Review of Dune (2021) by Calvincrack — 23 Oct 2021

The main sin that Dune commits is being boring. A movie can be many things but it can’t be boring. I appreciate their detail in obviously keeping to the book, but the movie felt like watching a book and that’s not what I want. Another big problem is the failure to have a worthy climax or self contained payoff within this movie.

They tried with (*****spoiler*****Paul defeating the freman who challenged them *****end spoiler*****). But Paul being a great fighter wasn’t exactly how I saw his core struggle. That seems like more of a side story to deal with his responsibilities as future leader. If that was going to be the movie’s pay off they could have built that up more earlier so that scene hit harder.

The movie just felt shapeless. I understand that it’s part one but they needed to find more of an arc to this individual tale to make it work as a movie. They went hard on the Paul’s interior dreams and visions angle, but that stuff didn’t really work for me. It’s hard to translate to film and in my opinion they actually overdid it with the same dream flash again and again. I could’ve done with less of that and more of advancing the plot further.

I also wasn’t a big fan of the music and found it quite distracting at times particularly when the loud chorus of female voices would suddenly ring out.

It may seem from my mostly negative review that I didn’t like the movie but I did enjoy a great deal of it, and I’m optimistic that a dynamite part two will improve this part in retrospect. For now though I must award this movie a 6/10.