This review of Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” was first published on September 3 after its premiere at the Venice Film Festival.
Director Denis Villeneuve has succeeded in wrestling Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi classic “Dune” to the big screen, and that’s an impressive feat all by itself. So when his film premiered last month at the Venice Film Festival, it’s no surprise that it showed what a movie version of “Dune” can be, but also why it’s been so difficult to get one onto the screen.
Villeneuve’s “Dune” is both dazzling and frustrating, often spectacular and often slow. It’s huge and loud and impressive but it can also be humorless and bleak – though on the whole, it tries valiantly to address the problems of taking on Herbert’s complex epic, which requires a director to spend lots of time setting things up and explaining the world before they can even get the damn thing off the ground.