Dune: Part One

DUNE: PART ONE   ***1/2

Denis Villeneuve

2021

IDEA:  Thousands of years in the future, war is waged over the desert planet Arrakis. Caught up in the conflict is the heir to a galactic noble house that's attempting to ally itself with the planet's native people.

BLURB:  The most arresting thing about Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part One is its formidable sense of physical magnitude. Understanding that a work of epic fiction calls for an enormous canvas, the director and his superior crafts team have realized a vision with a focus toward the sublime. For 150 minutes, they treat us to an opulent parade of images that play on the parallactic juxtaposition of scales, resulting in breathtaking views of elephantine contrasts: tiny figures dwarfed by brutalist architecture; soldiers coalescing into sprawling phalanxes; massive machinery devoured (literally) by even more supersized sandworms. Villeneuve and crew orchestrate a number of sweeping action set pieces that recall a largely lost form of epic big-budget filmmaking, creating and maintaining scale through an elegant, always legible rendering of spatial relationships. Has sand been so palpable since The English Patient, so multivalent in its materiality and meaning since Woman in the Dunes? The sound design follows suit, its dense, sonorous mix constituting an aural landscape as prodigiously enveloping as the visual one. It’s so easy to fall under the thrall of Dune’s sheer formal heft that one could miss, or at least not mind, its relative tonal monotony and lack of robust characterization, the fact that its huge cast of talented actors are mostly called upon to perform in a register of uniform stolidity. Somehow, this doesn’t make the film less thrilling, and hopefully these elements will acquire more dimension in Part Two. On the level of large-scale science-fiction action-adventure spectacle – and spectacle that also grapples seriously with imperialism, multiculturalism, and spirituality – Part One more than delivers. At its best, it sends chills through the skin that would shake the sands of Arrakis.