Dune (2021) — Movie Review

Cinematography and Direction

In terms of cinematography — it was pretty damn good. There were plenty of ultra-wide shots that captured the scale of the worlds that our characters interacted with. It made the world feel big. And the reality is, the world is big — we just don’t feel it in that way as we move through it (might feel like a digression but I think this is important to the Sci-fi genre). In terms of Direction, it was okay, I felt like some of the acting was outlandish for the sake of it — especially the interactions between the Fremen. Also, the casting of Timothée Chalamet was pretty bad imo. I felt little care for him as a character, he felt kind of soft for the environment that he was in.

Military and Combat

Portrayal of the military forces was A+. As someone who has always appreciated strong military posture, I really enjoyed the ceremonial rituals of the large scale armies. I know modern ground wars aren’t fought like this anymore, it was nice to see old rituals within a futuristic world. Combat on the other hand, was ok. I thought the world was a bit too physically protective (with the combat shields) and didn’t indulge enough in the bodily damages that modern combat brings, making it feel too fake.

World Building

Important to most science fiction movies and films is the depth of the world the author can create in the audience’s mind. In my mind, the best science fiction doesn’t like to hang around too long with familiar experiences. It should try to get you to imagine a world outside of your own experiences, mainly through a process of slowly layering on novel scientific projections and mild abstractions. At the same time, it needs to try really hard to make sense. It should be grounded within current paradigms, and spend a lot of its efforts explaining to us a new paradigm, before presenting the technology that lives within it.

I won’t blame the director for their execution of this, just because there’s a lot of deep lore and world building that a book like this carries. I just thought it was a bit too unfamiliar and outlandish at first. It would have been great if they decided to lean into their anthropological references (e.g. references to Islamic tribes, Russian empires) a bit harder. The environmental themes were more obvious but I thought they could have created a strong sense of resource scarcity.

Technological Accuracy

I think I was a bit harsher on Dune for the lack of its tech accuracy. Obviously, being based off of thinking in 1965, it’s not going to be accurate in its projections as something from 2021. At the same time, there were a number of emergent technologies at the time that I think could have been captured by the work. E.g. Nuclear energy, Lasers, & really early computers. In my mind, Science Fiction should be made with the intent of eventually becoming science non-fiction. Things that were really terrible? The HUGE floating ships, and use of “shields”, and the Fremmen.