Critics are split on Denis Villeneuve’s Dune—Is it a masterpiece or a mess?

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune has officially premiered at the Venice Film Festival, and the reviews are pouring in. What’s the consensus?

Well, it’s split. Pretty much everyone agrees that the film is wildly ambitious — the sweeping trailer and the all-star cast could tell you that — but many question the choice to split Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel into two parts (this movie only tells the first half of the story) and worry that Villeneuve made a film that’s almost too huge to fit on the screen.

Still, the positive reviews are effusive. “Dune reminds us what a Hollywood blockbuster can be,” writes The Guardian. “Implicitly, its message written again and again in the sand, Denis Villeneuve’s fantasy epic tells us that big-budget spectaculars don’t have to be dumb or hyperactive, that it’s possible to allow the odd quiet passage amid the explosions…Dune is dense, moody and quite often sublime — the missing link bridging the multiplex and the arthouse. Encountering it here was like stumbling across some fabulous lost tribe, or a breakaway branch of America’s founding fathers who laid out the template for a different and better New World.”

Empire Magazine also turned in a rave, calling Dune “an absorbing, awe-inspiringly huge adaptation of (half of) Frank Herbert’s novel that will wow existing acolytes, and get newcomers hooked on its spice-fueled visions. If Part 2 never happens, it’ll be a travesty.”

IndieWire, on the other hand, found hardly anything to like about the movie. “It’s hard to overstate how little actually happens in this Dune, which flows like an overture that’s stretched for the duration of an entire opera,” writes critic David Ehrlich. “Villeneuve’s seismic world-building is all tone and no melody. He spends precious minutes detailing the topography of Arrakis and the suits that allow people to survive its deserts, but devotes nary a moment to Duke Atreides’ private concerns about the intergalactic feudalism that shapes his fate, or Paul’s nebulous inner conflict over leaving his old world behind.”

Most reviews were more mixed, like IGN’s, which thought the movie dragged in the last half of its two-and-a-half hour runtime: “[I]n cutting this story into two parts, Villeneuve has front-loaded Dune with a lot of set-up and no obvious way to end things,” writes Scott Collura, “and so it lingers, and eventually overstays its welcome. This is a technically brilliant, visually amazing movie with a top-notch cast and deep sci-fi concepts. A shame, then, that it feels like a drag in its back half.”

At the least, the movie sounds ambitious enough to see at least once. USA Today admits that while the movie is a “mixed bag,” it still provides an “awesome experience … with astounding special effects, great production design and a propulsive Hans Zimmer score. Insect/helicopter hybrid vehicles buzz around, Paul’s frequent future visions add a mysteriously neat vibe, and it’s hard to beat scarily mawed sandworms that could stretch across quite a few football fields.”

Denis Villeneuve envisions a Dune movie trilogy

I was a little concerned when I heard that Villeneuve would be splitting the original story in two, and hearing him talk about the decision to SyFy Wire, it sounds like this movie is front-loaded with a lot of exposition. “I will say, the tough task here was to introduce you guys to the world, to the ideas to this world, to the codes, to the cultures, the different families, the different planets,” the director said. “Now once this is done, it becomes an insane playground. It will allow me to go berserk and really create.”

"I shouldn’t say it, but I will say that for me, Dune Part I is like an appetizer. Dune Part II is the main meal where we can add much more. As much as Dune Part 1 was, by far, my most exciting project ever, Dune Part II is already getting me even more excited."

It’s nice that he’s excited about Part II, but that movie doesn’t happen unless Part I is a success, and to do that it’s got to exciting all on its own. And Part I might not succeed if people don’t go to the theater, which is tricky these days thanks to the coronavirus. “At the end of the day these are difficult times for everybody, safety first, if the audience feels comfortable I encourage them to watch it on the big screen,” Villeneuve said at the festival, according to Variety. “It has been dreamed, designed, shot, thinking IMAX. When you watch this movie on the big screen, it is a physical experience. We tried to design it to be as immersive as possible.”

Beyond that, Villeneuve adapting Herbert’s second Dune book as well, although that’s still a ways off. “I’m going to be very honest, I envisioned the adaptation of two books, Dune and Dune Messiah,” he said. “As a filmmaker and as a screenwriter, I know how to do this. When we decided to split the first novel in two, now we are at three movies. But those movies are very long to make, so for my mental sanity, I decided to just dream about three movies. After that, because I am a big fan of all the novels, I’ll see where I am.”

Dune opens in theaters and on HBO Max on October 22.

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h/t SyFy Wire