94% on Rotten Tomatoes (out of 342 reviews)
Runtime: 165 minutes
Directed by: Denis V.
Starring: An incredible cast
From: Warner Bros./Legendary
I waited until last night to finally check out Dune: Part Two. Besides my schedule and not wanting to be with too large an audience (it’s not really due to any phobias; it was that the crowd I saw Part One w/ was not the best), the first film needed to be revisited as I had only that one theatrical experience & of course it was needed before I saw the second half of a dense story. My theory was proven right: the refresher-done a few hours before tackling this-was needed & better than just reading the Wikipedia synopsis. The crowd last night was thankfully MUCH better.
None of the Frank Herbert novels have been read by me; that said, I heard a few things… the ending of this movie wasn’t too terribly surprising. As for the plot: last night immediately after viewing the film I did not entirely love it, although I understand there were changes made from the source material and of course certain elements likely will play better in print where all the machinations can receive far more elaboration to appreciate. It is likely that this would make me better admire how the plot isn’t a standard Hero’s Journey where our protagonist attempts to free an oppressed people. My opinion today… more on that in a moment.
Otherwise, in terms of the audio and visual, it will be incredibly hard to top the experience of Dune: Part Two. The cast, the direction, the action, the carnage, the world-building, the detail, the sets, the score, the sound design… all of those aspects were blue-ribbon quality. It was nice to see serious cinema that had some humorous bits but wasn’t MCU quip a minute BS… not to mention other modern tropes I loathe such as “nonsensical plot”, “no stakes”, and “fake-out deaths”, among many others. A flick avoiding all those bad tropes while not being afraid to have complex characters that may turn off the average Joe Blow moviegoer—that can be appreciated by me, even from Warner Bros. a studio I don’t love due to the reign of Voldemort.
Recently, I rolled my eyes incredibly hard when I read that Denis Villeneuve recently made the proclamation that “dialogue is for television & stage” and thus, he’d like to make a movie without dialogue. Now, how pretentious can you get? Pretension in the movie world more often than not makes me sigh. As can be seen by my highest-possible rating, that opinion played no role in my review as it did not factor into the end product.
As so much was done so well with the movie-including how it successfully wrapped the story presented in Part One-and it is a modern movie I can marvel over (it happens less & less frequently, much to my dismay) bestowing the highest of high ratings seems appropriate; I am not simply logging that rating because most of Letterboxd also gave it *****. If you can view it on a giant screen-like I did, even if it wasn't IMAX-it's a must.
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