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#Dune denis villeneuve movie
Their collective stature helps lend the necessary gravitas to the movie as much as the stellar production design does. Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson and Oscar Isaac make a plausible noble family, and Josh Brolin, Jason Momoa and Javier Bardem each put their own fleshed-out spin on Herbert's various strong men. This Dune is also phenomenally well-cast, featuring an impressive lineup of seasoned character actors and young stars at or near the pinnacle of their careers. That, in turn, allows Dune's reverent and foreboding tone to finally come across on screen. The scale of the Atreides and Harkonnen estates and armies, as well as the vastness and loneliness of space itself, is made believable. Thankfully, Villeneuve is still up to the task. But near-future dystopia is one thing Dune takes place thousands of years in the future in a universe that barely resembles modern life and doesn't include Earth. RELATED: What Is Spice & Why Is It So Important?Īesthetically, Dune seemed like it was in good hands with Villeneuve, who also directed visually interesting films like Arrival and Blade Runner 2049. Dune is deadly serious - there's hardly a joke to be found in its 800 pages - so the unintentional silliness of half-baked visuals ran counter to the novel's aesthetic. By contrast, Star Wars (which was original, though clearly inspired by Herbert's work) had a sense of humor and could get away with its charming practical effects. In the past, the tone suffered without the ability to produce appropriately grand yet realistic sets and seamless special effects. Readers expect to see ornithopters, stillsuits, energy shields and 400-meter sandworms, not to mention specifically described planets. One of the downfalls of previous attempts to adapt Dune had to do with the available technology (or lack thereof) that could be used to bring Herbert's sprawling yet finely detailed world to life. After a long wait, it's here, and it's proof that two things are true: excellent movies can come from "unfilmable" literature, but they still can't quite capture the original. The Oscar-nominated director has a reputation for being something of an auteur maximalist. Villeneuve's Dune was seen as the most promising. David Lynch's campy 1984 take wasn't everybody's cup of tea, nor was a moderately well-received but low-budget Syfy Channel miniseries. Alejandro Jodorowsky's ultra-ambitious project in the 1970s never materialized. Frank Herbert's 1965 game-changer, Dune, is famously one of those tomes, though Denis Villeneuve's version isn't the first attempt to translate it to cinema. Many hulking, canonical works of fiction get called "unadaptable" or "unfilmable," but at a time when the entertainment industry is mining every intellectual property for its potential fandom (not unlike spice from Arrakis), unfilmable books are going to get filmed. WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Dune, now streaming on HBO Max.