| Warner Bros. Pictures | Release Date: October 22, 2021 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
54
Mixed:
13
Negative:
1
|
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Critic Reviews
SlashfilmSep 3, 2021
The PlaylistSep 3, 2021
Those who find Villeneuve to be a self-serious, humorless, and pretentious bore likely won’t be changing their minds anytime soon after “Dune,” but that just might be their loss. Whether Warner Bros. accepts the call to make a sequel in a climate of dismal box-office returns remains to be seen. But that’s not our concern at the moment; Dune is undeniably impressive, spellbinding, and evocatively immense, regardless.
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A film with this scope and richness is a splendid achievement, but it's easier to admire than to love. There is some humanity in there somewhere: at heart it's a coming-of-age story about a boy becoming tougher and more cynical on his way to becoming a leader. But will anyone care about the shallow, po-faced characters? They've got exotic names and elaborate costumes, but none of them has much warmth or personality compared to those in a certain other space opera which I won't mention.
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To call this Dune a remarkably lucid work is to praise it with very faint damnation. Perhaps reluctant to alienate the novices in the audience, Villeneuve has ironed out many of the novel’s convolutions, to the likely benefit of comprehension but at the expense of some rich, imaginative excess.
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The sheer awesomeness of Villeneuve's execution — there might not be another film this year, or ever, that turns one character asking another for a glass of water into a kind of walloping psychedelic performance art — often obscures the fact that the plot is mostly prologue: a sprawling origin story with no fixed beginning or end.
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Movie NationOct 12, 2021
The movie is too vividly realized to be boring, but it spends a lot of time scrambling out of the gap between pulpy fun and serious allegory. It’s also hobbled by the fact that it’s very much, as the opening credits say, Part 1; no real resolution is offered by the end of its 155 minutes. It’s just half a movie.
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The Film StageSep 3, 2021
A director comparison I hoped wouldn’t hover in my mind was Zack Snyder. This is relevant in two important senses. It’s kindred spirits with his 2009 Watchmen in its utter fealty to the text, an impressive piece of mimicry unbothered by its source’s troubling ideas, the sense of subversion bubbling below. (The Dune novel is profoundly politically incorrect by today’s necessary standards––but it makes us nostalgic for risks.) It also undoes some fine initial storytelling work and artfully gnarled production design by collapsing into a relentless barrage of explosions and violent carnage as the clock ticks towards the end of its runtime.
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