*This is a spoiler-free brain dump (rough cut?) rather than My Official Take. The Shai Hulud-sized caveat is that my screening was insufficiently loud. Hopefully, after a second viewing (fingers crossed on IMAX), I will come crawling back with my desert mouse tail wedged firmly between my legs.*
As a longtime admirer of Villeneuve’s austere brutalism, I arrived at the cinema, ready to abandon any pretence of critical detachment at the altar of Big Sand, Big Ship and Big Worm.
That makes it even more painful to admit that I found Dune Part Two… slightly underwhelming?
At his best, Villeneuve summons a sense of sparse, magisterial weirdness. Blade Runner 2049 is this vibe for 2.5 hours. Sicario, too. Even the first Dune, which was far from my favourite of his films, has its moments: the minute-long scene of Sardaukar throat-gurgling, the weird spider monster, the multiple long takes of ships landing and taking off.
Dune Part Two abandons the aloof, weighty distance for something more conventionally Epic. It sacrifices atmosphere for propulsiveness; otherworldliness for immediacy. It’s bigger than his previous films but feels more cramped and claustrophobic. There is simply too much: too much talking, too much plot, too many cuts.
Villeneuve’s critics have long derided his aesthetic for its empty, flat formalism. I’ve never really understood that criticism - to me, there is an atmospheric and tonal specificity to his scale (which functions, more often than not, as a Dread Delivery Device). There is, however, a mechanical functionalism to Dune Part Two that makes me wonder if his critics have a point. So obsessed is the film on what happens next that it’s hard to care about what’s happening now. Emotional beats, barring a late moment, are unearned. Dialogue (of which there is plenty) is expositionary.
I’d still take a weaker Villeneuve blockbuster over 95% of other films made at this scale. I hope, though, before returning for the inevitable Part Three, he chooses to make something a little looser and less beholden to such a dense, labyrinthine plot.
I don't know too much about Villeneuve but his of idea zooming in incredibly closely on people's faces, as if the human face would kind of intervene and do the work of making a film for him, seemed particularly stupid, at least because it never seemed that the actors know that this was the plan.