A- | The surviving members of House Atreides integrate themselves with the Fremen of Arrakis and seek revenge on House Harkonnen. Directed by Denis Villeneuve Starring Timothee Chalamet, Zendaya, and Rebecca Ferguson Review by Jon Kissel |
As big-budget filmmaking finds itself at a crossroads, where the cash cows of the past have been put out to slaughter and no one knows what the next billion dollar film will be, every film that smashes expectations creates a possible future where movies like itself will one day be the next exhausted fad. Will it be historical biopics with all-star casts, weightless video game adaptations, satirical toy tie-ins, or jingoistic advertisements for the military industrial complex? Denis Villeneuve imagines the possibility that the wave of the cinematic future is superficially opaque space operas, where invented terminology like kwisatz haderach and lisan al-ghaib are made to sound meaningful instead of ridiculous. His two Dune films, with a third on the way, use the bludgeoning effects of size and scale to make the theater experience a must, but Villeneuve also remembers the human element, even moreso in Dune: Part Two. Frank Herbert’s novel is a recognizable hero’s journey, partly because it’s a classic story and partly because so many subsequent stories have imitated it, but the specific influences of the book and what Villeneuve chooses to embellish and focus on makes Dune into a hopeful harbinger of a better cinematic future.
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