I revere the source material but have many misgivings about Denis Villeneuve. Will I hate it it? (By the way, I like the uneven imperfect Lynch version)
shareI thought it was excellent, a 9/10.
shareIt was great. Much better than the old Dune movie, and they paid homage to the RTS games in this film a bit. Absolutely loved the special effects. Yes, the third act is kinda MIA but the payoff is a comin' with more movies down the road.
shareI predict the second movie won't happen. This isn't a hit by any means. I love Dune, but the mass audience just doesn't get it. That is the problem. No matter who directs Dune, the general public just can't wrap their minds around it. I haven't seen this version yet, but it doesn't matter...the public will always see challenging material as boring.
shareSuper boring, fell asleep the first 25 minutes (which is super rare for me). I don't recommend it.
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Good job, David.
Here are some of your points that I don't agree with:
"the dumbing down of Paul Atreides"
Paul Atreides is meant to be young and inexperienced in Part I so that we could see the growth of the character. On the other hand, just because others explain some matter to him doesn't mean he doesn't know or understand. (Apparently, you don't have a nagging wife.)
"the essential rule of good storytelling: show, don't tell."
In my opinion, the essential rule of good storytelling in movies is: show and explain through dialogues. One way to achieve that is by using flashbacks wisely. In this movie, the director chose to use flashforwards (Paul's dreams) to set the stage for the future plot. Adding flashbacks could confuse the audience.
As someone who's not familiar with the source material, I liked it. Not one of my favorite Denis Villeneuve films but I enjoyed it for the most part. It was good not great.
And as someone who's unfamiliar with the whole thing, I found it pretty easy to follow. It didn't try to hold my hand but I got the jist of it pretty fast.
Hope they green light the sequel
I thought that among adapted SF books, this was among the truest to the source material (other than the gender-swapping of Liet-Keynes which is seriously problematic regarding revelations to come). I am concerned that those who haven’t read the books will find that the characters lack development and clear motivation. There’s a lot of back-story and sub-plots that just don’t transfer to film easily or well. Overall I thought the casting and acting were done well and overall it’s in a whole different league from Lynch’s version (which even he hates). CGI and cinematography were great. I hope the sequel(s) get made.
shareFantastic.
shareI fastforwarded a few parts, but all in all, not too bad - but this being only first part....
I wonder how many people will be duped into thinking that this is the entire story when showing up at the movie theater, only to read 'part one' when the title comes onto the screen.
Pretty sleazy move, if you ask me. WTF did they not insert 'part one' into the official title? I think we all know the answer to that question.
But same applies to Avengers - which basically started the whole scammy 'let's split the film into 2' filmmaking strategy.
At least with lord of the rings there were 3 books - hence 3 films -- here, it's scam - pure and simple.
Aside from that, while some say that this film has more stuff from the book - the original Lynch's film managed to fit the inner dialogues via whispers, which made it pretty creepy, but also added to how surreal it was. Dropping inner dialogues actually subtracted from the story, given just how big a role they played in character development in the book series.
Otherwise.... like I said, what I did see wasn't too bad - it wasn't as much of a disaster as I thought it would be.