Review of Dune (2021) by Thazari — 22 Oct 2021

Dune is spectacular at the visual and auditory level, but highly unpleasant to watch due to rapid scene switching and highly forgettable due to lack of depth.

The entire movie seems to be repeating a cycle of introducing a big new locale with bombastic music followed by a shallow exchange of a few oneliners or a brief action scene that has no flow or cohesion with the rest of the scenes, making the movie feel more like one long spectacular trailer than anything that tries to convey an actual story. Overall, it felt pretty similar to Jupiter Ascending, Valerian or any recent superhero movie: Spectacular visuals, but devoid of cohesion. Dune however lacks the cringy dialogue that the aforementioned movies had, cutting the dialogue to a bare minimum instead, which makes it even more difficult to understand the setting and maintain cohesion. Unfortunately, Duncan and Stilgar try their best to up the cringe factor here and there with their silly, out of place oneliners.

The moments where the movie does take a bit more time to resolve an important scene, the scenes are not done well, which prevents the viewer from feeling any emotional attachment: This is most clearly seen in the poorly executed scenes of Paul's test, the long but shallow dialogue between Paul and the Duke Leto, the scene between the Duke Leto and the Baron Harkonnen, and the flashy but highly disorientating combat scenes that just feel like an anticlimax more than anything the movie had spent considerable time building up towards. In general, the movie lingers long on scenes that lack any meaning but look pretty, and skips over the key scenes and interactions that are supposed to carry the story. I do not mind the fact that the movie does not always closely follows the book, as that is understandable for an adaptation, but I do mind that the movie does not utilize the opportunities of the movie medium for any kind of story telling or exposition besides the epic visuals/audio - this does not necessarily have to be through spoken dialogue, but narrative exposition can also be done in a visual way, which the movie does not do either.

The characters feel paper-thin and barely display any personal characteristics, making them flat, unlikable and unrelatable. There is nothing explaining the motivations or backgrounds of Piter, Yueh, Rabban or the Baron Harkonnen. The Harkonnen are evil because they have ghoulish faces and speak the few lines they are graced with a voice that does befit a Marvel villain, and that's pretty much all there is to it.

It is odd to see movie based on DUNE, arguably one of the more complex and intellectual science fiction IPs reduced to a movie that does not have a single memorable line of dialogue, compelling scene, or meaningful interaction between its characters.

The movie trickled along and fizzled out, and at the end I was left wondering what I had actually seen, as I remembered nothing of the story or felt anything for any of the characters. It was just a long sequence of brief impressive visuals that bear little to no relation to each other. The movie left me feeling empty, like I had watched a generic Marvel movie with no plotline, no background, no character development, hyperactive pacing, shallow/silly interactions, all covered up by epic bombastic visuals.