Dune (2021)
There's a particular kind of frustration that only a technically brilliant film can produce. If something is rubbish from top to bottom, you just shrug and move on. But when a film has every conceivable ingredient at its disposal and still manages to leave you completely cold, that's genuinely maddening. Denis Villeneuve's Dune is exactly that kind of film for me. I can see, on a purely intellectual level, why critics fell over themselves to praise it. And yet I sat there for nearly three hours feeling almost nothing.
The ensemble alone should have been enough to guarantee something special. Timothée Chalamet, Josh Brolin, Oscar Isaac, a roster of serious, committed performers all given room to work within an enormously ambitious sci-fi world. And yet the whole thing is utterly, bafflingly lifeless. There's no pulse to it. The stakes are supposedly enormous but I never once felt them. Characters I'm told are important come and go and I couldn't bring myself to care about a single one of them. That's a remarkable achievement in its own grim way, squandering that much talent.
Visually and aurally, I'll give it this: the film is genuinely stunning. The production design is extraordinary, and the sound design in particular is the kind of thing that reminds you why cinemas exist. Sit in a good auditorium with this one and the sheer physical force of it is impressive. But here's the problem. It's all one note. Every single frame is some variation of beige, sand, orange, grey. There's a monotony to it that sets in surprisingly early and just never lets up. Beautiful, yes, but beauty without warmth or variation becomes numbing. You can't sustain nearly three hours on spectacle alone when there's no emotional engine running underneath it.
The story itself is straightforward enough: a powerful empire wants control of a desert planet for its valuable resource and a clash with the planet's indigenous people is inevitable. That's a solid enough spine for an epic. The problem is the script's addiction to exposition. The middle of this film grinds to a near-complete halt as character after character stops to explain the political mechanics of the universe to each other, and by extension to us. I found myself checking the time. Repeatedly. That's never a good sign. Tension requires momentum, and the script keeps killing its own momentum dead.
I should also say something about Zendaya, whose appearance here is fairly brief but did nothing to shift my long-held view that she's a remarkably wooden screen presence. There's no spark, no urgency, nothing that makes you lean forward. I'm aware that's a minority opinion and people will disagree loudly, but I call it as I see it.
Villeneuve is a director I've had genuine admiration for. I loved Prisoners (2013), a film that grips you from the first scene and never lets go, and Arrival (2016) showed he could do ambitious, cerebral science fiction with real emotional weight behind it. That's exactly what makes Dune so deflating. He's proven he can do better than this. Here it feels like the scale swallowed him whole, and caution replaced instinct. Everything is so reverent, so careful, so determined not to put a foot wrong, that it forgets to actually be alive.
This is a hollow blockbuster that mistakes sheer enormity for depth. Two and a half stars, and I'm being generous because I can't entirely dismiss what it achieves on a technical level. I'll watch the second part at some point, mostly out of morbid curiosity, but I'm not going in with much hope. Sometimes the most expensive-looking films are the emptiest ones, and Dune makes that case more comprehensively than almost anything I've seen in recent years.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2021 | Watched: 2026-08-07
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: HBO Max Amazon Channel · Now TV Cinema · HBO Max
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Sky Store
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Sky Store
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: HBO Max Amazon Channel · YouTube TV · HBO Max
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
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