A handful of the world's top critics have now seen the highly anticipated film Dune and delivered their verdicts. This is what they said.
Dune is still months away from its release in Australia, but reviewers from across the world have already seen it and delivered their verdict.
The latest film adaptation of Frank Herbert's 1965 science-fiction novel (a previous attempt in 1984 was, shall we say, less than stellar) features an all-star cast, led by Timothee Chalamet as the protagonist Paul Atreides and Zendaya as his love interest Chani.
Other cast members include Oscar Isaac, Rebecca Ferguson, Jason Momoa, Dave Bautista, Stellan Skarsgard, Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem. The movie is directed by Denis Villeneuve.
Yeah. Quite the line-up. Hence the high hopes of fans, who reckon this might be the next epic sci-fi saga to really take off.
The release date for Australian cinemas has been pushed back all the way to December 2, long after its October release elsewhere. But a handful of critics got to view it at the Vince Film Festival on Friday.
If their early reviews are to be believed, the December delay is going to be a cause of immense frustration for Australian viewers - because the critics are, mostly, being quite positive.
At the time of writing, Dune has a perfectly respectable score of 85 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes, based on more than two dozen reviews. Here is a sampling of the critics' opinions.
Raphael Abraham, writing for The Financial Times, calls Dune "a galactic crowd-pleaser on a vast scale". He says this adaptation does a "far better job" than the previous one in making its convoluted world "mostly comprehensible", even for newcomers to the story.
"The art direction, production and costume are something to behold. Elegant blacks and greys combine with swaths of gold, everything exuding a cool modernist sheen and set to a crunching Hans Zimmer score," Abraham says.
"Such pseudo-spiritual sci-fi adventures often teeter on the edge of the ridiculous, but Dune mostly stays on the right side of risible, save for an elaborate 'sandwalk' that looks silly enough to come out of Monty Python's ministry.
"If the ending itself is strangely inconclusive, it is because Villeneuve and his story are not yet done, the director having pinned his hopes on a sequel."
He describes that as a "dangerous gamble", but gives the film four stars out of five.
The Los Angeles Times' Justin Chang says Dune is a "transporting vision" that could "use a touch more madness".
"Conventional wisdom has long held that Dune is unfilmable, that its interlocking parables of colonial oppression, ecological disaster and messianic deliverance are too vast to be contained within the flattening parameters of the cinema screen," he writes.
"(The new Dune) boldly seeks to reverse that prophecy. With methodical poise and seat-rattling spectacle, Villeneuve draws you into an astonishingly vivid, sometimes plausibly unnerving vision of the future."
He says the film's action sequences are handled with "masterly assurance", but Villeneuve particularly excels at "the queasy anticipation" of that violence.
"Until the movie slams to an abrupt, unsatisfying halt halfway through the events of Herbert's novel, there's pleasure in watching this particular game of thrones play out, though perhaps more pleasure than depth or meaning," says Chang.
"Perhaps reluctant to alienate the novices in the audience, Villeneuve has ironed out many of the novel's convolutions, to the likely benefit of comprehension but at the expense of some rich, imaginative excess.
"As a visual and visceral experience, Dune is undeniably transporting. As a spectacle for the mind and heart, it never quite leaves Earth behind. And perhaps that's as it should be, at least at this early stage. With any luck, there will be more to see and much more to think about in Dune: Part Two."
The Guardian's Xan Brooks is an unambiguous fan, giving the movie five stars and describing it as "blockbuster cinema at its dizzying, dazzling best".
"Villeneuve's fantasy epic tells us that big-budget spectaculars don't have to be dumb or hyperactive, that it's possible to allow the odd quiet passage amid the explosions," Brooks tells his readers.
"Dune is dense, moody and quite often sublime - the missing link bridging the multiplex and the arthouse.
"Good heavens, what a film. The drama is played out with relish by an ensemble cast and Villeneuve is confident enough to let the temperature slowly build before the big operatice set-pieces eventually break cover. He has constructed an entire world for us here, thick with myth and mystery, stripped of narrative signposts or even much in the way of handy exposition.
"It's a film of discovery, an invitation."
Lest we get too far ahead of ourselves here, it's worth noting a couple of negative reviews as well, such as the one from The Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney.
"Unless you're sufficiently up on Frank Herbert's 1965 sci-fi classic to know your Sardaukars from your Bene Gesserit, your crysknife from your hunter seeker, chances are you'll be glazing over not too far into Dune," says Rooney.
"Villeneuve's attempt to tame the notoriously difficult novel about an interstellar empire at war over control of a precious natural resource has no lack of cinematic spectacle, from its majestic landscapes to its monumental architecture, nifty hardware and impressive spacecraft. It also benefits from a charismatic ensemble.
"But it doesn't quash the frequent claim that the book is unfilmable. At least not in part one of what is being billed as a two-part saga."
He says the film has "a reasonable semblance of narrative coherence", which is at least better than the previous adaptation, but adds that it fails to "shape Herbert's intricate world-building into satisfyingly digestible form".
"The history and complex societal structure that are integral to the author's vision are condensed into a blur, cramping the mythology," writes Rooney.
Over at IndiWire, David Ehrlich is harsher, describing Dune as "a massive disappointment".
"This lifeless spice opera is told on such a comically massive scale that a screen of any size would struggle to contain it," he says.
"Likewise, no story - let alone the misshapen first half of one - could ever hope to support the enormity of what Villeneuve tries to build over the course of these interminable 155 minutes, or the sheer weight of the self-serious portent that he pounds into every shot.
"For all of Villeneuve's awe-inducing vision, he loses sight of why Frank Herbert's foundational sci-fi opus is worthy of this epic spectacle in the first place."
He says it's "hard to overstate how little actually happens" in this introduction to the world, which "flows like an overture stretched for the duration of an entire opera".
"'This is only the beginning,'" the last line threatens, and yet it unmistakably feels like the end of something too. Not the end of watching movies on the big screen, but perhaps the end of making movies that are too big to fit on it."
Ehrlich grades the film as a C-, which I must confess is better than I was expecting while reading his thoughts.
One more downer. Vanity Fair's Richard Lawson says Dune "gets lost in space".
If it doesn't do well enough for the studio to greenlight part two, says Lawson, this Dune will "live on as a turgid preamble with little payoff".
"Villeneuve's film is somehow plodding and hurried at once, flurries of exposition and table-setting around set-piece monoliths," he writes.
"At times, his aggressive approach works. There are scenes when the film's relentless rumble reaches heart and mind, and truly connects. The immensity of the film can probably only be experienced properly in a theatrical setting.
"Dune lumbers with such aloof, uninviting self-seriousness that it's hard to love. In all its marvel, it forgets to do basic things like give us someone or something to root for, or feel for, or think about for longer than the stretch of the film.
"Some vexing, inscrutable mystery and preening opacity can be fun. But there ought to at least be a big, central Why animating a film. Otherwise, it's all just a bunch of pretty shots of sand and fire and lavish costumery with no guiding spirit."
Back to a far more positive note, UK Telegraph critic Robbie Collin gives Dune five stars, calling it "science-fiction at its most majestic, unsettling and enveloping".
"An adult human body is 60 per cent water. But the audience leaving Friday morning's Venice Film Festival screening of Dune were, by this critic's reckoning, around 90 per cent goosebump," says Collin.
"Every detail feels threateningly alien, but also enticing, even addictive. The costumes by Jacqueline West and Bob Morgan are like occult-fascist regalia. The sets ring with the desolate grandeur of ancient ruins."
Finally, Entertainment Weekly's Leah Greenblatt calls the film "breathtaking" and "a little bit maddening" at the same time.
"If you're already knee-deep in Herbert mythology, you'll thrill to every whispered word; if you come in not knowing the difference between a Holtzman shield and a hole in the floor, it's a longer walk," she writes.
"The sheer awesomeness of Villeneuve's execution - there might not be another film this year, or ever, that turns one character asking another for a glass of water into a kind of walloping psychedelic performance art - often obscures the fact that the plot is mostly prologue, a sprawling origin story with no fixed beginning or end.
"Minus the fuller context that Herbert's extended universe and dense mythology provides, the meaning of it all feels both endlessly beguiling and just out of reach, a dazzling high-toned space opera written on stand."
Dune releases in Australian cinemas on December 2.
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2021-09-03 20:01:34Z
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