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Dune occasionally struggles with its unwieldy source material, but those issues are largely overshadowed by the scope and ambition of this visually thrilling adaptation.

Denis Villeneuve's Dune looks and sounds amazing -- and once the (admittedly slow-building) story gets you hooked, you'll be on the edge of your seat for the sequel.

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Denis Villeneuve

Timothée Chalamet

Paul Atreides

Rebecca Ferguson

Lady Jessica

Oscar Isaac

Duke Leto Atreides

Josh Brolin

Gurney Halleck

Stellan Skarsgård

Baron Vladimir Harkonnen

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Critic’s Pick

‘Dune’ Review: A Hero in the Making, on Shifting Sands

Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation is an equally sweeping and intimate take on Frank Herbert’s future-shock epic.

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‘Dune’ | Anatomy of a Scene

The director denis villeneuve narrates a combat training sequence from his film, featuring timothée chalamet and josh brolin..

My name is Denis Villeneuve and I’m the director of Dune. “Don’t stand with your back to the door!” This scene needed to serve four purposes. First, to establish the nature of the relationship between Paul Atreides and Gurney Halleck. Two, to give more insight about the context in which the Atreides will move to a new planet named Arrakis. Three, to induce the idea that Paul Atreides has been training for combat, but has never really experienced real violence. And four, to introduce the concept of the Holtzman Shields, and how they change the essence of combat. An Holtzman Shield is a technology that protects individuals or vehicles from any fast objects. Therefore, bullets or rockets are obsolete. So it means that man to man combat came back to sword fighting. The choreography between Timothée Chalamet, who plays Paul, and Josh Brolin, who plays Gurney Halleck, illustrate that each opponent is trying to distract his adversary by doing very fast moves in order to create an opportunity to insert slowly a blade inside the opponent’s shield. “Guess I’m not in the mood today.” “Mood?” “Mm.” “What’s mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises, no matter the mood. Now fight!” That choreography was designed by Roger Yuan. He developed the Atreides fighting style borrowing from a martial art technique developed in the ‘50s. This technique was called balintawak eskrima. It’s a style that involves blocking the opponent’s attack with both a weapon and the free hand. “I have you.” “Aye. But look down, my Lord. You’d have joined me in death. I see you found the mood.” Cinematographer Greig Fraser and I shot the fight like we will shoot a dance performance. The goal was to embrace the complexity of the movements with objective camera angles. We tried to make sure that the audience will understand the nature of this new way of fighting. “You don’t really understand the grave nature of what’s happening to us.” But more importantly, I wanted to feel that Josh Brolin’s character was caring about Paul like if he was his own son. “Can you imagine the wealth? In your eyes— I need to see it in your eyes. You never met Harkonnens before. I have. They’re not human. They’re brutal! You have to be ready.”

By Manohla Dargis

In a galaxy far, far away, a young man in a sea of sand faces a foreboding destiny. The threat of war hangs in the air. At the brink of a crisis, he navigates a feudalistic world with an evil emperor, noble houses and subjugated peoples, a tale right out of mythology and right at home in George Lucas’s brainpan. But this is “ Dune ,” baby, Frank Herbert’s science-fiction opus, which is making another run at global box-office domination even as it heads toward controversy about what it and its messianic protagonist signify.

The movie is a herculean endeavor from the director Denis Villeneuve (“Arrival”), a starry, sumptuous take on the novel’s first half. Published in 1965, Herbert’s book is a beautiful behemoth (my copy runs almost 900 pages) crowded with rulers and rebels, witches and warriors. Herbert had a lot to say — about religion, ecology, the fate of humanity — and drew from an astonishment of sources, from Greek mythology to Indigenous cultures. Inspired by government efforts to keep sand dunes at bay, he dreamed up a desert planet where water was the new petroleum. The result is a future-shock epic that reads like a cautionary tale for our environmentally ravaged world.

Villeneuve likes to work on a large scale, but has a miniaturist’s attention to fine-grained detail, which fits for a story as equally sweeping and intricate as “ Dune .” Like the novel, the movie is set thousands of years in the future and centers on Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), the scion of a noble family. With his father, Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac), and his mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), Paul is about to depart for his new home on a desert planet called Arrakis, a.k.a. Dune . The Duke, on orders from the Emperor, is to take charge of the planet, which is home to monstrous sandworms, enigmatic Bedouin-like inhabitants and an addictive, highly valuable resource called spice.

Much ensues. There are complicated intrigues along with sword fights, heroic deaths and many inserts of a mystery woman (Zendaya) throwing come-hither glances at the camera, a Malickian vision in flowing robes and liquid slow motion. She’s one piece of the multifaceted puzzle of Paul’s destiny, as is a mystical sisterhood (led by Charlotte Rampling in severe mistress mode) of psychic power brokers who share a collective consciousness. They’re playing the long game while the story’s most flamboyant villain, the Baron (Stellan Skarsgard), schemes and slays, floating above terrified minions and enemies like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon devised by Clive Barker.

The movie leans on a lot of exposition, partly to help guide viewers through the story’s denser thickets, but Villeneuve also uses his visuals to advance and clarify the narrative. The designs and textures of the movie’s various worlds and their inhabitants are arresting, filigreed and meaningful, with characters and their environments in sync. At times, though, Villeneuve lingers too long over his creations, as if he wanted you to check out his cool new line of dragonfly-style choppers and bleeding corpses. (This isn’t a funny movie but there are mordantly humorous flourishes, notably with the Baron, whose bald head and oily bath indicate that Villeneuve is a fan of “Apocalypse Now.”)

That impulse to linger is understandable given the monumentality of Villeneuve’s world building (and its price tag). But the movie’s spectacular scale combined with Herbert’s complex mythmaking also creates a not entirely productive tension between stasis and movement. Not long after he lands on Dune, Paul is ushered into the new world of its tribal people, the Fremen, a transitional passage leading from dark rooms to bright desert, from heavy machinery and vaulted spaces with friezes to gauzy robes and the meringue peaks of the dunes. Paul is on a journey filled with heavy deeds and thoughts, but en route he can seem caught in all this beauty, like a fly in fast-hardening sap.

Chalamet looks young enough for the role (Paul is 15 when the novel opens) and can certainly strike a Byronic pose, complete with black coat and anguished hair. The actor has his moments in “Dune,” including in an early scene with Rampling’s Reverend Mother, who puts Paul through a painful test; Chalamet excels at imparting a sense of confused woundedness, psychic and physical. But he doesn’t move with the coiled grace of the warrior that Paul is meant to be, which undermines both his training sessions with the family “warmaster” (Josh Brolin) and in his later role as a messianic figure, one who is considerably less complicated and conflicted onscreen than he is on the page.

Written by Villeneuve, Jon Spaihts and Eric Roth, the screenplay has taken predictable liberties. The movie retains the overall arc of the book despite having jettisoned characters and swaths of plot. There have been felicitous changes, as with the character Dr. Liet Kynes, an ecologist who’s a man in the book but is now a woman. Played by a formidably striking Sharon Duncan-Brewster, the character doesn’t receive nearly enough screen time, particularly given Kynes’s weighty patrimony and narrative function. But Duncan-Brewster — like so many of the other well-cast supporting performers — makes enough of an impression that she helps fill in the script’s ellipses.

Throughout “Dune,” you can feel Villeneuve caught and sometimes struggling between his fidelity to the source material and the demands of big-ticket mainstream moviemaking and selling. It’s easy to imagine that he owns several copies of the novel, each copiously dog-eared and heavily outlined. (The movie is relatively free of holiday-ready merch opportunities, outside of a cute desert mouse with saucer-sized ears.) At the same time, Villeneuve is making a movie in a Marvel-dominated industry that foregrounds obviousness and blunt action sequences over ambiguity and introspection. There’s talk and stillness here, true, but also plenty of fights, explosions and hardware.

The trickiest challenge is presented by the movie’s commercial imperatives and, by extension, the entire historical thrust of Hollywood with its demand for heroes and happy endings. This presents a problem that Villeneuve can’t or won’t solve. Paul is burdened by prophetic visions he doesn’t yet fully understand, and while he’s an appealing figure in the novel, he is also menacing. Herbert was interested in problematizing the figure of the classic champion, including the superhero, and he weaves his critique into the very fabric of his multilayered tale. “No more terrible disaster could befall your people,” a character warns, “than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero.”

There’s little overt menace to this Paul, who mostly registers as a sincere, sensitive, if callow hero-in-the-making. Mostly, the danger he telegraphs exists on a representational level and the dubiously romanticized image presented by a pale, white noble who’s hailed as a messiah by the planet’s darker-complexioned native population. Whether Paul is white in the novel is, I think, open to debate. Herbert’s focus is on the human race, which, as the writer Jordan S. Carroll notes in a fascinating essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books , hasn’t prevented white supremacists from embracing the book. “Fascists love ‘Dune,’” Carroll writes, though he sees this love as a self-serving misreading.

One of Herbert’s talents was his ability to blend his promiscuous borrowings — from Navajo, Aztec, Turkish, Persian and myriad other sources — into a smoothly unified future world that, as befits science fiction, is at once familiar and strange. The shadow of Lawrence of Arabia and colonialist fantasies does loom large, particularly because the Fremen and their language are drawn from Arabic origins. Still, the book gives you room to cast Paul in your head in whatever image you choose. But movies tend to visually lock in meaning, and, like David Lynch’s much-maligned 1984 adaptation with Kyle MacLachlan as Paul, this “Dune” is also about a white man leading a fateful charge.

That doesn’t make Villeneuve’s “Dune” a white-savior story or not exactly or maybe just not yet. The movie ends before everything wraps up too neatly or uncomfortably, which injects it with some welcome uncertainty. Herbert wrote five sequels, and Duneworld continued to expand after his death; if the movie hits the box-office sweet spot, the story can presumably continue, which would be a gift for a franchise-hungry industry. Whether it will become the kind of gift that keeps on giving is up to the audience. Villeneuve has made a serious, stately opus, and while he doesn’t have a pop bone in his body, he knows how to put on a show as he fans a timely argument about who gets to play the hero now.

Dune Rated PG-13 for war violence. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes. In theaters and on HBO Max .

Manohla Dargis has been the co-chief film critic since 2004. She started writing about movies professionally in 1987 while earning her M.A. in cinema studies at New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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Timothee chalamet in denis villeneuve’s ‘dune’: film review | venice 2021.

Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi classic gets epic screen treatment, with an all-star cast that also features Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Jason Momoa and Zendaya.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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Unless you’re sufficiently up on Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi classic to know your Sardaukars from your Bene Gesserit, your crysknife from your hunter-seeker, chances are you’ll be glazing over not too far into Dune . Or wishing that House Atreides and House Harkonnen would kick off a vogue ball.

Full credits

Venue: Venice Film Festival (Out of Competition) Distributor: Warner Bros. Production companies: Warner Bros. Pictures, Legendary Pictures Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgard, Dave Bautista, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Zendaya, Chang Chen, David Dastmalchian, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Charlotte Rampling, Jason Momoa, Javier Bardem, Babs Olusankokum, Golda Rosheuvel, Benjamin Clementine Director: Denis Villeneuve Screenwriters: Jon Spaihts, Denis Villeneuve, Eric Roth, based on the novel by Frank Herbert Producers: Mary Parent, Denis Villeneuve, Cale Boyter, Joe Caracciolo Jr. Executive producers: Tanya Lapointe, Joshua Grode, Herbert W. Gains, Jon Spaihts, Thomas Tull, Brian Herbert, Byron Merritt, Kim Herbert Director of photography: Greig Fraser Production designer: Patrice Vermette Costume designer: Jacqueline West, Robert Morgan Editor: Joe Walker Music: Hans Zimmer Visual effects supervisor: Paul Lambert Special effects supervisor: Gerd Nefzer Casting: Francine Maisler, Jina Jay

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‘Dune’ Wages an All-Out Attack on the Senses — and Wins

By K. Austin Collins

K. Austin Collins

It’s hard to be a messiah. Even before he recognizes that this is what he is, the young Paul Atreides of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune , played by Timothée Chalamet , lets the grief of expectation seep into his body, down to the drowsed slump of his shoulders and the toneless, contemplative wariness of his voice. The actor’s charm is kept in check; his latent vulnerabilities are in overdrive. Paul is the heir to House Atreides, whose fief is the oceanic planet of Caladan, a stony, rainy, tumultuous world, limited in its purview and power. An unusual home for a family said to descend from the ancient Greeks. But it helps to explain why everyone seems a little down in the dumps.

In another kind of movie, this quality would maybe seem less worthy of remark. A moody teen. So what? But Dune , as Villeneuve has ambitiously sought to tell it, is above all a story of empire, to which Chalamet’s performance lends an interesting texture, soft and uncertain amid the movie’s hardness. This is Villeneuve, after all. The conspicuous sense of design, the brutalism of its sets and sounds (the latter coming courtesy of Hans Zimmer), the overwhelming aesthetics: N one of this should surprise us. Villeneuve’s Dune is a thick, loud, well-fed spectacle of a movie, towering over the people in it with a brooding sense of intention — even in its quieter moments, even when wrestling through the Herbert novel’s wide-ranging, learned, quirky mysticism. But Dune is not just about the bone-rattling heft of its flying machines or its labyrinthine palace interiors or the intergalactic tangle of its imperial politics. Villeneuve must also wrestle with the oddities of the Frank Herbert novel on which the movie is based: the Bene Gesserit witches and their strep-throat vocal manipulations; the Fremen warriors of Arrakis with their blue eyes and violent devotion to the land; the gigantic worms with their baleen-like mouths; the psychotropic desert crop called melange — a.k.a. t he spice . I will never be able to un-hear Kyle Machlachan, in David Lynch’s maligned 1984 adaptation, saying it this way, in a horny whisper that now plays like an early foray into ASMR: The spice . There’s an air of mystery to it when MacLachlan says it. Villeneuve’s take is, by contrast, far less weird. It takes seriously the challenge of adapting a seemingly unadaptable novel, and keeping all its big-picture implications in full view. It earns its distinction as a faithful adaptation — and proves a satisfying movie, too.

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Hero’s journeys are satisfying by design. But Dune — both the novel and this adaptation — has more going on under the hood than its veneer of hero-myth rehashing would suggest. Chalamet’s Paul seems to carry the weight of an empire on his shoulders because, well, he does. Heavy weighs the promise of his father’s crown, and an eminent war that Paul senses he will have to fight. Paul is prone to visions of the future in his dreams. But one needn’t have ESP to know that there will be a war between House Atreides and their foes, the monstrous House of Harkonnen. The Harkonnens’ longtime stronghold over the desert planet Arrakis — rich with that so-called “spice,” which happens to be essential to operating intergalactic machinery — has suddenly come to an end. This is a strategic play, apparently, the workings of an overarching empire that’s pulling the strings, and it is meant to set these powerful houses at odds.

There in the middle stands Paul, next in succession for the dukeship of the House of Atreides behind his father Leto (Oscar Isaac). It cannot be coincidence that Paul, with his long coats and inward-looking sorrow, appears onscreen in a crucial moment like a cinematic successor to Caspar David Friedrich’s “ Wanderer Above the Fog ,” a lone figure staring off into a void of clashing uncertainties. One gets the feeling, just from watching Paul and Leto interact, that no one is under the illusion that any particular reign will get a chance to outstay its welcome. That’s war-torn space imperialism for you. Leto’s father was a bullfighter. His reign was cut prematurely short by a bull that had the gall to fight back. So: a doomed legacy. It hangs over the wary Atreides clan with an undeniable sense of reality — literally. The head of that bull looms over the family’s long-tabled dining quarters, watching over them as they enjoy the spoils of their power.

You could say the bull has been conquered, being a trophy now. Funny how it doesn’t feel that way. To say Leto and Paul make for a reluctant line of hero-leaders would be an understatement. Villeneuve renders it overstatement. The movie’s flashy successes and curious lapses both, often enough, come down to this.

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Dune review: Denis Villeneuve's starry sci-fi epic is breathtaking, and a little bit maddening

Earlier this summer, director Denis Villeneuve made news for insisting that watching Dune on television would be like "driv[ing] a speedboat in your bathtub." To some people, it sounded like the petty grievances of an out-of-touch auteur — or worse, a fundamental misunderstanding of the way post-pandemic Hollywood operates: any which way it can.

All that might be true, but it doesn't mean he's wrong. In fact Villeneuve's new adaptation of Frank Herbert's classic 1965 novel is exactly the kind of lush, lofty filmmaking wide screens were made for; a sensory experience so opulent and overwhelming it begs to be seen big, or not at all. That the movie (which premiered Friday at the Venice Film Festival, ahead of a theatrical and HBO Max release Oct. 22) seems to have room for only half the story — and that its emotional palate is considerably more limited than its artistic one — feels relative in many ways to the fandom. If you're already knee-deep in Herbert mythology, you'll thrill to every whispered word; if you come in not knowing the difference between a Holtzman shield and a hole in the floor, it's a longer walk.

The introduction, in any case, wastes little time on exposition: The year is 10191 and Duke Leto Atreides ( Oscar Isaac ) has come with his longtime concubine, Lady Jessica ( Rebecca Ferguson ) and their grown son, Paul ( Timothée Chalamet ), to oversee the colonized planet of Arrakis — a harsh, arid place whose lone prized export is a shimmery dust called Spice. The natives who manage to scrape out a subsistence living farming it there are known as Fremens, their Listerine-blue eyes and Mad Max -style compounds necessary adaptations to the unforgiving climate.

Paul is soon visited by dreams of one Fre-woman in particular, Chani ( Zendaya ), disturbing visions that come to him unreliably and often without context but seem to portend real future events. To Lady Jessica, a member of an ancient all-female order known as the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood, it's further proof that her child may in fact be the one chosen to save them all — centuries of selective eugenics finally come to bear in the body of a boy whose gender just happens to be wrong, or at least not what the Sisterhood planned for.

She's not the only one to take note of his particular gifts: The leader of Atreides' born enemy, the slug-bodied Baron Vladimir Harkonnen ( Stellan Skarsgård ) feels the ripple of his presence and the Fremens do too — even if loyal foot soldiers of his father's, including Josh Brolin 's taciturn weapons master Gurney Halleck and Jason Momoa 's cheerful warrior Duncan Idaho, continue to treat him like an essential if ordinary heir, to be trained and mentored and kept safe in the line of succession.

There are, you may have already sensed, no small actors in Dune , even in small parts: a veiled, imperious Charlotte Rampling as the Mother Superior who puts Paul to a memorable test; Javier Bardem as a terse Fremen chieftan; Dave Bautista as the Baron's brooding bull-necked nephew. Zendaya's Chani, who appears far more verbal in the trailer than she does in the actual film, moves through most of it as a sort of teasing apparition, less fully fleshed character than elusive spirit guide-slash-dream-key to Paul's destiny.

To be fair, it's hard to imagine a mortal movie star who wouldn't be dwarfed by the exquisite, elaborate world-building happening on screen. As he proved on projects like Arrival and Blade Runner 2049 , Villeneuve's gift for visual storytelling can be genuinely breathtaking — vast desertscapes unscrolling like oceans and helicopters with dragonfly-wing blades where the rotors should be; the kidney-piercing resonance of Hans Zimmer's soundtrack poured over sets of towering, planet-scaled enormity. (Speculation that Dune 's M.O. would be " Star Wars , but make it fashion" is not completely off-base.) If anything falls short of Herbert's particular vision it's the movie's sandworms, who for all their faceless foreboding mostly register as super-size CG tubes; colossal, unwieldy vacuum-cleaner attachments gone rogue.

Dune is so aesthetically rich and monolithic that a few brief, misguided stabs at Marvel-style humor early on feel almost like blasphemy. The script seems to know it and soon settles into a kind of grim grandeur, each turn a building block to nothing less than the interstellar fate of the free world. Chalamet aptly channels the ethereal beauty and conflicted psyche of a reluctant savior, his troubled, tender Paul a sort of sci-fi Hamlet forced by fate and circumstance to bear the full weight of history, and Isaacs' Duke is both a noble warrior and a father so lovingly supportive he belongs in the Call Me By Your Name dad hall of fame . At some point, it is virtually guaranteed that they and nearly everyone else on screen will appear in a visual tableau worth gasping over.

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. (The director has said that he only agreed to take on the project if the studio let him split Dune 's narrative into two parts, and that he's still "very optimistic" the second will get made.) Minus the fuller context that Herbert's extended universe and dense mythology provides, the meaning of it all feels both endlessly beguiling and just out of reach: a dazzling high-toned space opera written on sand. Grade: B

Review: Denis Villeneuve’s ‘Dune’ is a transporting vision, but it could use a touch more madness

Two men cling to a futuristic craft in the movie "Dune."

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The story in “Dune” is set in motion by an ambitious, unwieldy and ill-advised transfer of power — an undertaking that extracts a terrible cost and seems doomed to end in frustration and defeat. Something similar might be said of the previous major attempts to wrest Frank Herbert’s 1965 literary colossus to the big screen, even if recent history has sometimes looked back on those failures with a forgiving smile. Alejandro Jodorowsky’s assuredly trippy, never-completed version has become a much-mythologized cinematic ruin . David Lynch’s 1984 flop, reviled by many (including Lynch himself), can still inspire spasms of admiration for its mix of narrative intransigence and visionary strangeness.

Still, to the extent that “Dune” endures, it does so on the strengths of Herbert’s extraordinarily prescient work — its echoes of a real world ravaged by oil wars, climate change and other consequences of human greed — rather than anything to do with its dubious cinematic legacy. Not least among the book’s mysteries is that it has shaped the iconography of so many classic science-fiction and fantasy films — most obviously, though not exclusively, “Star Wars” — without yielding a classic of its own. Conventional wisdom has long held that “Dune” is unfilmable , that its interlocking parables of colonial oppression, ecological disaster and messianic deliverance are too vast to be contained within the flattening parameters of the cinema screen.

The magisterially brooding new “Dune,” just unveiled at the Venice International Film Festival and slated to reach U.S. theaters and HBO Max subscribers Oct. 22, boldly seeks to reverse that prophecy. With methodical poise and seat-rattling spectacle, the French Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve (who wrote the script with Jon Spaihts and Eric Roth) draws you into an astonishingly vivid, sometimes plausibly unnerving vision of the future. If those cursed earlier stabs at “Dune” were examples of what the French call a “film maudit,” this imposing new vision aspires to be the opposite: perhaps a “film Mahdi,” to reference the Arabic word often hurled at the young savior-to-be, Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), as he embraces his destiny.

Caption: ZENDAYA as Chani in Warner Bros. Pictures' and Legendary Pictures' action adventure "DUNE," a Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary release.

‘Dune: Part One’ ending explained: Where could a sequel go from here?

The new film “Dune” ends on a cliffhanger. With the second half of Frank Herbert’s classic story still to tell — not to mention all its sequels and prequels — where will the “Dune” universe go from here?

Oct. 24, 2021

The fulfillment of that destiny will have to wait; “Dune: Part One,” as it’s billed onscreen, is the first in a projected two-part adaptation, which means that any assessment of Villeneuve’s achievement must be provisional at best. For now, it’s hard to deny the excitement of feeling swept up in this movie’s great squalls of sand, spice and interplanetary intrigue, realized with a level of craft so overpowering in its dust-choked aridity that you may want to pull your mask up a little tighter in the theater. You may also feel a more qualified sense of admiration for Villeneuve’s efforts to preserve yet streamline the novel’s imaginative essence, to translate Herbert’s heady conceits and arcane nomenclature into a prestige blockbuster idiom.

Whether he succeeds — and for an impressive stretch, I think he does — his own meteoric Hollywood ascent has clearly prepared him for the assignment. This isn’t the first time Villeneuve has evinced a superb eye for the textural and chromatic nuances of sand, as the Mideast deserts of “Incendies,” the U.S.-Mexico border zones of “Sicario” and the Las Vegas ruins of “Blade Runner 2049” will attest. And like “Blade Runner 2049” and especially “Arrival,” “Dune” is an unusually philosophical speculative fiction that ponders the difficulties of language and coexistence.

As the movie opens, a superficial detente has been orchestrated between the warring royal strongholds of Atreides and Harkonnen, led respectively by the noble Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac) and the grotesque Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (a prosthetically transfigured Stellan Skarsgard). “Dune” heads will know the rest: By imperial decree, House Harkonnen must relinquish stewardship of the desert planet Arrakis, a.k.a. Dune, which is at once inhospitable to life and a much-coveted source of it. House Atreides will assume control of the planet as well as its rich concentrations of spice, a drug-like substance whose life-extending properties have made it the most prized commodity in the universe.

**SNEAKS FOR FALL 2021 DO NOT USE PRIOR 8/29/21: Timothee Chalamet as Paul Atreides in "Dune."

‘Dune’ was long considered ‘unadaptable.’ The screenwriters explain how they tackled the sci-fi classic

Heralded as the best sci-fi novel of all time, previous adaptations of Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’ have fizzled. Now it’s Denis Villeneuve’s turn.

Aug. 24, 2021

Notably, these narrative preliminaries are laid out by Chani (Zendaya), one of the Fremen, the thick-skinned, blue-eyed Indigenous people of Arrakis. Long acclimated to the planet’s sweltering heat and deadly giant sandworms, they’ve suffered bitterly under their cruel Harkonnen overlords and have no reason to suspect the Atreides will be any different. Villeneuve’s sympathetic focus on the Fremen feels like an early declaration of principle, a promise that this “Dune” might radically reframe the story from their perspective. For much of the movie, though, Chani and her people remain fleeting presences, glimpsed only in the gauzy visions of Duke Leto’s son, Paul.

Chalamet, always good at suggesting both youthful callowness and limitless potential, proves an inspired choice for the role of a young man who is both a coddled heir and an intriguingly unknown quantity. On the Atreides’ home planet of Caladan, he is trained with avuncular affection by his father’s retainers, including the brilliant security expert Thufir Hawat (Stephen McKinley Henderson), the brawny swordmaster Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa) and the skilled weapons teacher Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin, not exactly the “ugly lump of a man” described in the book). Paul is also a source of pride and anxiety for the Duke, movingly played by Isaac as a leader who longs to do right by his family, his people and the Fremen, even as he suspects that House Atreides might be stepping into a carefully laid trap.

Timothée Chalamet and Rebecca Ferguson in "Dune."

But Paul’s most important mentor is his mother, Lady Jessica (a superb Rebecca Ferguson), a member of a shadowy, oracular sisterhood known as the Bene Gesserit for whom Paul poses both a problem and a source of fascination. Led by an imperious Reverend Mother (a heavily veiled but unmistakable Charlotte Rampling), the Bene Gesserit are versed in many skills including “the Voice,” a form of mind control rendered here via menacing aural distortions that — along with the soundtrack’s low, ominous rumbles and Hans Zimmer’s pulsating score — make “Dune” a symphony for the ears as well as a feast for the eyes.

It is, admittedly, a rather monochromal feast, dryer than it is rich, notwithstanding a luscious early shot of the Arrakis dunes that brings to mind the crisped swirls of an overbaked meringue. Much of the palace intrigue plays out in muted tones and symmetrical compositions (the cinematography is by the great Greig Fraser), part of a rigorously color-controlled aesthetic that extends to Patrice Vermette’s futuro-brutalist production design and Jacqueline West’s slickly utilitarian costumes. A cold, fascist sheen seems to cling to the Atreides’ regal formations and their state-of-the-art ornithopters (like helicopters, but with blades that flutter like insect wings), all flawless design elements in a pageant of technological might and militaristic order.

Villeneuve means to subvert and disrupt that pageant, something he accomplishes in part by consciously elevating the women in this male-dominated story. Ferguson’s forceful presence in the expanded role of Lady Jessica is one example; another is the gender recasting of Liet Kynes (a striking Sharon Duncan-Brewster), Arrakis’ deeply knowledgeable planetologist. It’s Kynes who helps the Atreides adjust to their desert environs, at one point accompanying them to a spice-harvesting site where they get their terrifying first glimpse of a giant sandworm in action, its great maw swirling open like a raging quicksand vortex.

This action sequence and others are handled with masterly assurance, including several scenes of intimate combat performed with form-fitting, blood-concealing energy shields. But as ever, Villeneuve’s true talent is less in the staging of violence than in the queasy anticipation of it; he loves to linger in the looming threat of mayhem, in the tense moments before the (sand)worm turns. That gift serves him well enough in “Dune,” whose plot hinges on encroaching threats, assassination attempts and a series of devastating betrayals that send Paul and Lady Jessica fleeing into the desert where there await still more perils, possibilities and encounters with the Fremen (led by a sly Javier Bardem).

Caption: TIMOTHEE CHALAMET as Paul Atreides in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures' action adventure "DUNE," a Warner Bros. Pictures release.

Why ‘Dune’ made these 5 key changes from Frank Herbert’s book

“Dune” director Denis Villeneuve discusses several significant departures from the sci-fi classic source material.

Oct. 21, 2021

Until the movie slams to an abrupt, unsatisfying halt halfway through the events of Herbert’s novel, there’s pleasure in watching this particular game of thrones play out, though perhaps more pleasure than depth or meaning. 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. Herbert’s more memorable flights of linguistic fancy, like “gom jabbar” and “Kwisatz Haderach,” are spoken once, with a faint air of embarrassed obligation, and seldom mentioned again. A more significant casualty is the book’s layered interiority, its skill at turning unspoken perceptions and motives into drama; the writers have managed this material without mastering it.

Lynch’s compromised version was similarly stymied and more clotted with exposition. But it also had the courage of its demented convictions, as well as a fearless commitment to feverish, pustular imagery that makes Villeneuve’s pristine filmmaking seem almost timid by comparison. Not for the first time, his craft seems to exist mainly for its own sake; it’s the hallmark of a filmmaker who’s more logistician than thinker, more technician than artist. As a visual and visceral experience, “Dune” is undeniably transporting. As a spectacle for the mind and heart, it never quite leaves Earth behind.

And perhaps that’s as it should be, at least at this early stage. With any luck, there will be more to see and much more to think about in “Dune: Part Two,” the completion of which will depend to some degree on this first movie’s fortunes. Will “Dune” conjure enough coin — the spice of the Hollywood realm — to see itself through to completion? I suspect it might, in part because I doubt Villeneuve, a filmmaker more dependable than he is interesting, has it in him to add to “Dune’s” string of memorably catastrophic failures. Dust has long been his truest cinematic habitat, and to dust may he return.

‘Dune: Part One’

Rated: PG-13, for sequences of strong violence, some disturbing images and suggestive material Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes Playing: Starts Oct. 22 in general release and on HBO Max

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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Dune (2021)

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Sci-fi epic 'dune' is an immersive but incomplete experience.

Justin Chang

Timothée Chalamet is a royal heir, and Rebecca Ferguson is his mother in Dune . Chiabella James/Warner Bros. Pictures hide caption

Timothée Chalamet is a royal heir, and Rebecca Ferguson is his mother in Dune .

Dune may not be the best new movie you'll see this year, but it's easily the most new movie you'll see this year. I left the theater feeling overwhelmed and a little parched, as though I'd spent two hours and 35 minutes being pummeled by hot desert winds and blinding sandstorms. The world of Frank Herbert's novel feels big and immersive here in a way it never has on-screen, with its futuristic spacecraft, cavernous fortresses and, of course, terrifying sand worms.

I've never been a huge fan of Denis Villeneuve's technically stupendous but oddly soulless movies, like Prisoners and Incendies , or bought into the notion that he's some kind of second coming of Stanley Kubrick. Still, there's no question that he's well prepared for this assignment as the director of moodily ambitious science fiction like Arrival , probably his best film, and Blade Runner 2049 .

With Dune , Villeneuve and his co-writers, Jon Spaihts and Eric Roth, have made a lucid adaptation of a book that's long been deemed unfilmable: The Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky famously abandoned his Dune movie in the '70s, and David Lynch 's 1984 version was deemed such a disaster that Lynch himself disowned it. There was also a bland 2000 miniseries that at least understood that the book might be too dense to squeeze into a single film.

Reporter's Notebook

With 'dune,' denis villeneuve has made hollywood's definitive post-9/11 epic.

That may be why Villeneuve opted to split Dune into two movies. This first installment is a largely faithful retelling of a complicated story. Many millennia into the future, the universe has become a vast feudal society — a sort of interstellar Game of Thrones — in which noble houses control different planets. The most coveted is the desert planet Arrakis, or Dune, the source of a powerful, life-extending substance called spice.

As the story opens, there's been an imperial decree that control of Arrakis will be taken away from the treacherous House Harkonnen and handed over to its longtime rival, House Atreides. It's a triumph for the good Duke Leto Atreides ( Oscar Isaac ), though he and his advisers, played by actors including Jason Momoa and Josh Brolin , suspect they may be walking into a trap.

Pop Culture Happy Hour

'dune': a sweeping, spectacular spice-opera — half of one, anyway.

Timothée Chalamet is a great choice for the duke's son Paul, a coddled royal heir who could be the "Kwisatz Haderach" — that's Dune- speak for messiah figure or superbeing. For the most part, the movie keeps Herbert's made-up languages to a minimum.

Villeneuve wants even novices to be able to follow along. He plays up the book's ever-resonant subtexts of colonial oppression and ecological disaster. And he's cast even the smaller roles with magnetic actors, like Charlotte Rampling and Stellan Skarsgard, who keep you watching even when the plot begins to tilt into abstraction. Rebecca Ferguson brings a welcome warmth to Lady Jessica, Paul's mother, with whom he flees into the desert when House Atreides comes under attack. And Zendaya and Javier Bardem turn up among the Fremen, the brutally oppressed Indigenous people of Arrakis, who will play a larger role in part two.

Movie Interviews

Doomed 'dune' was generations ahead of its time.

For sheer seat-rattling spectacle, Dune is undeniably staggering. The attack on House Atreides is staged with a brooding, quasi-Shakespearean grandeur. And then there are those giant sand worms winding their way through the story, so mysterious and mesmerizing to behold that you almost wouldn't mind being eaten by one, just to see what it's like.

But there's also something crucial missing . Much of the plot is advanced through elements of mind reading and mind control, so it's a shame that the movie never really gets inside its characters' heads. As with so many of Villeneuve's films, the visuals are stunning but the storytelling feels rudimentary; you get the sense that he's managed his source material without fully mastering it. In some ways, Lynch's Dune actually got closer to the mind-bending strangeness of Herbert's novel; it had a touch of visionary madness that this movie could use a little more of.

Even though Villeneuve's Dune is incomplete by design, there's something odd and unsatisfying about the point at which it slams to a halt. Still, it duly whets your appetite for part two, assuming it gets made; that will depend on whether part one does well enough at the box office. I hope Villeneuve gets the chance to finish what he started. This first Dune may not be a great movie — or even half a great movie — but Dune the planet is gorgeous enough that I wouldn't mind a return visit.

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Dune Gets Lost in Space

By Richard Lawson

Image may contain Rebecca Ferguson Human Person Military Uniform Military Army Armored Timothe Chalamet and People

The trouble begins in Dune —which premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Friday—just about immediately. In the opening credits of Denis Villeuneuve ’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s seminal 1965 sci-fi fantasy novel, which is now a 2022 Oscar winner , we see the title of the film and then an ominous “Part One.” So what we’re seeing is not a complete story—it’s the kick-off to a new franchise of two (or more) movies. Not a second of the sequel has been shot yet, so we will just have to hope that the box office gods (and the streaming ones, as the film will also premiere on HBO Max) are kind enough to this first foray that subsequent installments will be deemed worth it.

If not, Dune will live on as a turgid preamble with little payoff. As he often does, Villeneuve has crafted a mighty aesthetic symphony, images looming epically as a Hans Zimmer score keens and brass-braaams around them. Herbert’s novel—which has been adapted by Villeneuve, Jon Spaiths , and Eric Roth —offers plenty of occasion for such maximalist finery. The story journeys to several exotic planets and introduces us to the dynastic pageantry of humanity’s ruling class some 10,000 years from now.

Villeneuve is no stranger to this kind of high imagining, or perhaps re-imagining. He applied his signature gloss onto the Blade Runner universe with 2017’s Blade Runner 2049 , a gorgeous but frustratingly thin continuation of a narrative well established before him. With Dune , Villeneuve has the chance to right the wrongs of David Lynch ’s 1984 misfire (a misfire according to some, anyway) and truly honor Herbert’s text. But Villenueve can’t help but lacquer it all up into something hyper polished and hard to the touch. Even Arrival , his most successful big-budget film, groans under the tremendous onus of his construction. He’s an overloader, and only the keenest and most urgent of scripts can survive beneath that weight.

Dune , unfortunately, is not one of those. Maybe the source material, with its unending glossary of terms describing places, peoples, religious traditions, and political systems, is just too dense to hone into something cinematically agile. Villeneuve’s film is somehow plodding and hurried at once, flurries of exposition and table-setting ringing around set-piece monoliths.

The general idea is stated plainly enough: a noble family, House Atreides, is enlisted by the galactic emperor to become the new stewards of the fearsome desert planet Arrakis, home to a sort of silt deposit called spice that’s valued across the universe for its use in medicine and starship navigation. This angers the despotic House Harkonnen, who long ruled over Arrakis and its precious resource. There is also, of course, a prophecy about a messiah who will deliver the natives of Arrakis, the Fremen—and perhaps the entirety of humanity—to freedom. Is that special boy the young prince of House Atreides, Paul ( Timothée Chalamet )?

All this palace intrigue and generational history is interesting, playing as a kind of spacebound Game of Thrones . (I know Dune long predates that book and TV series, as well as Star Wars , but I’m sure there is some studio marketing department wish that those parallels will be drawn by contemporary audiences.) What is less compelling is the Chosen One mythology, laid out confusingly to mask the simplicity at its core. Visions and murmured warnings and oracular epiphanies abound, all working to convince us that the hero of the film is, in fact, the hero. Perhaps a surprise is coming in a subsequent Dune film, but at present it all feels like a fait accompli that the handsome, noble prince standing before us is destined to be the thing everyone is so worked up about.

That the film is ultimately a long and overwrought prologue—a prelude to action rather than its own autonomous story—renders Villeneuve’s robust theatrics flimsier than they should be. What’s all this ado about something we know is coming but just won’t be shown yet? Chalamet strains to assume the mantle, but he’s swallowed up by the halo hanging around him. Rebecca Ferguson , as Paul’s mother Jessica, who studied under an order of shifty priestess called the Bene Gesserit, fares better, holding firm against the movie’s stylistic onslaught and making an impression.

Other talented actors drift in and out of the picture: Oscar Isaac as Paul’s dad, Leto; Josh Brolin and Jason Momoa as military men who help train Paul in combat; Stellan Skarsgård as the monstrous Baron Harkonnen; and Zendaya as a Fremen who appears to Paul in dreams, luring him toward ruin or glory or both. No one has much time to distinguish themselves, all functioning as mere fleshy cogs in Villeneuve’s churning machine. We don’t really learn much about individual characters in the film, making it hard to grasp or care about the stakes of the story. That’s not for lack of trying on Villeneuve’s part, who aims to fill just about every moment of the film with a towering import.

At times, his aggressive approach works. There are scenes when the film’s relentless rumble reaches heart and mind, and truly connects. The immensity of the film can probably only be experienced properly in a theatrical setting—making Warner Bros.’ decision to drop the movie on streaming that much more dismaying. But even in the dark, sans phone, a gigantic screen and sound system blaring away at you, Dune slips through your fingers like so much sand. And then it just ends, as a character has the gall to tell Paul (and us) that this is just the beginning.

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As a general rule, we should embrace grave and complicated blockbuster films like this, as they’re in such short supply in our age of comestible whizbang and synergistic packaging. But Dune lumbers with such aloof, uninviting self-seriousness that it’s hard to love, hard to even celebrate as an assured piece of tentpole authorship. In all its marvel, Dune forgets to do basic things like give us someone or something to root for, or feel for, or think about for longer than the stretch of the film.

Some vexing, inscrutable mystery and preening opacity can be fun. But there ought to at least be a big, central Why animating a film. Otherwise, it’s all just a bunch of pretty shots of sand and fire and lavish costumery with no guiding spirit. By the end of Dune ( Part One ), I was ready to leave the whole thing to the enormous worms who move through Arrakis devouring all the little things that matter to us petty humans. Watching as Villeneuve’s film eats itself up, those beasts started to seem pretty familiar.

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Kyle MacLachlan as Paul Atreides in the 1984 version of Dune, directed by David Lynch.

Dune review – David Lynch’s intergalactic epic shoots for the moon

There are moments of dreamlike brilliance in this extravagant fable of imperialism – provided you can stay awake to see them

W ith Denis Villeneuve’s new adaptation of Dune almost upon us, here is a chance to revisit David Lynch’s ill-starred attempt from 1984: the version of Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel he wrote and directed under the aegis of producer Dino De Laurentiis. At the time, it was greeted with a bored shrug from both press and public, making it a rare failure for Lynch. It would be agreeably contrarian to claim that Lynch’s Dune is an underrated masterpiece – but it isn’t exactly. There are, admittedly, some moments of expressionist panache and dreamlike strangeness; it sometimes feels like a freewheeling sci-fi production of a lost Shakespeare Roman play. There’s a wonderful scene when the mighty sandworm on the planet Arrakis is tamed and mastered, which Villeneuve hasn’t yet offered us.

But there are also a lot of longueurs, a lack of dramatic focus, and simply an attempt to do too much, encompassing and transforming the entire book in just over two hours. (Villeneuve, by contrast, is covering less than half with his version.) The passing of time can be very unforgiving for visual effects, and Lynch’s Dune doesn’t look as good as, say, Kubrick’s 2001, which was made long before. It’s closer in design to Mike Hodges’s intergalactic comic-book comedy Flash Gordon from 1980 , which was supposed to be funny, although that also had Max von Sydow in it.

In this Dune, Kyle MacLachlan plays Paul Atreides, the young aristocrat from a noble house ordered by the emperor to take up what amounts to a colonial governorship on the harsh planet of Arrakis, or “Dune”, a place of huge strategic importance. This is where a substance called melange, which endows the consumer with enormous power, is mined. But the planet has an indigenous people who are on the point of rising up against their imperial oppressors – there is talk of holy war – and a terrifying and possibly phallic sandworm that churns the desert landscape. Paul’s mother, Jessica (Francesca Annis), is the initiate of an occult sisterhood that cultivates supernatural powers of the mind and awaits the arrival of a messiah. Jessica is subordinate to a terrifying reverend-mother figure, nicely played by Siân Phillips, who forces Paul to undergo a disturbing initiation ceremony with a box. And as war between the house of Atreides and the various duplicitous families breaks out, Paul falls in love with Chani (Sean Young) and confronts his own messianic destiny.

It is a movie that starts out as if it were going to reinvent Lawrence of Arabia in those eerily rippling sands, and there’s a coolly delivered prologue from Virginia Madsen as the emperor’s daughter Princess Irulan, putting us in the picture about the geopolitics of it all, with her face swimming weirdly in and out of focus. There are intriguing supporting performances from Phillips, from Von Sydow as a scientist on the planet and from José Ferrer as the dignified emperor himself. But this is a film that doesn’t dramatically harness the vast forces it’s gesturing at, but trundles determinedly along with very little variation of tone or pace.

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Lots of fighting in vivid but long sci-fi adaptation.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

This film covers the first half of the source nove

Paul comes off as a fairly traditional hero but al

Male-driven narrative, but women in supporting rol

Sci-fi action-style guns and shooting. People get

Kissing. A man appears to be naked; nothing explic

Infrequent use of "hell," "s--t," "ass," "damn." "

"Spice" is described as a drug that has good prope

Positive Messages

This film covers the first half of the source novel, so many of the book's bigger themes -- including religion and environmentalism -- aren't fully explored. One theme that does arise involves control of Arrakis: The villains (House Harkonnen) oppress the Fremen, while the heroes (House Atreides) try to work alongside them.

Positive Role Models

Paul comes off as a fairly traditional hero but also has started down a dark path by beginning to use a prophecy to his own advantage, setting himself up as a kind of messiah. To prove himself worthy of the Fremen, he kills a man; there are no consequences. His father, Duke Leto, is a far better role model; he's shown to be kind, benevolent, wise, understanding, although his trust and loyalty eventually ( spoiler alert ) get him killed.

Diverse Representations

Male-driven narrative, but women in supporting roles are quite powerful and admirable. This version improves on previous iterations' all-White casts by including diverse actors (Latino, Hawaiian/Polynesian, Asian, Black), but main characters are still all White, and ( spoiler alert ) virtually all characters of color die. Has raised concerns in the way it leans on Middle Eastern culture for world-building but doesn't include any MENA actors. No body/size diversity, unless you count the Baron, whose grotesqueness is unfortunately tied to his larger size and eating.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Sci-fi action-style guns and shooting. People get shot; deaths/dead bodies. Fighting with swords, blades, other weapons. Battles. Explosions. Character stabbed. Character impaled with dart. Neck-slicing. Beheadings. Characters swallowed by sandworm. Not much blood, but scenes include a bloody hand, bloody knife, blood spot. Poison gas. Crash-landing. Rape is mentioned in dialogue.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Kissing. A man appears to be naked; nothing explicit shown. Shirtless man.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Infrequent use of "hell," "s--t," "ass," "damn." "My God" used as an exclamation.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

"Spice" is described as a drug that has good properties but is also addictive; the only side effect is that it turns users' eyes luminous blue. It's not really depicted as a substance that can be abused. It's more just "the thing" that both the heroes and villains want to get their hands on.

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Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Dune is based on Frank Herbert's epic 1965 novel (previously adapted for the big screen in 1984 and for TV in 2000). It covers the first half of the book and stars Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya . Sci-fi action violence includes lots of fighting, both on the battlefield and one on one, with guns, knives, and other weapons. There are also beheadings and explosions, and characters are stabbed and/or cut open, poisoned, and eaten by worms. A little bit of blood is shown, and characters die. There's kissing and partial male nudity (no sensitive body parts shown). Infrequent language includes "s--t," "ass," and "hell." The story is about a drug known as "spice," but it's more of a thing for everyone to fight over than a real drug. While this (long) movie isn't without its flaws, director Denis Villeneuve gives it a languid smoothness that makes for an enthralling tale (which continues in Dune: Part Two ). To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Parents say (24)
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Based on 24 parent reviews

Jaw-dropping prologue has intense violence

A fan and a father, what's the story.

In DUNE, the desert planet Arrakis is the source of a valuable drug, called "spice," that allows users to travel vast distances. Spice mining and distribution on Arrakis are controlled by the evil Baron Harkonnen ( Stellan Skarsgard ), whose armies oppress the planet's Fremen people. Under orders from the emperor, Duke Leto Atreides ( Oscar Isaac ) takes over the stewardship of Arrakis and moves there with his wife, Lady Jessica ( Rebecca Ferguson ), and son, Paul ( Timothée Chalamet ). Lady Jessica has been teaching Paul in the ways of the Bene Gesserit, and, once on Arrakis, some of the Fremen begin to suspect that Paul may be a prophesied "chosen one." But after a betrayal, Lady Jessica and Paul find themselves in the desert, hunted by giant sandworms, with the mysterious Fremen their only chance of survival.

Is It Any Good?

In this first of two Dune movies, director Denis Villeneuve smooths out the most cumbersome parts of Frank Herbert's original tale, providing enough spectacle to overcome the dull bits. With echoes of his earlier films Arrival and Blade Runner 2049 , Villeneuve brings a languid moodiness to the storytelling here, slowing things down and allowing viewers time to take in the vast sets (built broad and low to fit the widescreen frame) and devices -- like the amazing, if impractical, ships modeled after dragonflies -- and to keep track of the story's innumerable characters. This rhythm builds to the tale's memorable, invigorating highlights -- such as Paul dodging a life-threatening hunter-seeker or enduring the painful gom jabbar test, or the first appearance of the massive sandworms -- and makes them feel extra vivid.

The movie even manages to soften the old, tired "chosen one" device, as well as the simplistic plot strands that are covered up by heaps of sci-fi names (how do you pronounce "Thufir Hawat" anyway?), places, and devices, making things flow more organically. It's even possible to remember that the original novel, published in 1965, actually inspired much that came after it, including Star Wars and The Matrix . Villeneuve can't quite downplay the source material's choking seriousness, but there are lighter moments. Skarsgard's Baron is a highlight; he's so grotesque that you can't look away. And then there's a swaggering Jason Momoa as swordmaster Duncan, who seems to be the only one having any fun. As with Blade Runner 2049 , Dune goes on too long, with too many scenes of fighting, and this version lacks the quirky personality of the 1984 David Lynch take , but it's far more rousing.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Dune 's violence . How did it make you feel? Was it exciting? Shocking? What did the movie show or not show to achieve this effect? Why is that important?

Why is "spice" considered a drug ? Is meant to represent drugs as we know them? Is it glamorized? Are there consequences for using it?

What are some of the movie's themes? How can sci-fi be used to explore real-life issues like colonialism and representation? How are the Fremen represented in the film?

How does this movie compare to the novel, the previous movie, and/or the TV movie? How is it different from those versions? How is it the same?

Is Paul a role model ? What makes him seem heroic? What behaviors suggest otherwise?

Movie Details

In theaters : October 22, 2021
On DVD or streaming : January 11, 2022
Cast : Timothée Chalamet , Zendaya , Rebecca Ferguson , Oscar Isaac
Director : Denis Villeneuve
Inclusion Information : Female actors, Black actors, Multiracial actors, Latino actors
Studio : Warner Bros.
Genre : Science Fiction
Topics : Book Characters , Space and Aliens
Run time : 155 minutes
MPAA rating : PG-13
MPAA explanation : sequences of strong violence, some disturbing images and suggestive material
Awards : Academy Award , Golden Globe
Last updated : March 7, 2024

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Dune Doesn’t Care If You Like It

Vulture is recirculating its coverage of Dune in celebration of the epic’s long-awaited release on HBO Max and theaters .

Sandworms, the signature creation of Frank Herbert’s Dune series, are colossal beings that live in the deserts of the planet Arrakis, which the worms travel through the way a shark might through water. Their dominance over the land has them alternately revered and feared by the different human populations who also live there, carving out lives in the unforgiving environs. The worms are drawn to anything out on the sand, capable of sensing vibrations from far away, and emerge from underneath their targets, the ground giving way to a gaping maw for anyone unfortunate enough to be in the area. When David Lynch directed his ill-omened 1984 adaptation of the original 1965 novel, he gave his sandworms multi-lobed mouths that opened like monstrous flowers, much like they had in John Schoenherr’s dust-jacket illustrations. It’s a dependable method for making anatomy look ominous — just have it look like a toothy vulva — but it’s not an approach Denis Villeneuve replicates in his own sumptuous and strange new take on Herbert’s source material.

Villeneuve’s sandworms, like so many details of his new movie, strive to come across as genuinely otherworldly and from a context other than our own. They have a tunnel-like quality that’s organic only in the sense that microscopic organisms that turn out to be nightmare fuel when given their close-up are still organic, ending abruptly in circular jaws that are permanently agape and ringed by a filter made up of rows of needle-like teeth. When Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), Dune ’s reluctant messiah figure, has an encounter with one after fleeing into the desert, the worm lifts its massive noggin out of the drifts right in front of him, and he stares into its unseeing countenance in a moment that’s meant to be electric with the terrifying majesty of this utterly alien life-form. But, gazing into that eyeless hole with clenching interiors glimpsed in its shadowy depths, it might also cross your mind that the reimagined worm left its old vagina dentata influences behind only to end up resembling a giant asshole.

The human imagination is not as limitless as we like to pretend, and it’s funny how often, in trying to get beyond the boundaries of the known, we just end up circling back to our own privates. That’s the challenge of science fiction, to create a real sense of distance and otherness when so much of storytelling rests on evoking the familiar. It’s a challenge that Dune takes up with an admirable and maybe doomed determination, rendering Herbert’s rival intergalactic aristocrats and space witches on an awe-inspiring, gloriously unfriendly scale. Herbert himself didn’t build his world from scratch: The squabbled-over Arrakis, the only source for a substance called spice that’s essential to interstellar travel, is at the heart of what are basically oil wars writ large. And Dune does have the contours of a space opera, with its sand monsters and ghoulish villains and fine-boned princeling destined to meet the literal woman of this dreams — Chani, a member of the indigenous Fremen population played by Zendaya, who will presumably get more to do if the sequel actually happens — and lead humanity toward a better future. But Villeneuve isn’t interested in making a swashbuckling romantic adventure that happens to have sci-fi trappings.

His 2016 film Arrival was about trying to communicate with extraterrestrials who experience existence in an entirely different way from us, and Dune is bent on depicting a far future humanity in which traces of the familiar — bagpipes played at a ceremony, an ancestor’s penchant for bull-fighting — just end up emphasizing how distant the characters’ desires and motivations can be. They aren’t entirely inscrutable: Oscar Isaac plays Paul’s father, Duke Leto Atreides, as a careworn but kind ruler who’s aware he’s being steered into a trap when asked to take over Arrakis. Leto’s trusted military advisers, Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa) and Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin), serve as surrogate fond old brothers and stern uncles to Paul, while as Paul’s mother and Leto’s concubine Lady Jessica, Rebecca Ferguson embodies the fretful tension of a woman torn between protecting her son and preparing him to face unavoidable danger. But Jessica also happens to be a loyal member of the Bene Gesserit, a matriarchal order of psychic women who manipulate politics while masterminding an unfathomable multi-century breeding program to create the Kwisatz Haderach — a messiah who may or may not be Paul.

The most daring aspect of Dune is not that it only tells half a narrative, or that it opts to immerse its audience in its richly rendered universe, assuming they can keep up without guide ropes. It’s carried pretty far on the strength of spectacle alone, with its spaceships hanging impossibly still in the air, its thrumming Hans Zimmer score, and its pallid antagonist, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård channeling Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz), floating around on anti-gravity boosters like a menacing balloon. No, the most daring aspect of Dune is how much unease it creates around the idea of a chosen one, from the Leni Riefenstahl–inspired military ceremony in which Leto and Paul receive their commission to take care of Arrakis to the fact that Paul is the product of eugenics. It begins with Chani talking in voiceover about the colonization of the Fremen’s land and the oppression they’ve experienced at the hands of rapacious outsiders, and then turns to a white savior whose greatness is entirely synthetic, engineered via planted prophecies and genetic manipulation. Paul’s reluctance to fall into the role created for him isn’t the usual self-doubt, but the dread of someone who begins to believe he’s meant to initiate a holy war. Being the hero of the story has never looked so poisoned, and that alone is thrilling enough to hope Villeneuve gets to make part two of this impressively batshit venture.

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DVD & Streaming

Dune: Part One

Action/Adventure , Drama , Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Content Caution

In Theaters

October 22, 2021
Timothée Chalamet as Paul Atreides; Rebecca Ferguson as Lady Jessica Atreides; Oscar Isaac as Duke Leto Atreides; Jason Momoa as Duncan Idaho; Stellan Skarsgård as Baron Vladimir Harkonnen as Stephen McKinley Henderson as Thufir Hawat; Josh Brolin as Gurney Halleck; Javier Bardem as Stilgar; Sharon Duncan-Brewster as Dr. Liet Kynes; Chen Chang as Dr. Wellington Yueh; Dave Bautista as Beast Rabban Harkonnen; David Dastmalchian as Piter de Vries; Zendaya s Chani; Charlotte Rampling as Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam; Babs Olusanmokun as Jamis; Golda Rosheuvel as Shadout Mapes

Home Release Date

December 3, 2021
Denis Villeneuve

Distributor

Warner Bros.

Movie Review

Duke Leto Atreides knows he’s walking into a trap.

But he has little choice.

The galaxy’s Emperor has instructed the Duke’s noble House Atreides to assume stewardship of the most important planet in the empire: Arrakis. Dune , the Desert Planet, as it’s known.

The sands of Arrakis blow hot and barren across its vast wasteland. But the sand also mingles with the universe’s most precious commodity: spice. The spice of Dune is not only a powerful hallucinogenic; it also enables Spacing Guild Navigators to bend time and space, making interstellar travel possible. Without the spice, there is no space travel—no trade, no empire, no anything.

Nothing matters more than spice.

Receiving Arrakis would seem to be a great boon to House Atreides. But the planet’s oversight is being taken from the House Harkonnen, led by its grotesquely bloated Baron. He’s none too happy to have his monopoly given to another House—even if that supposed gift is part of a bigger plan on the part of the emperor to wipe out the increasingly formidable House Atreides.

Indeed, the myriad armies of House Atreides—led by the fierce soldiers Gurney Halleck and Duncan Idaho—have barely arrived in the capital city of Arrakeen when the trap begins to snap shut. And brutally so. It seems the Duke’s lineage—represented by his son Paul, who’s barely come of age—will be wiped out.

But all is not as it seems on Dune. Beneath the shifting, sweltering sands, harbored in island-like rock outcroppings in the deep desert, an indigenous people known as the Fremen await the coming of a messiah. It’s been foretold that he will lead them into glorious battle against their outworld oppressors, securing their freedom.

Whispers among the people even suggest that young Paul Atreides could be that long-awaited savior and deliverer.

If, that is, the heat, the Harkonnens and the sandworms don’t kill him first.

Positive Elements

Duke Leto is a man and leader of nobility and honor. Morally speaking, House Atreides is the polar opposite of House Harkonnen. Leto knows that the emperor’s “gift” is not what it seems; he knows the Harkonnens quite likely lie in wait for him; yet he obliges his emperor and prepares to receive the stewardship of Arrakis anyway—bravely taking a place of leadership on a brutal world surrounded by equally brutal rivals.

The Duke deeply loves his son, Paul. Speaking of leadership, he tells Paul, “A great man doesn’t seek to lead. He’s called to it. And he answers.” Then the Duke adds, “And if your answer is no, you’ll still be the only thing I ever needed you to be: my son.”

Paul has, not surprisingly, has received the best martial tutelage from the legendary warriors Duncan Idaho and Gurney Halleck. Indeed, both of these men strive to train, equip and encourage Paul to be prepared for any threat. At one point, Gurney charges into hand-to-hand combat training with the young man after Paul says he’s not in the mood. “Mood?!” Gurney exclaims. “What’s mood got to do with it? You fight when necessity arises, no matter what the mood.” And as the Harkonnens bring the fight to the House Atreides, Gurney and Duncan both serve heroically in defense of their liege.

The Duke has a longstanding love relationship with Lady Jessica, his concubine. Indeed, the Duke regrets never having married her (which he says to Jessica at one point). Jessica’s loyalty to and love for Paul likewise is as fierce as Duke Leto’s.

The Fremen, we learn, are a mysterious, semi-nomadic desert people who live by their own code of honor. At times it’s a deadly one, as we’ll see below.

One character, Dr. Liet Kynes, is an Imperial Planetologist who also serves as the Judge of the Change—the handover of power between the Harkonnens and the Atreides. She is supposed to be steadfastly neutral, but she, too, ultimately proves a heroic character when the Harkonnens attack.

In fact, there’s no shortage of heroism here all around—from the Duke, to Paul, to Jessica, to nearly all of the major Atreides characters—as they try to resist getting caught in the trap that’s been set for them.

Spiritual Elements

Two distinct streams of spiritual belief mingle throughout the story of Dune .

Jessica is a member of a shadowy-but-influential female religious order known as the Bene Gesserit . But she’s sought to train Paul, illicitly, in the ways of her religious tradition.

The Bene Gesserit have a variety of abilities. First, they use something called the Voice, which exerts powerful mind control over those who hear it. Second, we hear whispers of these soothsayers ability to foresee the future—as well as of their limited ability and boundless determination to shape it.

The Bene Gesserit form an organized religious force that plays an important role in sustaining and affirming the Emperor’s power. But it’s equally clear that the Bene Gesserit have their own agenda at work, too. As a whole, they’re not depicted as a force for good, but a group to be feared and distrusted because of their shadowy, duplicitous ways.

We also hear a few whispered mentions of a prophesied Bene Gesserit male leader known as the Kwisatz Haderach. The chief leader of the Bene Gesserit accuses Jessica of trying to give birth to this foretold leader.

Jessica quotes a famous Bene Gesserit proverb: “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

In some respects, you could perhaps identify loose narrative parallels between the Bene Gesserit’s depiction here and the medieval Catholic Church’s intertwined (and sometimes compromised) relationship with political powers in the Middle Ages. The Bene Gesserit sect has largely been corrupted by power but is ruthlessly determined to hang on to it.

The second religious thread in the story is the Fremen’s religion. These desert-dwelling people’s faith is depicted in a more pure and holistic way. If the Bene Gesserit are corrupt, the Fremen seem to be true believers in their convictions. The Fremen’s desert garb, their speech and their patterns of religious devotion also bear superficial resemblance to Islam and Arabic desert culture. The Duke’s warrior Duncan Idaho says of the Fremen’s martial ferocity, “They fight like demons.”

The Fremen, as mentioned above, have a prophecy about a leader who come from off-world to liberate them. Paul, some of theme think, could be that longed-for spiritual liberator.

Spice is described as a hallucinogenic agent. That said, for the Fremen (whose eyes are blue due to consuming it), it takes on a more mystical capacity than simply being a recreational drug. Paul has several spice-induced visions, as well as prophetic dreams of meeting a young Fremen woman named Chani. Spice is also integral to the Spacing Guild’s ability pilot spacecraft between worlds.

The Fremen seem almost to worship Dune’s great sandworms, whom they call “Makers.” Someone says, “Blessed be the Maker and his water.” Another character exclaims elsewhere, “God in heaven.”

Sexual Content

Several women wear translucent, clingy gowns with, apparently, not much on beneath. Paul dreams of kissing Chani. The Duke and Lady Jessica are shown, fully clothed, in bed together. Paul’s shown shirtless. A man who’s been drugged is also naked and sitting in a chair. We see the entirety of his bare side, but nothing critical. One scene also depicts quite a lot of the Baron’s prodigiously bare flesh.

Violent Content

Violence—and the threat of violence—permeates the world of Arrakis.

We see some brutal hand-to-hand combat in a massive battle on the planet. The body count here is high, and more than once we see blood-slicked swords in soldiers’ hands. That battle also includes an air-to-surface bombardment of the capital city, including the use of powerful explosives to fully breach the shield wall surrounding the city’s vulnerable entrance.

The intensity of this battle is still within PG-13 territory, but it pushes further in its grimness and blood-stained weaponry than most comparably rated sci-fi, fantasy or superhero flicks. It has a grim and foreboding feel to it that makes the combat here feel much more realistic and tragic. That’s especially true when Baron Harkonnen’s barbaric henchman, Beast Rabban, beheads a line of soldiers before him. (We see the blade begin to fall, but not the actual executions.)

Paul’s mother is threatened by a group of Harkonnen soldiers who talk of raping her before she brutally kills all of them. One of Paul’s visions repeatedly pictures a young woman with blood on her hands. Paul has dreams of—and is haunted by—images of him leading a religious holy war in which his warriors kill myriad people on different planets, all in his name.

Multiple other characters are stabbed and killed, and we see their pained expressions in the process. Likewise, Paul is forced to fight an honor duel of sorts. Paul and the man battle to the death.

The older priestess also gives Paul Atreides a test involving a box into which he places his hand. If he removes his hand for any reason before she allows him to do so, she has a poisoned needle at his neck called the gom jabbar to kill him. The test is to see whether he is a “human” or an “animal.” The latter, the priestess says, will chew off his leg to escape a trap. A human won’t do that. Paul leaves his hand in the box, even though he’s certain it’s being burned up by fire.

Someone unleashes an aerosol poison that kills many people. Tiny, syringe-like drones seek to assassinate people. Enormous, toothy sandworms attack (and don’t leave anything behind). A light aircraft crashes after flying into the teeth of a duststorm. Multiple characters are executed.

Crude or Profane Language

Duncan Idaho quotes a Fremen saying: “To shower, you scrub your a– with sand.” We hear single uses each of the s-word, “d–n” and “my god.”

Drug and Alcohol Content

We hear references to spice as noted above.

Other Negative Elements

Paul repeatedly lies about prophetic dreams he’s been having. There’s a great betrayal that makes the Harkonnen’s invasion of Arrakeen possible.

Frank Herbert’s epic Dune , published in 1965, is (arguably) to sci-fi what Lord of the Rings is to fantasy. This sweeping saga encompasses a riveting tale of politics, revolution, religion, love, loyalty and interstellar civil war as one young man slowly dons the mantle of messiah that has been thrust upon him.

If that sounds like a lot to cram into one movie, it is. So be forewarned: This story only makes it through about half of Herbert’s first book in the series—and that after some 2 hours and 35 minutes of run time.

Dune has infamously resisted translation to the cinematic format. The 1984 version, directed by none other than David Lynch, has been both mocked and adored—the latter for its pure absurdity at certain points. A miniseries in 2000 paid closer attention to the source material yet largely failed to generate adulation among the Dune faithful.

And now Canadian director Denis Villeneuve (Blade Runner 2049, Arrival) has stepped up to the plate. Given the inherent density of Herbert’s seminal novel, I suspect that this spectacularly filmed movie will still appeal more to those who’ve read the book than those who haven’t. More so than his predecessors, however, Villeneuve has managed to capture the essence of the story, the tale of a young man thrown into a brutal world and called to be its unlikely savior.

(Plus, of course, sandworms. Very nicely executed here, those.)

As far as Plugged In’s perspective is concerned, this PG-13 film pushes the boundaries of that rating in its grim violence. This is a dark story, one of betrayal and death that is not much redeemed in this first installment. Blood flows, as evidenced by plenty of the slick red stuff coating combatants’ blades.

And then there’s all that spiritual stuff—and there’s a lot of it here. Though both the Bene Gesserit religion and that of the Fremen are fictional ones, it’s not hard to draw parallels between existing belief systems in our world. Here, religion serves, paradoxically, as both the sustainer of the status quo and the spark of revolution coming against it.

There’s plenty of fodder for discussion in that tension, which I suspect is exactly what Herbert intended. And Villeneuve has captured that tension effectively here. But families with younger fans of the book may want to think carefully before seeing this version of Frank Herbert’s iconic story.

Adam R. Holz

After serving as an associate editor at NavPress’ Discipleship Journal and consulting editor for Current Thoughts and Trends, Adam now oversees the editing and publishing of Plugged In’s reviews as the site’s director. He and his wife, Jennifer, have three children. In their free time, the Holzes enjoy playing games, a variety of musical instruments, swimming and … watching movies.

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"It's like a dream," my friend from Hollywood was explaining. "It doesn't make any sense, and the special effects are straight from the dime store but if you give up trying to understand it, and just sit back and let it wash around in your mind, it's not bad." That was not exactly a rave review for a movie that someone paid $40 million to make, but it put me into a receptive frame of mind for "Dune," the epic based on the novels by Frank Herbert. I was even willing to forgive the special effects for not being great; after all, in an era when George Lucas' "Star Wars" has turned movies into high tech, why not a film that looks like a throwback to Flash Gordon. It might be kind of fun.

It took "Dune" about nine minutes to completely strip me of my anticipation. This movie is a real mess, an incomprehensible, ugly, unstructured, pointless excursion into the murkier realms of one of the most confusing screenplays of all time. Even the color is no good; everything is seen through a sort of dusty yellow filter, as if the film was left out in the sun too long. Yes, you might say, but the action is, after all, on a desert planet where there isn't a drop of water, and there's sand everywhere. David Lean solved that problem in " Lawrence of Arabia ," where he made the desert look beautiful and mysterious, not shabby and drab.

The movie's plot will no doubt mean more to people who've read Herbert than to those who are walking in cold. It has to do with a young hero's personal quest. He leads his people against an evil baron and tries to destroy a galaxy-wide trade in spice, a drug produced on the desert planet. Spice allows you to live indefinitely while you discover you have less and less to think about. There are various theological overtones, which are best left unexplored.

The movie has so many characters, so many unexplained or incomplete relationships, and so many parallel courses of action that it's sometimes a toss-up whether we're watching a story, or just an assembly of meditations on themes introduced by the novels (the movie is like a dream).

Occasionally a striking image will swim into view: The alien brain floating in brine, for example, or our first glimpse of the giant sand worms plowing through the desert. If the first look is striking, however, the movie's special effects don't stand up to scrutiny. The heads of the sand worms begin to look more and more as if they came out of the same factory that produced Kermit the Frog (they have the same mouths). An evil baron floats through the air on trajectories all too obviously controlled by wires. The spaceships in the movie are so shabby, so lacking in detail or dimension, that they look almost like those student films where plastic models are shot against a tablecloth.

Nobody looks very happy in this movie. Actors stand around in ridiculous costumes, mouthing dialogue that has little or no context. They're not even given scenes that work on a self-contained basis; portentious lines of pop profundity are allowed to hang in the air unanswered, while additional characters arrive or leave on unexplained errands. "Dune" looks like a project that was seriously out of control from the start. Sets were constructed, actors were hired; no usable screenplay was ever written; everybody faked it as long as they could. Some shabby special effects were thrown into the pot, and the producers crossed their fingers and hoped that everybody who has read the books will want to see the movie. Not if the word gets out, they won't.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film credits.

Dune (1984)

Rated PG-13

137 minutes

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COMMENTS

Dune
Dune is a sci-fi epic based on Frank Herbert's novel, directed by Denis Villeneuve. Read critic and audience reviews, watch trailers and featurettes, and find out where to watch this visually stunning and ambitious adaptation.
Dune movie review & film summary (2021)
Roger Ebert praises the new film adaptation of the sci-fi novel Dune by Frank Herbert, directed by Denis Villeneuve and starring Timothée Chalamet, Oscar Isaac, and Zendaya. He praises the film's visuals, acting, and references to other films, but criticizes its pacing and exposition.
Dune: Part Two movie review & film summary (2024)
Roger Ebert praises Denis Villeneuve's "massive" and "epic" sequel to Dune, which follows Paul Atreides' rise as the chosen one on Arrakis. He admires the film's craft, themes, and performances, but questions its hero's journey and Chalamet's acting.
'Dune' Review: A Hero in the Making, on Shifting Sands
Villeneuve has made a serious, stately opus, and while he doesn't have a pop bone in his body, he knows how to put on a show as he fans a timely argument about who gets to play the hero now ...
'Dune' Review
Timothee Chalamet in Denis Villeneuve's 'Dune': Film Review | Venice 2021. Frank Herbert's 1965 sci-fi classic gets epic screen treatment, with an all-star cast that also features Rebecca ...
Dune (2021)
Dune: Directed by Denis Villeneuve. With Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Jason Momoa. A noble family becomes embroiled in a war for control over the galaxy's most valuable asset while its heir becomes troubled by visions of a dark future.
'Dune' Review: Villeneuve Turns the Sci-Fi Classic Into a Blockbuster
Villeneuve's Dune is a thick, loud, well-fed spectacle of a movie, towering over the people in it with a brooding sense of intention — even in its quieter moments, even when wrestling through ...
Dune review: Villeneuve's sci-fi epic is breathtaking and a bit maddening
Dune review: Denis Villeneuve's starry sci-fi epic is breathtaking, and a little bit maddening. Earlier this summer, director Denis Villeneuve made news for insisting that watching Dune on ...
Dune review
David Lynch's Dune from 1984 was an interesting, rackety, flawed movie that attempted to cram the entirety of Frank Herbert's classic sci-fi novel into its running time - the result was like ...
'Dune' review: Denis Villeneuve makes Herbert classic his own
Review: Denis Villeneuve's 'Dune' is a transporting vision, but it could use a touch more madness Josh Brolin, left, and Timothée Chalamet in the movie "Dune." (Warner Bros. Pictures)
Dune Review
Denis Villeneuve's Dune is beautiful to behold, a faithful adaptation of Frank Herbert's novel. Or of its first half, that is. And therein lies the problem that the film faces, for in cutting ...
Dune (2021)
Read what critics and fans think of the sci-fi epic Dune, directed by Denis Villeneuve and based on Frank Herbert's novel. Find out how they rate the film's visuals, acting, pacing, and faithfulness to the source material.
Dune review
First look review Venice film festival 2021. This article is more than 2 years old. Review. ... Dune screens at the Venice film festival and is released in Australia and the UK on 21 October, ...
'Dune' 2021 review: The story sprawls, the pacing stalls : NPR
His screenplay distills Herbert's hilariously dense network of galactic institutions down to the major players. You'll miss some nuance, maybe, but that's why God made wikis for you to consult on ...
'Dune' review: Sci-fi epic is an immersive but incomplete experience
Review Movie Reviews. Sci-Fi epic 'Dune' is an immersive but incomplete experience ... This first Dune may not be a great movie — or even half a great movie — but Dune the planet is gorgeous ...
Dune Gets Lost in Space
September 3, 2021. By Chia Bella James/Warner Bros. Pictures. The trouble begins in Dune —which premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Friday—just about immediately. In the opening credits ...
Dune review
Dune review - blockbuster cinema at its dizzying, dazzling best. ... It is a movie that starts out as if it were going to reinvent Lawrence of Arabia in those eerily rippling sands, and there ...
Dune Movie Review
Jaw-dropping prologue has intense violence. Dune (2021) is a beautiful film following a dystopian world and its inhabitants relying on "the spice" the universes most important substance and natural resource crucial for space travel. Throughout, expect knife violence which can get bloody at times.
'Dune' Movie Review: Denis Villeneuve's Turn
Denis Villeneuve's gloriously unfriendly take on Frank Herbert's sci-fi classic, starring (among many other actors) Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya, wants to feel as alien as possible.
Dune: Part One
Movie Review. Duke Leto Atreides knows he's walking into a trap. But he has little choice. The galaxy's Emperor has instructed the Duke's noble House Atreides to assume stewardship of the most important planet in the empire: Arrakis. Dune, the Desert Planet, as it's known. The sands of Arrakis blow hot and barren across its vast wasteland.
Dune movie review & film summary (1984)
This movie is a real mess, an incomprehensible, ugly, unstructured, pointless excursion into the murkier realms of one of the most confusing screenplays of all time. Even the color is no good; everything is seen through a sort of dusty yellow filter, as if the film was left out in the sun too long. Yes, you might say, but the action is, after ...

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Dune review: Denis Villeneuve's starry sci-fi epic is breathtaking, and a little bit maddening

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