Dune (Dune: Part One) is a 2021 American Action, Adventure, Drama, and science fiction film. It is rated PG-13 and it is two hours and 35 minutes.
The film stars Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgård, Dave Bautista, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Zendaya, David Dastmalchian, Chang Chen, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Charlotte Rampling, Jason Momoa, and Javier Bardem.
Let’s talk more about the film…
Dune 2021 Movie Review
It’s finally here. Dune was one of my most anticipated movies of whatever year. They decided to release it because it’s been pushed back and moved around like so many other things, and I’m really excited to talk about it.
Dune was directed by Denis Villeneuve, he is one of my favorite directors of all time. He’s made some of my favorite movies of all time. The Man is a genius, and I was extremely excited to see his vision of a movie that’s been talked about for a very long time.
David Lynch originally directed an adaptation of this movie, and the books are filled with so much lore and so much backstory and so much stuff happening that many people felt a film like this would be very difficult to translate to the big screen.
Dune is a feature adaptation of Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel about the son of a Noble family entrusted with the protection of the most valuable asset and most vital element in the Galaxy.
Dune is masterfully directed. Denis Villeneuve is easily one of the best filmmakers working today, and he consistently blows you out of the water with incredible visuals. The visual effects in Arrival and Blade Runner, and now Dune have a real depth to them.
Most of the visual effects are aided by the fact that the shot they’re in usually has something else in it that we understand the size of, whether it’s a planet, a human being, a building that creates.
This feeling of scope, whether it’s a Sandworm, and we’re seeing it from the perspective of two people who are on the docking Bay of a ship, or it’s a massive army of people. But there’s a ship in the sky that’s descending towards them.
The focus is usually on something within the frame that we understand the size of which creates this massive feeling of depth in every single image.
Everything about Dune feels otherworldly. It feels like you’re being transported to a different place. The art Department outdid themselves, the interiors of their homes, the interiors of the ships, or the places they go underground or this incredible city that they visit.
Everything feels like a living, breathing, tangible world. One of the hardest things about Dune, though, is how much lore there is.
How much information the viewer has to understand about this world, about things that people can do with certain abilities, something called the voice that allows them to influence other people’s actions.
All of this has to be communicated to the audience in a way that feels organic, without an overload of exposition or backstory, which is very difficult when the source material has so much information and so much depth already.
But I think they did a really good job of communicating the key elements, the things that are most important for the audience to understand, so they can relate to these characters and appreciate their journey and their sacrifices.
When Rebecca Ferguson’s character is teaching her son, played by Timothée Chalamet, to use this thing called The Voice, you immediately understand its power.
But there’s also a long history of politics with different civilizations, and they’re all sort of warring with each other, some actually fighting, and some are fighting more in ways that our signatures and treaties and contracts, and you can tell they’re not really agreeing, and there might be some sinister things happening under the surface.
This is a lot of information, and it’s understandable why so many people thought that Dune is such a difficult thing to translate to the big screen because not everybody really enjoyed David Lynch’s version, and there was also a TV show as well.
There hasn’t been what most people would consider the definitive big-screen version of Dune. I think until now because this movie genuinely is masterful. That being said, it is incomplete.
This is pretty much the only thing that I could compare Dune to Halloween Kills is that they both feel incomplete. This is 100% of Part one, and even though it wasn’t really marketed that way, it does say Dune Part One in the opening titles.
And when the film ends, you’re sort of hanging a little bit. There’s a lot of things you’re looking forward to seeing come to fruition that you’re not going to see it. And if the film doesn’t do well, enough. We might not ever see it.
It’s a very strange time we live in, where a person who has made great films like Enemy, Prisoners in Sandy, Blade Runner 2049 Arrival, and now Dune isn’t entirely sure if he can finance Dune part two. It’s such a strange time we live in.
We live in a time where Ridley Scott can make a movie with Jason Bourne, Batman, and Kylo Ren, and it bombs at the box office, because I saw the film and it’s excellent and you should see it too.
So I hope that we do get it Dune part two because I really love this setup and I love real gritty, hard Sci-Fi like this. And once again, Hans Zimmer outdoes himself.
He creates a score here that is somehow very linked to him and sounds like something that he would create, but also sounds incredibly unique to what he usually creates. I can’t wait to listen to it over and over again for years to come.
Timothée Chalamet is excellent in this film. I think it might actually be my favorite performance of his. I also loved Oscar Isaac, Rebecca Ferguson, and Josh Brolin, who once again shows up as a cool guy who’s just awesome. I don’t know why he keeps doing that, but he’s good at it. Since this is very much so half a movie.
Zendaya is not in the film that much. So if you were really excited to see what she was going to do, she’s mostly a music video character in the movie because she almost primarily exists in the film as a vision that Timothée Chalamet’s character is having.
So she’s not in the movie all that much. And I’m assuming she’ll be in part two if they get to make it a lot more.
I really loved doing the action. Set pieces were phenomenal, but the focus was almost always on the characters. There’d be these massive explosions and ships crashing in the background, but you’re focused on Josh Brolin running.
And I have to say they did an amazing job at setting up so much backstory and so much information and making it feel very digestible for someone who’s never read the books or seen David Lynch’s film or the TV show. Everything was handled in a way that I think most audiences will be able to understand.
But Denis Villeneuve has a way of making big-budget movies where a person could see Dune and make a movie like, say, Michael Bay might have made.
His bigger films like Blade Runner are blockbuster entertainment combined with arthouse. And so I don’t know if everyone who sees this film is going to appreciate it or if it will make the type of money that a movie like a Transformers would make.
It’s a very disappointing world that we live in where these masterful films people are like, I’ll wait for it to be on streaming which it will be, but it’s disappointing. I wish that more people supported films like this because these are the types of movies I want to see more of.
So I am going to give Dune 2021 a B.
So, guys, if you can see Dune in theaters, I would strongly recommend it. Guys thank you so much as always for reading the review of Dune 2021 filme. See you next time.
Dune Trailer
Check out the trailer of the most anticipated movie of the year Dune 2021.