Dune Part 1(2021)
I haven't read the book and I'm one of those people who didn't particularly enjoy the 1984 movie beyond the casual fun factor, I just like the idea of a decent sci-fi movie. Saw it in IMAX.
I'm afraid it didn't grab me and my overall reaction was one of ok to middling to nah, wish I'd skipped it.
The visuals are great, in places. But then so it was with Transformers movies.
The slow and brooding atmosphere worked really well for the director when he made Bladerunner 2049 and slow and brooding is most of the concept of Bladerunner generally. However, trying to do the same thing with Dune simply doesn't work IMO.
And the reason for that is that it comes across to me as a relatively generic action movie, at least in this Part 1 of this film, no idea about the book. You have the hero, you have his family, who are presented as the good guys, and you have the ugly bad guy and his evil army who don't do much but be evil and try to kill the good guys.
There are a couple of plot nuances here and there which are nice, but nothing particularly in depth nor ground breaking and certainly not much to think about either during or after.
The portrayal of the bad guy in particular really took me out the movie as they literally copy and pasted Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now. It wasn't even subtle, it was an in your face carbon copy, like an SNL sketch or something. And then they had the bad guy eat a meal noisily and grotesquely while giving out some dumb evil order and I nearly facepalmed with a big sigh in the theatre.
It's a really long film and it felt it, 2.5 hours, and most of it is long brooding atmospheric shots with most dialogue reduced to choppy one-liners and trailer quotes and necessary exposition. As a consequence, the acting seemed fine, but that's because there was nothing much to challenge anyone, which also left quite a few scenes feeling a bit wooden.
To be honest, I probably would have enjoyed it more if the film had zero dialogue entirely and instead they went full-on voice-over and just had someone like Judi Dench narrate the book while we watched stunning visuals.
The action scenes are very poor and underwhelming and mostly comprise a couple of dozen people fighting each other with short swords.
There is simply nothing of any great interest here for anyone who is either mildly well versed in movie watching or looking for something vaguely different, or even more of the same done better.
I can understand a Dune fan specifically wanting to love it and be in a mad panic to ensure Part 2 gets made, but that ain't me.
Oh yeah, characterisation is virtually non-existent either. It's one of those films where they give characters dramatic and emotional death scenes almost ignorant of the fact that the audience has only seen them for 5 minutes and gives zero fucks about them. And this happens… a lot.
Still going to give it
6/10 though, because the visuals are worth it not being complete shit-tier.