiously stripped from this film.
Perhaps it's understandable to gloss or omit the Baron's homosexual/paedophilic predilections, but Jessica's sexual baiting of the Harkonnes guards in order to kill and escape them is gone, and there's no mention (that I recall) that she is Leto's concubine and not his wife. Feyd-Rautha is yet to appear, but I don't expect his sadistic wenching to feature very highly in the second film. One wonders whether this is wholly an artistic decision or whether a risk-adverse studio had an influence in this 'Cancel Age'?
My scores?
With the sound off: 9/10.
With the sound on: 7/10.
Liked it, will watch again, but as ever, read the book.