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‘Dune’ Review: A Hero in the Making, on Shifting Sands

Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation is an equally sweeping and intimate take on Frank Herbert’s future-shock epic.

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‘Dune’ | Anatomy of a Scene

The director denis villeneuve narrates a combat training sequence from his film, featuring timothée chalamet and josh brolin..

My name is Denis Villeneuve and I’m the director of Dune. “Don’t stand with your back to the door!” This scene needed to serve four purposes. First, to establish the nature of the relationship between Paul Atreides and Gurney Halleck. Two, to give more insight about the context in which the Atreides will move to a new planet named Arrakis. Three, to induce the idea that Paul Atreides has been training for combat, but has never really experienced real violence. And four, to introduce the concept of the Holtzman Shields, and how they change the essence of combat. An Holtzman Shield is a technology that protects individuals or vehicles from any fast objects. Therefore, bullets or rockets are obsolete. So it means that man to man combat came back to sword fighting. The choreography between Timothée Chalamet, who plays Paul, and Josh Brolin, who plays Gurney Halleck, illustrate that each opponent is trying to distract his adversary by doing very fast moves in order to create an opportunity to insert slowly a blade inside the opponent’s shield. “Guess I’m not in the mood today.” “Mood?” “Mm.” “What’s mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises, no matter the mood. Now fight!” That choreography was designed by Roger Yuan. He developed the Atreides fighting style borrowing from a martial art technique developed in the ‘50s. This technique was called balintawak eskrima. It’s a style that involves blocking the opponent’s attack with both a weapon and the free hand. “I have you.” “Aye. But look down, my Lord. You’d have joined me in death. I see you found the mood.” Cinematographer Greig Fraser and I shot the fight like we will shoot a dance performance. The goal was to embrace the complexity of the movements with objective camera angles. We tried to make sure that the audience will understand the nature of this new way of fighting. “You don’t really understand the grave nature of what’s happening to us.” But more importantly, I wanted to feel that Josh Brolin’s character was caring about Paul like if he was his own son. “Can you imagine the wealth? In your eyes— I need to see it in your eyes. You never met Harkonnens before. I have. They’re not human. They’re brutal! You have to be ready.”

By Manohla Dargis

In a galaxy far, far away, a young man in a sea of sand faces a foreboding destiny. The threat of war hangs in the air. At the brink of a crisis, he navigates a feudalistic world with an evil emperor, noble houses and subjugated peoples, a tale right out of mythology and right at home in George Lucas’s brainpan. But this is “ Dune ,” baby, Frank Herbert’s science-fiction opus, which is making another run at global box-office domination even as it heads toward controversy about what it and its messianic protagonist signify.

The movie is a herculean endeavor from the director Denis Villeneuve (“Arrival”), a starry, sumptuous take on the novel’s first half. Published in 1965, Herbert’s book is a beautiful behemoth (my copy runs almost 900 pages) crowded with rulers and rebels, witches and warriors. Herbert had a lot to say — about religion, ecology, the fate of humanity — and drew from an astonishment of sources, from Greek mythology to Indigenous cultures. Inspired by government efforts to keep sand dunes at bay, he dreamed up a desert planet where water was the new petroleum. The result is a future-shock epic that reads like a cautionary tale for our environmentally ravaged world.

Villeneuve likes to work on a large scale, but has a miniaturist’s attention to fine-grained detail, which fits for a story as equally sweeping and intricate as “ Dune .” Like the novel, the movie is set thousands of years in the future and centers on Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), the scion of a noble family. With his father, Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac), and his mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), Paul is about to depart for his new home on a desert planet called Arrakis, a.k.a. Dune . The Duke, on orders from the Emperor, is to take charge of the planet, which is home to monstrous sandworms, enigmatic Bedouin-like inhabitants and an addictive, highly valuable resource called spice.

Much ensues. There are complicated intrigues along with sword fights, heroic deaths and many inserts of a mystery woman (Zendaya) throwing come-hither glances at the camera, a Malickian vision in flowing robes and liquid slow motion. She’s one piece of the multifaceted puzzle of Paul’s destiny, as is a mystical sisterhood (led by Charlotte Rampling in severe mistress mode) of psychic power brokers who share a collective consciousness. They’re playing the long game while the story’s most flamboyant villain, the Baron (Stellan Skarsgard), schemes and slays, floating above terrified minions and enemies like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon devised by Clive Barker.

The movie leans on a lot of exposition, partly to help guide viewers through the story’s denser thickets, but Villeneuve also uses his visuals to advance and clarify the narrative. The designs and textures of the movie’s various worlds and their inhabitants are arresting, filigreed and meaningful, with characters and their environments in sync. At times, though, Villeneuve lingers too long over his creations, as if he wanted you to check out his cool new line of dragonfly-style choppers and bleeding corpses. (This isn’t a funny movie but there are mordantly humorous flourishes, notably with the Baron, whose bald head and oily bath indicate that Villeneuve is a fan of “Apocalypse Now.”)

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Dune Reviews

With a tone and narrative that feels like a melting pot of some of the most beloved franchises in popular culture, it is not far-fetched to think that Dune could become the next big thing.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 15, 2024

The “Dune” series has long been considered a landmark of science fiction. Fortunately, Denis Villeneuve’s astute direction in laying the right foundations only shows his respect for Frank Herbert’s work.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Jul 4, 2024

While Villeneuve's version makes more of an effort than Lynch's to explore some of Dune's meatier themes, like colonization, it fails to nail the environmental ideas.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Jun 3, 2024

Villeneuve’s “Dune” is the cinematic equivalent of a meditation garden: gorgeous to watch with its characters’ polished skin, smooth stonelike spaceships, sand enveloped landscapes, sunlight

Full Review | Mar 24, 2024

It would be enough of a cinematic experience with just the visuals, but the technical elements within the sound are award-worthy.

Full Review | Original Score: A+ | Mar 1, 2024

Few movies showcase this scale, and once again, Villeneuve proves himself one of the best filmmakers alive. However, some early pacing issues and the two-part nature make Dune feel somewhat incomplete.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Mar 1, 2024

Dune’s first half lived up to the hype as a mix of political intrigue, sci-fi storytelling and a large selection of really interesting characters, all with great visuals and sound design to match.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 26, 2024

There are even moments that surpass the novel, especially the relationship between Leto and Paul, mainly due to a heartfelt speech from Oscar Isaac...

Full Review | Feb 24, 2024

Director Denis Villeneuve never misses and succeeds again in this adaptation with incredible performances especially from Timothee Chalamet and Rebecca Ferguson.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 11, 2023

The end result is a movie worthy of the source material.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 10, 2023

an incredibly well-crafted adaptation that's faithful to the source material while also breathing new life into it, and an immersive, epic cinematic journey that will absolutely leave you aching for more.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 8, 2023

Villeneuve’s Dune: Part One is a worthy addition to the collection, besting the Lynch film in certain ways but still flummoxed and frustrated by the source material’s conversation-heavy downside.

Full Review | Jul 28, 2023

Dune is a masterful sci-fi blockbuster that is going to please the majority of its audience. The visuals are crying out to be seen on the biggest screen possible, easily becoming the movies standout.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 27, 2023

A true cinematic treasure that will be cherished for decades to come & gave me the same feeling that I got watching A New Hope for the first time. This is Epic to the highest of standards & I need more right now.

Full Review | Original Score: A+ | Jul 26, 2023

The talented cast is in service of spectacle, doing little more than providing the expositional sutures that connect one elaborate set piece to the next.

Full Review | Jul 26, 2023

Dune sets the new standard for epic cinema with eyegamic visuals, powerful sound design and score, and a compelling story surrounded by an absolutely massive scale. Denis Villeneuve adds yet another audiovisual masterpiece to his filmography.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Jul 25, 2023

Dune is so engaged in getting the plot right and building an appropriate world that it doesn’t have time to let its characters bond or develop a real connection.

Full Review | Jul 24, 2023

Villeneuve can build spectacle and innovative tales because we have seen him do it before, but his rendition of Dune isn’t one of them.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Jul 21, 2023

Laced with complex politics, interesting themes on religion, gender, imperialism, and environmentalism; this has just about everything a fantasy/sci-fi fan could want.

Full Review | Jul 19, 2023

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is simply epic in every sense of the word, from the acting and action sequences, to the score from Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer. The grandeur of the film is accentuated by captivating shots and landscapes

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Timothee chalamet in denis villeneuve’s ‘dune’: film review | venice 2021.

Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi classic gets epic screen treatment, with an all-star cast that also features Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Jason Momoa and Zendaya.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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Unless you’re sufficiently up on Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi classic to know your Sardaukars from your Bene Gesserit, your crysknife from your hunter-seeker, chances are you’ll be glazing over not too far into Dune . Or wishing that House Atreides and House Harkonnen would kick off a vogue ball.

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20 tenniscore fashion essentials to celebrate the start of the u.s. open, jenna ortega thinks she auditioned for zendaya's role in 'dune': "everything was very secret".

Venue : Venice Film Festival (Out of Competition) Release date : Friday, Oct. 22 Cast : Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgård, Dave Bautista, Zendaya, Jason Momoa Director : Denis Villeneuve Screenwriters : Jon Spaihts, Denis Villeneuve, Eric Roth

Decades after Alejandro Jodorowsky’s aborted 1970s attempt to bring Dune to the screen and David Lynch’s baffling 1984 version — which was memorable mostly for putting Sting in a winged metal diaper — Villeneuve’s film at least gets closer to the elusive goal than its predecessors. It has a reasonable semblance of narrative coherence, even if a glossary would be helpful to keep track of the Imperium’s various planets, dynastic Houses, mystical sects, desert tribes and their respective power players.

What the film doesn’t do is shape Herbert’s intricate world-building into satisfyingly digestible form. The history and complex societal structure that are integral to the author’s vision are condensed into a blur, cramping the mythology. The layers of political, religious, ecological and technological allegory that give the novel such exalted status get mulched in the screenplay by Jon Spaihts, Villeneuve and Eric Roth into an uninvolving trade war, with the blobby Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard) ordering a genocide to secure a monopoly of the addictive Spice found only in the desert wastelands of the planet Arrakis.

That drug looks like a glitter bomb set off in the sand in the dreamlike visions of Paul Atreides (Chalamet) that punctuate the action with numbing regularity. The mind-expanding substance’s benefits to health, longevity and knowledge place it in high demand, as we learn during an exposition dump disguised as Paul’s study time. Those visions also feature Chani ( Zendaya ), a member of the Fremen civilization that lives on Arrakis; she haunts Paul throughout in a spiritual connection, but doesn’t show up physically until the final scenes, just in time to say, “This is only the beginning.” Never a good sign at the end of a two-and-a-half-hour movie that has long since been sagging under its dense thicket of plot.

It’s the year 10191, and House Harkonnen has been in charge of harvesting Spice for some time, ravaging the land and inflicting cruelty on the Fremen. But the emperor abruptly pulls them out and puts Paul’s father, Duke Leto ( Oscar Isaac ), in control, giving House Atreides exclusive stewardship over Arrakis. Leto and his concubine Jessica ( Rebecca Ferguson ), Paul’s mother, both see the vulnerability in their elevation, even if the Duke hopes to forge an alliance with the Fremen and bring peace. For reasons that the film hurries through with too much haste to clarify, the stage is set for war nonetheless, and Leto calls the reluctant Paul to power as the future of House Atreides.

Part hero’s journey and part survival story, the film keeps throwing arcane details at you, which might thrill the Herbert geeks but will have most everyone else zoning out. Villeneuve is a smart director who honed his chops on brainy sci-fi with Arrival and Blade Runner 2049 . For sheer monolithic scale, visual imagination and visceral soundscape alone, a number of the set pieces are arresting, and the film has the benefit of putting the focus on physical production, with far less CG saturation than most of its recent genre brethren.

There’s much to admire in Patrice Vermette’s production design, particularly the Zen elegance of the aristocratic Atreides household on their beautiful oceanic home planet of Caladan and the Arrakis stronghold Arrakeen, a sprawling structure that combines ancient Egyptian and Aztec influences. The costumes by Jacqueline West and Robert Morgan also are full of eye-catching touches, from the gauzy gowns of Jessica and other women billowing in the desert wind to the utilitarian body-cooling “stillsuit” developed by the Fremen for survival in the desert, equipped with a fluid-recycling system.

On a scene-by-scene basis, Dune is occasionally exciting, notably whenever Atreides swordmaster Duncan Idaho ( Jason Momoa ) is in action, backed by Hans Zimmer’s thundering orchestral score. (Duncan also benefits from being the only guy in this dull old universe with a sense of humor.) But the storytelling lacks the clean lines to make it consistently propulsive. Paradoxically, given its lofty position in the sci-fi canon, much of the narrative’s novelty has also been diluted, rendered stale by decades of imitation. Looking at you, George Lucas.

I found myself less interested in the human ordeals than the tech business — the giant Harkonnen harvesters raking the sands like desert beetles as monstrous sandworms tunnel up to the surface to suck everything into their huge fibrous maws; the wasp-winged choppers known as ornithopters, buzzing through the skies; the stillsuits and the recycling tubes of an emergency tent, turning sweat and tears into drinkable water.

Perhaps the biggest issue with Dune , however, is that this is only the first part, with the second film in preproduction. That means an awful lot of what we’re watching feels like laborious setup for a hopefully more gripping film to come — the boring homework before the juicy stuff starts happening.

Zendaya’s role, in particular, is basically a prelude to a larger arc that Paul has partly foreseen, where he lives among the Fremen as their “Lisan al Gaib,” or off-world prophet, as they plot to take back Arrakis. A quick glimpse of him rodeo-riding a sandworm signals the future extent of his powers. Other actors, like Javier Bardem as proud Fremen chieftain Stilgar, will presumably have more to do, as will good guys like Josh Brolin’s Atreides warmaster Gurney Halleck if part two sticks to Herbert’s plot. On the villainous side, Skarsgard’s levitating lard-ass Baron Harkonnen and his thuggish nephew Beast Rabban (Dave Bautista) seem sure to be back to wreak more destruction.

Whether audiences will choose to return for more after this often ponderous trudge through the desert is an open question.

Full credits

Venue: Venice Film Festival (Out of Competition) Distributor: Warner Bros. Production companies: Warner Bros. Pictures, Legendary Pictures Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgard, Dave Bautista, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Zendaya, Chang Chen, David Dastmalchian, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Charlotte Rampling, Jason Momoa, Javier Bardem, Babs Olusankokum, Golda Rosheuvel, Benjamin Clementine Director: Denis Villeneuve Screenwriters: Jon Spaihts, Denis Villeneuve, Eric Roth, based on the novel by Frank Herbert Producers: Mary Parent, Denis Villeneuve, Cale Boyter, Joe Caracciolo Jr. Executive producers: Tanya Lapointe, Joshua Grode, Herbert W. Gains, Jon Spaihts, Thomas Tull, Brian Herbert, Byron Merritt, Kim Herbert Director of photography: Greig Fraser Production designer: Patrice Vermette Costume designer: Jacqueline West, Robert Morgan Editor: Joe Walker Music: Hans Zimmer Visual effects supervisor: Paul Lambert Special effects supervisor: Gerd Nefzer Casting: Francine Maisler, Jina Jay

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A noble family becomes embroiled in a war for control over the galaxy's most valuable asset while its heir becomes troubled by visions of a dark future. A noble family becomes embroiled in a war for control over the galaxy's most valuable asset while its heir becomes troubled by visions of a dark future. A noble family becomes embroiled in a war for control over the galaxy's most valuable asset while its heir becomes troubled by visions of a dark future.

• Denis Villeneuve
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• Timothée Chalamet
• Rebecca Ferguson
• 5.9K User reviews
• 544 Critic reviews
• 74 Metascore
• 175 wins & 294 nominations total

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• Paul Atreides

• Lady Jessica Atreides

• Duke Leto Atreides

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• Baron Vladimir Harkonnen

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• Dr. Liet Kynes

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Did you know

• Trivia David Lynch , director of the previous Dune (1984) , stated that he has "zero interest" in the new movie. He cited that his issues have nothing to do with director Denis Villeneuve but with his own painful memories of making the 1984 version: "Because it was a heartache for me. It was a failure and I didn't have final cut. I've told this story a billion times. It's not the film I wanted to make. I like certain parts of it very much - but it was a total failure for me."
• Goofs Despite several mentions of the intensity of the sun on Arrakis, no character ever wears any eye protection.

Lady Jessica Atreides : I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings obliteration. I will face my fear and I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past... I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

• Crazy credits At the start of the film, a Sardaukar priest chants "Dreams are messages from the deep" as a prologue as it is subtitled onscreen.
• Connections Featured in Black and White Sports Too: Dune Trailer Reaction! Official 2020 - Oscar Isaac, Jason Momoa, Josh Brolin (2020)
• Soundtracks Tooth of Shai Hulud Performed by Czarina Russell Written and Produced by Theo Green

User reviews 5.9K

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• October 22, 2021 (United States)
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• $165,000,000 (estimated)
• $108,897,830
• $41,011,174
• Oct 24, 2021
• $407,573,628

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• Runtime 2 hours 35 minutes
• Dolby Surround 7.1
• Dolby Atmos
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Dune review: Denis Villeneuve's starry sci-fi epic is breathtaking, and a little bit maddening

Earlier this summer, director Denis Villeneuve made news for insisting that watching Dune on television would be like "driv[ing] a speedboat in your bathtub." To some people, it sounded like the petty grievances of an out-of-touch auteur — or worse, a fundamental misunderstanding of the way post-pandemic Hollywood operates: any which way it can.

All that might be true, but it doesn't mean he's wrong. In fact Villeneuve's new adaptation of Frank Herbert's classic 1965 novel is exactly the kind of lush, lofty filmmaking wide screens were made for; a sensory experience so opulent and overwhelming it begs to be seen big, or not at all. That the movie (which premiered Friday at the Venice Film Festival, ahead of a theatrical and HBO Max release Oct. 22) seems to have room for only half the story — and that its emotional palate is considerably more limited than its artistic one — feels relative in many ways to the fandom. If you're already knee-deep in Herbert mythology, you'll thrill to every whispered word; if you come in not knowing the difference between a Holtzman shield and a hole in the floor, it's a longer walk.

The introduction, in any case, wastes little time on exposition: The year is 10191 and Duke Leto Atreides ( Oscar Isaac ) has come with his longtime concubine, Lady Jessica ( Rebecca Ferguson ) and their grown son, Paul ( Timothée Chalamet ), to oversee the colonized planet of Arrakis — a harsh, arid place whose lone prized export is a shimmery dust called Spice. The natives who manage to scrape out a subsistence living farming it there are known as Fremens, their Listerine-blue eyes and Mad Max -style compounds necessary adaptations to the unforgiving climate.

Paul is soon visited by dreams of one Fre-woman in particular, Chani ( Zendaya ), disturbing visions that come to him unreliably and often without context but seem to portend real future events. To Lady Jessica, a member of an ancient all-female order known as the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood, it's further proof that her child may in fact be the one chosen to save them all — centuries of selective eugenics finally come to bear in the body of a boy whose gender just happens to be wrong, or at least not what the Sisterhood planned for.

She's not the only one to take note of his particular gifts: The leader of Atreides' born enemy, the slug-bodied Baron Vladimir Harkonnen ( Stellan Skarsgård ) feels the ripple of his presence and the Fremens do too — even if loyal foot soldiers of his father's, including Josh Brolin 's taciturn weapons master Gurney Halleck and Jason Momoa 's cheerful warrior Duncan Idaho, continue to treat him like an essential if ordinary heir, to be trained and mentored and kept safe in the line of succession.

There are, you may have already sensed, no small actors in Dune , even in small parts: a veiled, imperious Charlotte Rampling as the Mother Superior who puts Paul to a memorable test; Javier Bardem as a terse Fremen chieftan; Dave Bautista as the Baron's brooding bull-necked nephew. Zendaya's Chani, who appears far more verbal in the trailer than she does in the actual film, moves through most of it as a sort of teasing apparition, less fully fleshed character than elusive spirit guide­-slash-dream-key to Paul's destiny.

To be fair, it's hard to imagine a mortal movie star who wouldn't be dwarfed by the exquisite, elaborate world-building happening on screen. As he proved on projects like Arrival and Blade Runner 2049 , Villeneuve's gift for visual storytelling can be genuinely breathtaking — vast desertscapes unscrolling like oceans and helicopters with dragonfly-wing blades where the rotors should be; the kidney-piercing resonance of Hans Zimmer's soundtrack poured over sets of towering, planet-scaled enormity. (Speculation that Dune 's M.O. would be " Star Wars , but make it fashion" is not completely off-base.) If anything falls short of Herbert's particular vision it's the movie's sandworms, who for all their faceless foreboding mostly register as super-size CG tubes; colossal, unwieldy vacuum-cleaner attachments gone rogue.

Dune is so aesthetically rich and monolithic that a few brief, misguided stabs at Marvel-style humor early on feel almost like blasphemy. The script seems to know it and soon settles into a kind of grim grandeur, each turn a building block to nothing less than the interstellar fate of the free world. Chalamet aptly channels the ethereal beauty and conflicted psyche of a reluctant savior, his troubled, tender Paul a sort of sci-fi Hamlet forced by fate and circumstance to bear the full weight of history, and Isaacs' Duke is both a noble warrior and a father so lovingly supportive he belongs in the Call Me By Your Name dad hall of fame . At some point, it is virtually guaranteed that they and nearly everyone else on screen will appear in a visual tableau worth gasping over.

The sheer awesomeness of Villeneuve's execution — there might not be another film this year, or ever, that turns one character asking another for a glass of water into a kind of walloping psychedelic performance art — often obscures the fact that the plot is mostly prologue: a sprawling origin story with no fixed beginning or end. (The director has said that he only agreed to take on the project if the studio let him split Dune 's narrative into two parts, and that he's still "very optimistic" the second will get made.) Minus the fuller context that Herbert's extended universe and dense mythology provides, the meaning of it all feels both endlessly beguiling and just out of reach: a dazzling high-toned space opera written on sand. Grade: B

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In “ Dune ,” Denis Villeneuve ’s droolingly anticipated, eye-bogglingly vast adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 cult sci-fi novel, the characters fly around in airplanes that have three sets of wings, all of which flap very fast. The planes look like insects, and the film suggests that’s one way that a flying machine, in another planetary sphere, might have evolved. On Earth, we styled our airplanes after birds. In “Dune,” they’re modeled on bugs, which gives them a fluttery malevolence.

“Dune,” a majestically somber and grand-scale sci-fi trance-out, is full of lavish hugger-mugger — clan wars, brute armies, a grotesque autocrat villain, a hero who may be the Messiah — that links it, in spirit and design, to the “Star Wars” and “Lord of the Rings” films, though with a predatory ominousness all its own. The desert-planet architecture, which is bigger than huge, is sandstone Mayan. The spaceships are like floating rocks the size of cities. And the cinematic style is “Lawrence of Arabia” meets “Triumph of the Will” meets the most visionary cologne commercial that Ridley Scott never made. (The movie is more than a little enthralled with the clockwork imagery of fascism.) “Dune” is out to wow us, and sometimes succeeds, but it also wants to get under your skin like a hypnotically toxic mosquito. It does…until it doesn’t.

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Here’s one useful definition of a great sci-fi fantasy film. It’s one in which the world-building is awesome but not more essential than the storytelling. In the first two “Star Wars” films, those dynamics were in perfect sync; they were, as well, in “The Dark Knight” and the “Mad Max” films. “Blade Runner,” in its way, is an amazing movie, but its world-building packs more punch than its transcendental neo-noir noodlings.

Viewed in that light, “Dune” is a movie that earns five stars for world-building and about two-and-a-half for storytelling. If you stack it up next to David Lynch’s disastrously confounding 1984 adaptation of “Dune,” it can look like a masterpiece. (Most of the story now makes sense.) And for an hour or so, the movie is rather mesmerizing, throwing off seductive glints of treachery as it presents the tale of Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), the gifted scion of the House Atreides, whose father, Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac), is leading what looks to be an opportunity, though one that’s fraught with peril.

For 80 years, the forbidding desert planet of Arrakis has been presided over by the Harkonnen, who ruled with an iron fist as they controlled production of the valuable spice that’s embedded in the sand and the air. (In the book, the spice, called mélange, is a metaphor for oil and also for drugs. Here it’s a glittery abstraction.) Now, the emperor has ordered the Harkonnen to leave Arrakis and has placed the House Atreides in charge. They arrive like a newly occupying army. But they’re being set up as patsies.

Villeneuve works hard to to stay true to the conspiratorial sprawl of Herbert’s sand-planet dream, even as he streamlines the book down to its most playable scenes. Chalamet, tall and skinny, with a quizzical innocence under his cloud of curls, resembles a willowy version of Edward Scissorhands, and he plays Paul as an untested hero with abilities he scarcely understands. They’re inherited from his mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), an acolyte of the mystic matriarchal sect the Bene Gesserit, who wants to put him in touch with his inner cosmic savior.

There are good scenes like one in which Paul learns to speak to his mother telepathically; or receives a lesson from Isaac’s warmly protective but all-too-vulnerable Leto, who speaks to him about the human choices encoded within destiny; or gets put through a primal test by his aunt, Gaius Helen Mohiam (Charlotte Rampling) — those names! Yes, they’re as annoying as the ones in the George Lucas prequels — who asks him to place his hand in a box of pain and withstand it. (He’d better; if he fails, she’ll stab his neck with a lethal needle.) Stellan Skarsgård, nearly unrecognizable as Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, who’s like a floating homicidal Jabba the Hutt crossed with Henry VIII crossed with Fat Bastard, sets the plot in motion, reclaiming Arrakis by trying to kill off just about everyone in the movie who most holds our attention.

His success rate is a bit disarming. The hand-to-hand combat scenes in “Dune” have a flash of originality. Instead of lightsabers, the characters hit each with other weapons that reduce their bodies to electromagnetic freeze frames. It’s exciting to see Duncan Idaho, played by Jason Momoa as the film’s sexy-loyal-bruiser Han Solo figure, take on a small army of enemies.

Yet where is all of this going? “Dune” keeps foreshadowing the moment when Paul will embed himself with the Fremen, the indigenous desert people of Arrakis who have a more organic relationship to the perilous landscape, and to the spice, than any of their rulers, but live in a state of ragged guerrilla oppression. They’re waiting for someone to liberate them, and Paul would seem to be that figure, since it’s prophesied by half a dozen interchangeable flash-forwards to his interface with Chani ( Zendaya ), a Fremen warrior-protector who is shot like some sort of desert princess.

“Dune” opens with a title that reads “Dune Part I,” and there’s a standard but rather presumptuous promise embedded in those words: that after 2 hours and 35 minutes, we’ll be so hooked by this saga that we’ll be hungry for Part II. That, in a way, is the promise of every franchise. But the trouble with “Dune” is that it feels, at different points, like just about every other franchise. Over the decades, more than a few movies have been sprung from the DNA of Herbert’s universe, like (for instance) the opening act of “Star Wars.” And there’s a reason it’s that film’s first part; the desert is an awfully barren setting for sci-fi. (“Star Wars” starts slow and arid on purpose, all to set up the revelation of its kinetic second half.) “Dune” is rich with “themes” and visual motifs, but it turns into a movie about Chalamet’s Paul piloting through sandstorms and hooking up with the rebels of the desert, who in this movie are a lot more noble than interesting.

It’s not just that the story loses its pulse. It loses any sense that we’re emotionally invested in it. The giant sandworms, who are protectors of the spice and burrow through the desert like a sinister underground tornado until they reveal themselves (they’re like monster nostrils that suck in everything in front of them), are good for a moment or two of old-fashioned creature-feature awe, but what, really, do they have to do with anything? “Dune” makes the worms, the dunes, the paramilitary spectacle, and the kid-savior-tests-his-mettle plot immersive — for a while. But then, as the movie begins to run out of tricks, it turns woozy and amorphous. Will Part II really be coming? It will if Part I is successful enough, and that isn’t foregone. It’s hard to build a cliffhanger on shifting sands.

Reviewed at Venice Film Festival (Out of Competition), Sept. 3, 2021. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 155 MIN.

• Production: A Warner Bros. Pictures release of a Legendary Pictures, Villeneuve Films, Warner Bros. production. Producers: Denis Villeneuve, Mary Parent, Cale Boyter, Joe Caracciolo Jr. Executive producers: Herbert W. Gains, Joshua Grode, John Harrison, Brian Herbert, Kim Herbert, Tanya Lapointe, Byron Merritt, Richard P. Rubenstein, Jon Spaihts, Thomas Tull.
• Crew: Director: Denis Villeneuve. Screenplay: Jon Spaihts, Denis Villeneuve, Eric Roth. Camera: Greig Fraser. Editor: Joe Walker. Music: Hans Zimmer.
• With: Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgård, Jason Momoa, Zendaya, Charlotte Rampling, Dave Bautista, Javier Bardem, Sharon Duncan Brewster, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Chang Chen, David Dastmalchian.

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Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is all world-building and no world-living

As visually rich and emotional as Part One gets, it’s still just setup for Part Two

by Roxana Hadadi

When David Lynch’s Dune was released in 1984, a specific pattern developed among the mostly negative reviews. Lynch’s compressed adaptation, which shoved the 400-plus pages of Frank Herbert’s novel 1965 Dune into 137 minutes, was visually striking, but practically impossible to follow. A theory spread: Perhaps Herbert’s iconic sci-fi work was impossible to adapt into movie form. Nearly 40 years later, Denis Villeneuve’s attempt at Dune is earning the exact same reactions. Time is a flat circle, and Dune is as strikingly shot and impenetrably conceived as ever.

The sand? Everywhere! ( Dune was filmed partially in Jordan and Abu Dhabi.) Cinematographer Greig Fraser’s angles? Extremely wide! The sound design? Challenging! The dialogue? Partially lost, in said challenging sound design! The flirting-with-Orientalism vibe of Herbert’s text? Amped all the way up, even as practically all of Herbert’s incorporations of the complex and varied Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) culture and the Muslim religion are either blunted or excised! Jason Momoa? The only person who genuinely seems to be having fun amid this deep ensemble, and a bright spot amid so much dourness!

It would be sneeringly easy to ask, “Who is this Dune for?” Certainly one of the most formative sci-fi texts of the 20th century has retained a core fanbase. It’s a recognizable IP with a long history. And big-budget space operas continue to draw curious eyes. (Look at the never-ending sprawl of Star Wars.) To be fair, Villeneuve’s Dune is staggeringly gorgeous, and was clearly expensive as hell to make. The Arrival director leans into the contrast between brutalist design and the natural world, with unyielding angles and harsh materials bumping up against the rough bark of an improbably grown date palm tree, the riotous red of a hand dipped in blood, or the bubbling viscosity of pitch-black oil. (In case you didn’t grasp what the fought-over natural resource “spice” is standing in for.)

Fraser, no stranger to this genre after working on Rogue One and The Mandalorian , makes use of every inch of every frame. Gigantic, unusually shaped ships traveling through space are as compellingly imagined as a group of Bene Gesserit witches, clad head to toe in black, emerging through the murky grey of a nighttime fog. And a lengthy mid-film battle sequence is well-edited by Joe Walker — the vicious hand-to-hand combat between various factions is blissfully easy to follow.

If you can get lost in the cocoon of production, costume, and art-design opulence, and sink into the Big Event angle of it all — which is why people go to the movies, isn’t it? — the film, styled as Dune: Part One , can be overwhelmingly evocative. The problem, though, is the film’s pervasive emotional emptiness. Villeneuve and his co-writers, Jon Spaihts (of Passengers and Prometheus ) and Eric Roth, rush through character journeys, and shortchange ostensible hero Paul Atreides ( wild-hair-haver Timothée Chalamet ). They skip over explaining most of the dense mythology of this world, instead collapsing entire communities into thinly rendered versions of other recognizable pop-culture figures. (The Fremen more or less become Tusken Raiders; the Bene Gesserit are Macbeth ’s witches.) And the result of all that streamlining is that the connective thread linking all these disparate elements into a cohesive whole is nowhere to be found. The film is a splendid, threadbare tapestry that unravels as you’re watching it.

• Polygon’s complete guide to understanding Dune

Dune: Part One is set in the year 10191, when the galaxy is under imperial rule. (The Persian word “padishah,” pervasively used throughout Herbert’s novel to describe the emperor, is used only once in the film, and pronounced horribly incorrectly; the same goes for how various actors in the film butcher the Arabic “al-Mahdi.”) A number of ancient, established families rule over planets as fiefdoms, and fight among themselves. The heir of House Atreides is Paul (Chalamet), a young man whose father is Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac) and mother is the Bene Gesserit concubine Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson). Leto is training Paul to be a strong leader and military strategist, while Jessica is training Paul in the secret Bene Gesserit ways of mind control and persuasion, among other things. Paul, meanwhile, dreams about a young woman with blue eyes (Zendaya), guiding him forward on a desert planet.

Could Paul be seeing the future? Maybe, because House Atreides learns that at the emperor’s behest, they’ve been assigned to take over the planet Arrakis. For decades, House Atreides’s enemies, House Harkonnen, have been in charge of Arrakis, and have have mined the planet for spice, a natural resource that powers space travel. By assigning Arrakis to House Atreides, the emperor is knowingly increasing tensions — and maybe even trying to start a war.

So House Atreides travels to Arrakis: Leto, Paul, Jessica, weapons master Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin), swordmaster Duncan Idaho (Momoa), and the computer-like Mentat Thufir Hawat (Stephen McKinley Henderson). Can they befriend the Fremen, the planet’s original inhabitants, who are led by proud, principled men like Stilgar (Javier Bardem, miscast and underused)? Or will House Harkonnen, led by the Baron (Stellan Skarsgård) and his bloodthirsty nephew Glossu Rabban (Dave Bautista), not let their loss of Arrakis slide? And what role does the young woman from Paul’s dreams have to play?

This is a lot to take in, and because Dune: Part One frontloads on palace intrigue and exposition (including Zendaya’s narrated introduction to Arrakis, with the question “Who will our next oppressors be?”), its first hour drags. The script offers up broad story beats (House Atreides, good; House Harkonnen, bad) that the ensemble then has to make real through their performances. Some are better at it than others. Isaac makes a principled, honorable Leto; Ferguson a conflicted, protective Jessica. Momoa is the film’s standout as the loyal, empathetic bro Duncan. A scene of him picking up Chalamet’s Paul and spinning him around will either launch a thousand ships, or an array of gifs. But the most inconsistencies are found in Chalamet and the Fremen, which is particularly distracting given their centrality to this film, and the potential Dune: Part Two .

Chalamet tries to embody Paul’s fragile strengths, and he looks the part in his all-black space-Goth outfits. His duality of rawness and control makes the “Fear is the mind killer” scene, one of the film’s best, pulse with propulsive anxiety and royal haughtiness. Paul asks pointed questions about outsider meddling in Arrakis, and Chalamet imbues those queries with freshman-poli-sci-major brattiness. But the larger issue is that Paul is theoretically on an inward-looking journey that the film does not fully explain, and his frantic concern about what his fate on Arrakis might be is condensed into one in-tent freakout. Between the muffled line deliveries and the script’s dampening of the religious elements that made this moment so important in the book, this turning point isn’t nearly as defining as it should be.

For their part, the Fremen exist in an uneasy space as a result of Villeneuve removing many of their defining MENA and Muslim characteristics from Herbert’s novel, perhaps fearing that viewers would see people wearing robes, living in the desert, and saying the word “jihad,” and immediately pigeonhole them as terrorists. That isn’t an entirely baseless worry, given how the novel Dune progresses, and how Islamophobia has so pervaded Hollywood . And to be sure, Dune: Part One is otherwise appreciably racially and ethnically inclusive, with Sharon Duncan-Brewster’s gender-swapped Dr. Liet Kynes, Momoa’s Duncan, Babs Olusanmokun’s Jamis, and Chang Chen’s Dr. Wellington Yueh speaking Mandarin with Paul.

But overall, the Fremen characters in Dune: Part One lack the interiority they need to come across as something other than stock types. And so the film, through erasure, still ends up engaging in the Orientalism Villeneuve seemed to be trying to avoid. The motivations of Stilgar, Zendaya’s Chani, and Golda Rosheuvel’s Shadout Mapes are all murky, and their relationships with Paul aren’t narratively clear because so much of their belief system and identity is left nebulous. They are noble, exoticized others, and it’s unintentionally telling that Hans Zimmer’s score loads up on MENA folk music traditions (so many women ululating!), but that no actors of MENA heritage have speaking roles among the Fremen. This is a culture used for atmosphere and aesthetics, but approached with no deeper curiosity.

That statement could arguably be applied to the entirety of Dune: Part One . Villeneuve has spent his career merging intellectual and philosophical queries with striking otherworldly images, but that duality is frustratingly imbalanced in his vision for Dune . The visuals are mesmerizing, but the world-building is flat. The ensemble is committed, but the storytelling is liminal. Whether Dune: Part Two will ever be made is a question mark, and standing on its own, Dune: Part One is all setup with very little payoff.

Dune: Part One premieres in theaters and on HBO Max on October 22, 2021.

Dune on HBO Max

The epic sci-fi saga arrives to HBO Max for subscribers for free starting Oct. 21.

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Dune review: Spectacular sci-fi adaptation is this generation’s Lord of the Rings trilogy

Denis villeneuve’s film is of such literal and emotional largeness that it overwhelms the senses, article bookmarked.

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Dir: Denis Villeneuve. Starring: Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgård, Dave Bautista, Zendaya. Cert 15, 155 mins

In Frank Herbert’s Dune , we’re introduced to the fictional planet of Arrakis – an arid place, its winds so choked with sand that it seems impossible for any creature or person to dwell within it. And yet, from somewhere deep below, a rumble can be heard. Sandworms, both fierce and mountainous, move unseen but still felt. It’s an oddly accurate way to describe the fate of Herbert’s own book, widely recognised as one of the greatest pieces of science fiction, but absent from the popular consciousness to such a degree that George Lucas could pilfer its story of ancient religions and desert messiahs without much notice.

Meanwhile, Hollywood has come to consider the book as something of a poisoned chalice. Dune has already felled two great visionaries: Alejandro Jodorowsky’s psychedelic vision collapsed in on itself, while David Lynch’s typically absurdist take was reviled by critics. So there was an undeniable audacity to the decision by Warner Bros to revisit Herbert’s 1965 novel, placing it now in the hands of French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve and dividing it into two parts. But that risk has been richly rewarded.

Villeneuve’s Dune is the sandworm exploding out from the darkness below. It is a film of such literal and emotional largeness that it overwhelms the senses. If all goes well, it should reinvigorate the book’s legacy in the same way Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy did for JRR Tolkien’s work. Indeed, much like Jackson, Villeneuve has a certain pliancy to his vision that, in this case, has been his saving grace. Arrival and Prisoners , two of his previous films, may have possessed their own distinctive look but, when it came to Blade Runner 2049 , his belated sequel to Ridley Scott’s masterpiece, it spoke fluently in the language of what came before.

Dune , then, is firmly grounded in Herbert’s book. The author’s story of feudal nobles waging war over Arrakis, the only source of a powerful drug known as spice, is thick with conflicting ideas that academics are still unpacking today. For Villeneuve, his interests seem to lie mostly in where colonialism and religion collide, specifically in the weaponisation of belief in order to control a population. The film opens with a piece of narration from Chani (Zendaya), one of Arrakis’s indigenous Fremen, as she ponders over who will be the next to oppress her people. The cruel and ruthless Harkonnens have left their planet and given up control of the spice trade. In their place arrives House Atreides: Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac), his concubine Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), and their son Paul (Timothée Chalamet).

Jessica is a member of the Bene Gesserit, a spiritual order of witch-like women who have served as the guiding hand of history. Through the careful intermixing of bloodlines, they hope to produce the “Kwisatz Haderach” – a mind so powerful that it could bridge space and time, past and future. It’s becoming increasingly clear that Paul himself may be the fated being in question.

Centuries before the events described in Herbert’s novel, there was a revolt that destroyed all computers. Patrice Vermette’s production work and Jacqueline West’s costumes have thus eschewed many of the conventions of futuristic design in favour of something far more archaeological and symbolic. Painted Japanese panels sit beside Byzantine robes, with just a touch of the mechanical eerieness of artist HR Giger, once hired for Jodorowsky’s film. Hans Zimmer’s score, so dread-filled that it’s frightening, includes both throat singing and Scottish bagpipes.

Villeneuve allows the terrible, suffocating weight of Paul’s destiny to infect every frame of Dune – from the sterile, muted palette of his homeworld Caladan to the gold-flecked haze of Arrakis. Figures traverse across vast landscapes, while miniature swarms of spaceships gather like invading insects. That smallness allows, too, for some humanity. There is a fragility to these characters, upheld by a cast of actors all too smart to be swallowed up by portentousness. Chalamet will always have his sheepishness, Zendaya a cutting clarity to her voice.

But Dune is a complicated book. It’s also a complicated film. There’s a real question as to why the Fremen – whose language, dress, and culture are so directly inspired by the nomadic, Arabic Bedouin tribes – don’t feature any Middle Eastern and North African (Mena) actors in speaking roles, their leader instead played by Javier Bardem in a shemagh-inspired headscarf. The casting choice is poor, and will only cause further problems if Villeneuve is able to make the second part of this story. It’s a small, but noticeable chip in the paint when it comes to Dune – a work that’s otherwise of such intimidating grandeur that it’s hard to believe it even exists in the first place.

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‘Dune’ Wages an All-Out Attack on the Senses — and Wins

By K. Austin Collins

K. Austin Collins

It’s hard to be a messiah. Even before he recognizes that this is what he is, the young Paul Atreides of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune , played by Timothée Chalamet , lets the grief of expectation seep into his body, down to the drowsed slump of his shoulders and the toneless, contemplative wariness of his voice. The actor’s charm is kept in check; his latent vulnerabilities are in overdrive. Paul is the heir to House Atreides, whose fief is the oceanic planet of Caladan, a stony, rainy, tumultuous world, limited in its purview and power. An unusual home for a family said to descend from the ancient Greeks. But it helps to explain why everyone seems a little down in the dumps. 

In another kind of movie, this quality would maybe seem less worthy of remark. A moody teen. So what? But Dune , as Villeneuve has ambitiously sought to tell it, is above all a story of empire, to which Chalamet’s performance lends an interesting texture, soft and uncertain amid the movie’s hardness. This is Villeneuve, after all. The conspicuous sense of design, the brutalism of its sets and sounds (the latter coming courtesy of Hans Zimmer), the overwhelming aesthetics: N one of this should surprise us. Villeneuve’s Dune is a thick, loud, well-fed spectacle of a movie, towering over the people in it with a brooding sense of intention — even in its quieter moments, even when wrestling through the Herbert novel’s wide-ranging, learned, quirky mysticism. But Dune is not just about the bone-rattling heft of its flying machines or its labyrinthine palace interiors or the intergalactic tangle of its imperial politics. Villeneuve must also wrestle with the oddities of the Frank Herbert novel on which the movie is based: the Bene Gesserit witches and their strep-throat vocal manipulations; the Fremen warriors of Arrakis with their blue eyes and violent devotion to the land; the gigantic worms with their baleen-like mouths; the psychotropic desert crop called melange — a.k.a. t he spice . I will never be able to un-hear Kyle Machlachan, in David Lynch’s maligned 1984 adaptation, saying it this way, in a horny whisper that now plays like an early foray into ASMR: The spice . There’s an air of mystery to it when MacLachlan says it. Villeneuve’s take is, by contrast, far less weird. It takes seriously the challenge of adapting a seemingly unadaptable novel, and keeping all its big-picture implications in full view. It earns its distinction as a faithful adaptation — and proves a satisfying movie, too. 

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Hero’s journeys are satisfying by design. But Dune — both the novel and this adaptation — has more going on under the hood than its veneer of hero-myth rehashing would suggest. Chalamet’s Paul seems to carry the weight of an empire on his shoulders because, well, he does. Heavy weighs the promise of his father’s crown, and an eminent war that Paul senses he will have to fight. Paul is prone to visions of the future in his dreams. But one needn’t have ESP to know that there will be a war between House Atreides and their foes, the monstrous House of Harkonnen. The Harkonnens’ longtime stronghold over the desert planet Arrakis — rich with that so-called “spice,” which happens to be essential to operating intergalactic machinery — has suddenly come to an end. This is a strategic play, apparently, the workings of an overarching empire that’s pulling the strings, and it is meant to set these powerful houses at odds. 

There in the middle stands Paul, next in succession for the dukeship of the House of Atreides behind his father Leto (Oscar Isaac). It cannot be coincidence that Paul, with his long coats and inward-looking sorrow, appears onscreen in a crucial moment like a cinematic successor to Caspar David Friedrich’s “ Wanderer Above the Fog ,” a lone figure staring off into a void of clashing uncertainties. One gets the feeling, just from watching Paul and Leto interact, that no one is under the illusion that any particular reign will get a chance to outstay its welcome. That’s war-torn space imperialism for you. Leto’s father was a bullfighter. His reign was cut prematurely short by a bull that had the gall to fight back. So: a doomed legacy. It hangs over the wary Atreides clan with an undeniable sense of reality — literally. The head of that bull looms over the family’s long-tabled dining quarters, watching over them as they enjoy the spoils of their power. 

You could say the bull has been conquered, being a trophy now. Funny how it doesn’t feel that way. To say Leto and Paul make for a reluctant line of hero-leaders would be an understatement. Villeneuve renders it overstatement. The movie’s flashy successes and curious lapses both, often enough, come down to this. 

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Technically, this Dune is just “Part One” of the saga. Villeneuve’s first wise move: splitting the novel in half. He told Vanity Fair that he would not commit to making the movie with Warner Bros. unless he could make it in two parts. He wasn’t the first to notice that Herbert was simply doing too much to make sense of in the space of a typical metroplex feature. Alejandro Jodorowsky planned to turn Herbert’s epic into a 12-hour movie; Lynch compressed it (and/or had it compressed) into a Tangerine Dream-y two-hour saga. Villeneuve has struck something of a bargain between the two. This approach allows him to wind his way through the novel’s flummoxing heaps of exposition with stylish, procedural efficiency — every shot assured; every special effect made to feel special . Across Dune ’s many adaptations — including the SyFy TV series from 2000 and the unrealized could-have-beens by directors as varied as Jodorowsky, David Lean, and Ridley Scott — Villeneuve’s has most firmly cemented itself as a story about the geopolitical morass of war between, as Herbert put it, the “polish” of civilization and the native outliers, the keepers of the land.

Co-written by the director with Jon Spaihts and Eric Roth, the film leans into the story’s clear blockbuster potential, trying where it can to be thoughtful about it. It is the kind of big-ticket, big-idea, big-cast epic the director has been working toward for some time now. It is a worthy attempt to carve out an intelligible path between Dune ’s opposing halves, with the through-line being Paul’s displeasure at being trapped at the crossroads. On the one side, there’s the mysticism, that Messianic fate Paul inherits from his Bene Gesserit witch-mother Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), which has begun to plague his dreams with visions of a young Fremen woman named Chani ( Zendaya ) — the stuff Lynch’s Eighties rendition dove into with unintentionally campy verve. And in the other corner, there’s the war-story mechanics, with all the big-budget trappings that come with them. 

It all amounts to another chance for Villeneuve to lay out the most consistently impressive feat of his films: the design. From the towering, anonymous allure of the women of the Bene Gesserit, whose beanstalking strides through the film make us instinctively tilt back in our seats; to the vast and varied landscapes (the fog-misted home planet of the Atreides clan, the deadly Arrakis desert, and most especially the temples of the House of Harkonnen, so dark as to seem carved out of a vacuum of ink); to the straightforward excitement of watching giant things go boom . This is the kind of film in which the visual wizardry often has the material splendor of practical effects. It’s irresistible on that front. The spice floats through the air like live sparks or miniature jewels, gleaming with mystery and importance. When ships get blown to bits, they crumble apart as if they were wrought from mere clumps of sand. When those sand worms emerge — and everyone who loves the Dune enterprise has something at stake in the movie getting these fearsome beasts right — their desert-cloud fury feels lifelike and ugly, their maws more terrifying for being revealed only sparingly.

But the new Dune has so invested itself in the story’s monolithic power that the more down-to-earth ingredients at stake sometimes feel inert. The actual drama isn’t as satisfying as the physical world Villeneuve and his collaborators have dreamed up to surround it. Take away the shock and awe of the movie’s accomplished world-building and his lively action set-pieces, and only a handful of scenes really work as scenes — which feels odd. For as human as it is, Dune ’s entire story plays out in the far-future, on alien planets, and is overstuffed with costumes and little twinges of detail suggesting that this world’s idea of “normal” is a far cry from our own. That uncanny power feels segmented from the rest of Villeneuve’s vision. With the exception of seeing Chalamet get high on the spice in one captivating set piece, it’s just not quite as convincing.

You can’t blame the cast. Stellan Skarsgård as Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, Javier Bardem as the imposingly reticent Fremen leader Stilgar, Josh Brolin as the fantastically trigger-happy Gurney Halleck, and a broader supporting net of supporting players all try to strike the balance that the movie needs, with the war-mongering and spice-huffing and witchery all capably accounted for. David Dastmalchian and Dave Baustista star as the yin and yang of Harkonnen’s inner circle; Charlotte Rampling brings cruel knowingness to her role as the witchiest Bene Gesserit of them all. And a wonderful set of turns from Stephen McKinley Henderson, Chang Chen, and Babs Olusanmokun, none of whom needs much screen time to sear their characters into our minds, gives the movie a dash of soul. At times it can feel overflowing with showy performances. A bald and bloated Skarsgård really does emerge headfirst out of darkness into a spotlight, rubbing his dome pensively, looking wet and slippery and villainous as a demon seal — a moment out of the Brando playbook that looks stunning but feels obvious. (Brolin, by comparison, gets a lot more mileage out of a performance that verges on Rambo  levels of reactionary violence.)

Two of the best turns offer a refreshing counterpoint to the occasional showing off. There’s Sharon Duncan-Brewster as a gender-reversed Dr. Liet-Kynes (played in the 1984 version by the estimable Max von Sydow), with the added benefit of an enlarged role compared to the book. And there’s Jason Momoa as the irrepressibly charismatic warrior-swordsman Duncan Idaho, whose caring concern for young Paul is the film’s most convincing emotional thread. If not for the consistent peculiarity and merit of certain actors — Henderson, Duncan-Brewster, Momoa, Bardem — it’d be easy to forget what a strange universe Herbert has bestowed on us, flashy movie tricks be damned.

Why does this movie still work? Because it’s big and breathless and committed, so capably navigated in its finest moments that you can’t help but give credit where it’s due. Its flaws cannot derail the most compelling mark in the movie’s favor: the pleasure of a big, somewhat silly blockbuster. In a healthier, more robust moment for big-tent Hollywood spectacles, Dune would maybe not feel like such a big deal. But it is a big deal, in its way. The kind of mainstream-visionary deal that Tenet, with its pandemic-marred release, didn’t get to be; which Marvel and DC fare isn’t quite designed to be (with a couple of exceptions); and which long-promised Avatar sequels 2 through 200 have yet to be.

There are directors who seem to want to make the 2001: A Space Odyssey of their era. No one has. But Villeneuve is unabashedly one such Star Child-aspiring director: a striving visionary whose canvas has grown ever bigger in what feels like a short span of time. If his sure-footed, leaping strides from Sicario to Arrival to Blade Runner 2049 weren’t enough proof of that, Dune most certainly is. What’s fun and flawed about this new Dune is that, like Blade Runner 2049 before it, it wears its aspiration to once-in-a-blue moon, auteur-anointing spectacle squarely on its sleeve. So it sometimes falls into the trap of an ambition so overwhelming, it eclipses any genuine glimpses of originality or dramatic imagination. The explosive set-pieces make the movie worth watching; Momoa and Chalamet palling around make the movie worth watching. When the movie whittles itself down to the totalizing, sublime power of a well-funded action spectacle, it hits its stride. It’s in the grand opera of it all that it hits its boring stretches and false notes.

Ridley Scott — a journeyman director with a few indispensable movies, a handful of really good movies, and a number of whatever efforts that haven’t been bad enough to dim the auteur cred he’s amassed over the years —  came to mind each time I saw Dune . Scott was in fact mega-producer Dino De Laurentiis’ pick to helm a Dune adaptation before the project fell to David Lynch. At times, it feels like Villeneuve is evoking Scott directly, and not for the first time.  It’s there in his approach to the fortress on Arrakis, which calls to mind the futurist industrialism of Syd Mead’s Blade Runner landscape, only seen by day, with a lot more dust. And those wandering dead-wife daymares that punctuated Gladiator find their echo, here, in Paul’s dreams of Chani, which at their most intriguing recall “ Afghan Girl ,” that omnipresent and unforgettable National Geographic cover of an Afghan woman whose green eyes nearly break the skin of the image. Villeneuve, like Scott in Gladiator , overuses the gesture. He comes back to it again and again, selling us on the idea that Paul is haunted (fair enough) while draining Chani of the very magnetism she’s meant to impress upon us.

Maybe the lapses only stand out because of what’s so accomplished about the movie otherwise. Dune has pretensions to being about something . Hear Chani say: “They ravage our lands before our eyes.” See, in slow, sculptural montage, the aforementioned ravaging. It is a deliberate choice. And much of what follows, the film’s stark desert images, its views of the Fremen and the cultural reality of invasive desert warfare that their faces and wary eyes knowingly evoke, are all equally deliberate. Whether Villenueve’s saga has anything truly of interest to say in that direction, whether its depiction of empire has a backbone of ideas worthy of such grandeur, remains to be seen. 

Good thing, then, that we’ll undoubtedly get to see the sequel. All this nodding toward the future means that the moral terrors underlying Part One ’s visual wonders feel more outlined and gestured at than rigorous or real — for now. Much of what seems murky in this first chapter feels wrought in anticipation of the terrifying clarity we can expect of the sequel. The sorrows of young Atreides, so pervasive in this movie, may prove a useful aperture. We laugh nowadays at that line from Revenge of the Sith: “You were the chosen one!” But in effect, something similar seems to lurk ahead for Paul, whose visions have a good track record when it comes to bearing fruit. Given the substance of some of those visions, that makes for a rough prospect. Part One is good enough to make you want to stick around and see it — and to see if Villeneuve really does something with it. This movie reiterates an already-proven point: the guy’s got talent. It will be up to Part Two to show us how much further he’s willing to ride it.

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Dune: Part Two

The word that will likely be used most often to describe Denis Villeneuve ’s “Dune: Part Two” is “massive.” Expect a whole lot of variations on the words “epic” and “spectacle” too. Whatever big words you apply to the result, Villeneuve undeniably did not approach Frank Herbert ’s beloved sci-fi novel with modest aspirations, and it’s his ambition, along with the top tier of behind-the-scenes craftspeople with whom he collaborated, that have paid off in this superior follow-up to the Oscar-winning 2021 film. While that beloved blockbuster often felt like half a film, “Dune: Part Two” locates significantly higher stakes on Arrakis, while injecting just enough humor and nuanced themes about power and fanaticism to flavor the old-fashioned storytelling. More than a simple savior or chosen one story, “Dune: Part Two” is a robust piece of filmmaking, a reminder that this kind of broad-scale blockbuster can be done with artistry and flair.

“Dune: Part Two” picks up so closely on the heels of the first film that the Fremen are still transporting the body of Jamis ( Babs Olusanmokun ) home again after he was bested in the fight with Paul Atreides ( Timothee Chalamet ). After the massacre of House Atreides, Paul chose to go with the Fremen, much to the consternation of his mother Jessica ( Rebecca Ferguson ). Thinking both Paul and Jessica were taken by the desert and all hopped up on violence after destroying the Atreides interlopers, House Harkonnen amplifies its attack on the Fremen, leading to a few remarkably staged battles between the warriors and soldiers. Villeneuve and his team deftly fill the first hour with battle sequences that counter the firepower of the Harkonnen military and the Fremen tribal combatants, who often literally emerge from the earth to destroy them. Bodies fall from the sky as enormous ships burst into flames in a way that feels nearly operatic. Amidst the chaos, Dave Bautista cannily sketches Rabban Harkonnen as a wartime leader who is in way over his bald head while Stellan Skargard leans even harder into a sort of blend between Nosferatu and Jabba the Hutt.

As the battle between the Fremen and the Harkonnens for control of Arrakis serves as the backdrop for “Dune: Part Two,” Paul’s arc from nervous young man at the beginning of the first film to potential leader plays out in the foreground. A Fremen tribal leader named Stilgar ( Javier Bardem ) is convinced that Paul Atreides is the chosen one that has been foretold among his people for generations. Even as so much of the mythology points to Paul’s savior role, the Emo King tries to blend into the Fremen, forming a relationship with a young warrior named Chani (Zendaya). Paul passes the tests put in front of him by the Fremen, takes on the tribal name of Muad’Dib, and vows vengeance against the Harkonnens who were behind his father’s death.

On another planet, an Emperor named Shaddam IV ( Christopher Walken ) counsels with his daughter Irulan ( Florence Pugh ) and a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother ( Charlotte Rampling ) on the state of Arrakis. It’s revealed early on that Shaddam basically sent House Atreides to its destruction, meaning he’s on that vengeance list that Paul’s been keeping, while Irulan serves as a sort-of narrator for “Dune: Part Two,” dictating some of the political developments into a device that’s really designed to keep audiences with the plot.

If the interstellar politics aren’t enough, writers Villeneuve and Jon Spaihts inject a nice dose of religious fanaticism for the inevitable think pieces too. Lady Jessica becomes a powerful religious figure of her own among the Fremen, guiding her son’s ascendance in a manner that feels nefarious and unsettling. “Dune: Part Two” is not a traditional hero’s journey in that it’s constantly questioning if being led by an outsider from another culture is the right move—Chani sure doesn’t think so, and Zendaya subtly finds notes to make viewers wonder what a happy ending would be for these characters. As Jessica and Paul learn more about Fremen history and culture, they threaten not to lead it as much as dismantle and own it. There’s a big difference.

While the plotting in “Part Two” is undeniably richer than the first film, its greatest assets are once again on a craft level. Greig Fraser , who won the Oscar for cinematography the first time, tops his work there with stunning use of color and light. It’s in the manner the sun hits Chalamet’s face at a certain angle or the wildly different palettes that differentiate the Harkonnens and the Fremen. The browns and blues of the desert culture don’t feel arid as much as grounded and tactile, while the Harkonnen world is so devoid of color that it’s often literally black and white—even what look like fireworks pop like someone throwing colorless paint at a wall. Hans Zimmer ’s Oscar-winning score felt a bit overdone to me in the first film, but he smartly differentiates the cultures here, finding more metallic sounds for the cold Harkonnens to balance against the heated score for the Fremen. Finally, the effects and sound design feel denser this time, and the fight choreography reminds one how poorly this has been done in other blockbuster films.

As for performers, Chalamet is likely to be the most divisive element, often feeling a bit flat for someone believed to be the Neo of this world. However, those choices add up in a way that makes thematic sense, enhancing the uncertainty of Paul’s rise. Zendaya is solid—although she lacks chemistry with Chalamet that would have helped—but it’s Ferguson’s slippery performance and Bardem’s playful one that really add flavors here that weren’t in the first outing. Finally, Austin Butler leans hard into the exaggerated role of Feyd-Rautha, playing the sociopathic nephew of the Baron with all the scenery-chewing intensity that a character like this needs to work, finding the emotional void to balance out against Chalamet’s tempestuous inner monologue.

“Dune: Part Two” has been compared to “ The Empire Strikes Back ” in the run-up to its release, and that’s not quite right. The better comparison is “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers,” another film that built on what we knew about the characters from the first film, added a few new ones, and really amplified a sense of continuous battle and danger. Like both films, a third chapter feels inevitable. Critics will have to come up with a new synonym for massive.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

• Timothée Chalamet as Paul Atreides
• Zendaya as Chani
• Rebecca Ferguson as Lady Jessica Atreides
• Josh Brolin as Gurney Halleck
• Austin Butler as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen
• Florence Pugh as Princess Irulan Corrino
• Dave Bautista as Beast Rabban Harkonnen
• Christopher Walken as Emperor Shaddam Corrino IV
• Stephen McKinley Henderson as Thufir Hawat
• Léa Seydoux as Lady Margot Fenring
• Stellan Skarsgård as Baron Vladimir Harkonnen
• Charlotte Rampling as Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam
• Javier Bardem as Stilgar
• Tim Blake Nelson as Count Hasimir Fenring
• Anya Taylor-Joy as Alia Atreides
• Denis Villeneuve
• Jon Spaihts
• Frank Herbert

Director of Photography

• Greig Fraser

Original Music Composer

• Hans Zimmer

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Review: Denis Villeneuve’s ‘Dune’ is a transporting vision, but it could use a touch more madness

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The story in “Dune” is set in motion by an ambitious, unwieldy and ill-advised transfer of power — an undertaking that extracts a terrible cost and seems doomed to end in frustration and defeat. Something similar might be said of the previous major attempts to wrest Frank Herbert’s 1965 literary colossus to the big screen, even if recent history has sometimes looked back on those failures with a forgiving smile. Alejandro Jodorowsky’s assuredly trippy, never-completed version has become a much-mythologized cinematic ruin . David Lynch’s 1984 flop, reviled by many (including Lynch himself), can still inspire spasms of admiration for its mix of narrative intransigence and visionary strangeness.

Still, to the extent that “Dune” endures, it does so on the strengths of Herbert’s extraordinarily prescient work — its echoes of a real world ravaged by oil wars, climate change and other consequences of human greed — rather than anything to do with its dubious cinematic legacy. Not least among the book’s mysteries is that it has shaped the iconography of so many classic science-fiction and fantasy films — most obviously, though not exclusively, “Star Wars” — without yielding a classic of its own. Conventional wisdom has long held that “Dune” is unfilmable , that its interlocking parables of colonial oppression, ecological disaster and messianic deliverance are too vast to be contained within the flattening parameters of the cinema screen.

The magisterially brooding new “Dune,” just unveiled at the Venice International Film Festival and slated to reach U.S. theaters and HBO Max subscribers Oct. 22, boldly seeks to reverse that prophecy. With methodical poise and seat-rattling spectacle, the French Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve (who wrote the script with Jon Spaihts and Eric Roth) draws you into an astonishingly vivid, sometimes plausibly unnerving vision of the future. If those cursed earlier stabs at “Dune” were examples of what the French call a “film maudit,” this imposing new vision aspires to be the opposite: perhaps a “film Mahdi,” to reference the Arabic word often hurled at the young savior-to-be, Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), as he embraces his destiny.

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The new film “Dune” ends on a cliffhanger. With the second half of Frank Herbert’s classic story still to tell — not to mention all its sequels and prequels — where will the “Dune” universe go from here?

Oct. 24, 2021

The fulfillment of that destiny will have to wait; “Dune: Part One,” as it’s billed onscreen, is the first in a projected two-part adaptation, which means that any assessment of Villeneuve’s achievement must be provisional at best. For now, it’s hard to deny the excitement of feeling swept up in this movie’s great squalls of sand, spice and interplanetary intrigue, realized with a level of craft so overpowering in its dust-choked aridity that you may want to pull your mask up a little tighter in the theater. You may also feel a more qualified sense of admiration for Villeneuve’s efforts to preserve yet streamline the novel’s imaginative essence, to translate Herbert’s heady conceits and arcane nomenclature into a prestige blockbuster idiom.

Whether he succeeds — and for an impressive stretch, I think he does — his own meteoric Hollywood ascent has clearly prepared him for the assignment. This isn’t the first time Villeneuve has evinced a superb eye for the textural and chromatic nuances of sand, as the Mideast deserts of “Incendies,” the U.S.-Mexico border zones of “Sicario” and the Las Vegas ruins of “Blade Runner 2049” will attest. And like “Blade Runner 2049” and especially “Arrival,” “Dune” is an unusually philosophical speculative fiction that ponders the difficulties of language and coexistence.

As the movie opens, a superficial detente has been orchestrated between the warring royal strongholds of Atreides and Harkonnen, led respectively by the noble Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac) and the grotesque Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (a prosthetically transfigured Stellan Skarsgard). “Dune” heads will know the rest: By imperial decree, House Harkonnen must relinquish stewardship of the desert planet Arrakis, a.k.a. Dune, which is at once inhospitable to life and a much-coveted source of it. House Atreides will assume control of the planet as well as its rich concentrations of spice, a drug-like substance whose life-extending properties have made it the most prized commodity in the universe.

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Notably, these narrative preliminaries are laid out by Chani (Zendaya), one of the Fremen, the thick-skinned, blue-eyed Indigenous people of Arrakis. Long acclimated to the planet’s sweltering heat and deadly giant sandworms, they’ve suffered bitterly under their cruel Harkonnen overlords and have no reason to suspect the Atreides will be any different. Villeneuve’s sympathetic focus on the Fremen feels like an early declaration of principle, a promise that this “Dune” might radically reframe the story from their perspective. For much of the movie, though, Chani and her people remain fleeting presences, glimpsed only in the gauzy visions of Duke Leto’s son, Paul.

Chalamet, always good at suggesting both youthful callowness and limitless potential, proves an inspired choice for the role of a young man who is both a coddled heir and an intriguingly unknown quantity. On the Atreides’ home planet of Caladan, he is trained with avuncular affection by his father’s retainers, including the brilliant security expert Thufir Hawat (Stephen McKinley Henderson), the brawny swordmaster Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa) and the skilled weapons teacher Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin, not exactly the “ugly lump of a man” described in the book). Paul is also a source of pride and anxiety for the Duke, movingly played by Isaac as a leader who longs to do right by his family, his people and the Fremen, even as he suspects that House Atreides might be stepping into a carefully laid trap.

But Paul’s most important mentor is his mother, Lady Jessica (a superb Rebecca Ferguson), a member of a shadowy, oracular sisterhood known as the Bene Gesserit for whom Paul poses both a problem and a source of fascination. Led by an imperious Reverend Mother (a heavily veiled but unmistakable Charlotte Rampling), the Bene Gesserit are versed in many skills including “the Voice,” a form of mind control rendered here via menacing aural distortions that — along with the soundtrack’s low, ominous rumbles and Hans Zimmer’s pulsating score — make “Dune” a symphony for the ears as well as a feast for the eyes.

It is, admittedly, a rather monochromal feast, dryer than it is rich, notwithstanding a luscious early shot of the Arrakis dunes that brings to mind the crisped swirls of an overbaked meringue. Much of the palace intrigue plays out in muted tones and symmetrical compositions (the cinematography is by the great Greig Fraser), part of a rigorously color-controlled aesthetic that extends to Patrice Vermette’s futuro-brutalist production design and Jacqueline West’s slickly utilitarian costumes. A cold, fascist sheen seems to cling to the Atreides’ regal formations and their state-of-the-art ornithopters (like helicopters, but with blades that flutter like insect wings), all flawless design elements in a pageant of technological might and militaristic order.

Villeneuve means to subvert and disrupt that pageant, something he accomplishes in part by consciously elevating the women in this male-dominated story. Ferguson’s forceful presence in the expanded role of Lady Jessica is one example; another is the gender recasting of Liet Kynes (a striking Sharon Duncan-Brewster), Arrakis’ deeply knowledgeable planetologist. It’s Kynes who helps the Atreides adjust to their desert environs, at one point accompanying them to a spice-harvesting site where they get their terrifying first glimpse of a giant sandworm in action, its great maw swirling open like a raging quicksand vortex.

This action sequence and others are handled with masterly assurance, including several scenes of intimate combat performed with form-fitting, blood-concealing energy shields. But as ever, Villeneuve’s true talent is less in the staging of violence than in the queasy anticipation of it; he loves to linger in the looming threat of mayhem, in the tense moments before the (sand)worm turns. That gift serves him well enough in “Dune,” whose plot hinges on encroaching threats, assassination attempts and a series of devastating betrayals that send Paul and Lady Jessica fleeing into the desert where there await still more perils, possibilities and encounters with the Fremen (led by a sly Javier Bardem).

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Until the movie slams to an abrupt, unsatisfying halt halfway through the events of Herbert’s novel, there’s pleasure in watching this particular game of thrones play out, though perhaps more pleasure than depth or meaning. To call this “Dune” a remarkably lucid work is to praise it with very faint damnation. Perhaps reluctant to alienate the novices in the audience, Villeneuve has ironed out many of the novel’s convolutions, to the likely benefit of comprehension but at the expense of some rich, imaginative excess. Herbert’s more memorable flights of linguistic fancy, like “gom jabbar” and “Kwisatz Haderach,” are spoken once, with a faint air of embarrassed obligation, and seldom mentioned again. A more significant casualty is the book’s layered interiority, its skill at turning unspoken perceptions and motives into drama; the writers have managed this material without mastering it.

Lynch’s compromised version was similarly stymied and more clotted with exposition. But it also had the courage of its demented convictions, as well as a fearless commitment to feverish, pustular imagery that makes Villeneuve’s pristine filmmaking seem almost timid by comparison. Not for the first time, his craft seems to exist mainly for its own sake; it’s the hallmark of a filmmaker who’s more logistician than thinker, more technician than artist. As a visual and visceral experience, “Dune” is undeniably transporting. As a spectacle for the mind and heart, it never quite leaves Earth behind.

And perhaps that’s as it should be, at least at this early stage. With any luck, there will be more to see and much more to think about in “Dune: Part Two,” the completion of which will depend to some degree on this first movie’s fortunes. Will “Dune” conjure enough coin — the spice of the Hollywood realm — to see itself through to completion? I suspect it might, in part because I doubt Villeneuve, a filmmaker more dependable than he is interesting, has it in him to add to “Dune’s” string of memorably catastrophic failures. Dust has long been his truest cinematic habitat, and to dust may he return.

‘Dune: Part One’

Rated: PG-13, for sequences of strong violence, some disturbing images and suggestive material Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes Playing: Starts Oct. 22 in general release and on HBO Max

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for work published in 2023. Chang is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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Dune First Reviews: The Breathtaking Adaptation Fans Have Been Waiting For

Critics say denis villeneuve's new take on frank herbert's classic novel is a nuanced, well-acted feast for the eyes and ears, even if it only leaves viewers wanting more..

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After decades of failed attempts and unsuccessful efforts, Frank Herbert’s Dune has been adapted into one of the most anticipated movies of the year — if not millennia. Does Denis Villeneuve ( Arrival ) finally do the classic science fiction novel(s) justice? The first reviews of his star-studded and visually epic new movie, also known as Dune: Part One , answer mostly in the affirmative. However, there’s a fairly uniform disappointment in how it ends without an ending.

Here’s what critics are saying about Dune :

Is this the Dune we’ve always wanted?

“Denis Villeneuve’s movie is the film interpretation that fans have been waiting to see for decades.” – Eric Eisenberg, Cinema Blend

“For science fiction devotees, especially those who have long-worshipped Frank Herbert’s dense tome…Villeneuve’s  Dune  is the adaptation you always dreamed of.” – Ben Travis, Empire Magazine

“[It] honors the source material in the most satisfying way possible.  Dune  2021 is a modern-day work of art.” – Jimmy O, JoBlo’s Movie Emporium

“The missing link bridging the multiplex and the arthouse… Good heavens, what a film.” – Xan Brooks, Guardian

“For all its amazing imagery and A-list stars and very cool interpretations of the nerdier aspects of Herbert’s book, this version of Dune doesn’t fully coalesce.” – Scott Collura, IGN

Will it make us forget about David Lynch’s version?

“His Dune is the opposite of Lynch’s, methodical and cerebral, set against pastels and smoke and long stretches of moodiness.” – Roger Friedman, Showbiz 411

“Denis Villeneuve hasn’t succeeded where the likes of David Lynch and Alejandro Jodorowsky have already failed, [but] his Dune is at least uniquely dispiriting.” – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

“I’ll always love Lynch’s Dune , a severely compromised dream-work that (not surprising given Lynch’s own inclination) had little use for Herbert’s messaging. But Villeneuve’s movie is   Dune .” – Glenn Kenny, RogerEbert.com

(Photo by Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures)

Is it a satisfying adaptation?

“This first chapter explores a very complex and detailed story with clarity and style. More importantly, it does so without sacrificing the impressive detail of Frank Herbert’s original vision.” – Jimmy O, JoBlo’s Movie Emporium

“Denis Villeneuve and his collaborators have cracked the code with their approach… extraordinary in its ability to directly translate the source material across mediums without compromise.” – Eric Eisenberg, Cinema Blend

“A more significant casualty is the book’s layered interiority, its skill at turning unspoken perceptions and motives into drama; the writers have managed this material without mastering it.” – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

“If anything falls short of Herbert’s particular vision it’s the movie’s sandworms.” – Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly

Is it OK if you haven’t read the book?

“Thankfully, Dune isn’t particularly hard to follow.” – Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist

“Though there’s plenty to establish, Villeneuve makes surprisingly light work of it all…  Dune  is never as formidable as it threatens to be.” – Ben Travis, Empire Magazine

“The script does a good job with exposition without making it seem like EXPOSITION… but by the same token, there may not be any reason for you to be interested in Dune if you’re not a science-fiction-movie person anyway.” – Glenn Kenny, RogerEbert.com

“It’s not a film that requires any familiarity with the source material… Stretches in the early parts of  Dune  are a layman’s terms guide to Herbert’s incredibly intricate and uniquely realized universe.” – Adam Solomons, AwardsWatch

“If you come in not knowing the difference between a Holtzman shield and a hole in the floor, it’s a longer walk.” – Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly

“We don’t really learn much about individual characters in the film, making it hard to grasp or care about the stakes of the story.” – Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair

(Photo by Chiabella James/©Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.)

How is Denis Villeneuve as director?

“Villeneuve’s true talent is less in the staging of violence than in the queasy anticipation of it… That gift serves him well enough in Dune .” – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

“Those who find Villeneuve to be a self-serious, humorless, and pretentious bore likely won’t be changing their minds anytime soon after Dune , but that just might be their loss.” – Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist

“To say I have not admired Villeneuve’s prior films is something of an understatement. But I can’t deny that he’s made a more-than-satisfactory movie of the book.” – Glenn Kenny, RogerEbert.com

“The unforgiving starkness will unsettle even some of Villeneuve’s greatest fans.” – Donald Clarke, Irish Times

“For all of Villeneuve’s awe-inducing vision, he loses sight of why Frank Herbert’s foundational sci-fi opus is worthy of this epic spectacle in the first place.” – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

“He’s an overloader, and only the keenest and most urgent of scripts can survive beneath that weight. Dune , unfortunately, is not one of those.” – Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair

How does it compare to his other work?

“It’s an arthouse blockbuster in the vein of his Blade Runner 2049 , but even less concerned with commercial appeal, which is admirably bold.” – Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist

“Much like the haunting  Blade Runner 2049 , the director has taken the time to explore numerous characters without sacrificing the main story and themes.” – Jimmy O, JoBlo’s Movie Emporium

“Like Blade Runner 2049 and especially Arrival , Dune is another unusually philosophical speculative fiction that ponders the difficulties of language and coexistence.” – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

“If you loved Arrival and Blade Runner 2049 , then Dune is perhaps Denis Villeneuve at his Villeneuviest.” – Richard Trenholm, CNET

Is it reminiscent of anything else?

“Think of it as Game of Thrones in space or Star Wars if it never got off Tatooine.” – Steve Pond, The Wrap

“Impressively ambitious in scale, like Villeneuve mashing up the worlds of Star Wars and Game of Thrones .” – Brian Truitt, USA Today

“Arguably [many of its elements are] all things that Star Wars features too, but just much more dense, sophisticated, and less child-like.” – Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist

“ Dune feels most reminiscent of The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring .” – Ben Travis, Empire Magazine

“Much like the semi-recent classic Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Rings in the LOTR trilogy, this is only the beginning of the story… [and] Denis Villeneuve has created one of the best fantasy feature since Peter Jackson’s journey into Middle Earth.” – Jimmy O, JoBlo’s Movie Emporium

“Historical comparisons are of no use. None of us has been anywhere like this before. They can put that on the poster.” – Donald Clarke, Irish Times

“It sets a new standard for modern sci-fi epics.” – Germain Lussier, io9.com

Is there enough action for mainstream audiences?

“ Dune  is consistently gripping and plot driven.” – Adam Solomons, AwardsWatch

“Even though it may be a slow burn, the action set pieces do not disappoint, neither does the filmmaker sacrifice the subtle themes and ideas explored throughout.” – Jimmy O, JoBlo’s Movie Emporium

“The pacing is perfect. Villeneuve makes you wait  just  long enough, so when the action moves to Arrakis you’re just as eager to venture into the desert as Paul.” – Ben Travis, Empire Magazine

“This version of Dune sometimes feels as if it aims to impress you more than entertain you… but it’s also a formidable cinematic accomplishment.” – Steve Pond, The Wrap

“It feels like a drag in its back half.” – Scott Collura, IGN

How are the visuals?

“Cinematographer Grieg Fraser has outdone himself from frame to frame, set piece to set piece, creating jaw dropping pieces of art that are impressionistic, sensational, and other worldly.” – Roger Friedman, Showbiz 411

“It’s all a feast for the eyes. The visuals are mind-blowing.” – Jimmy O, JoBlo’s Movie Emporium

“Aesthetically, Dune is pretty damn monumental and enveloping, and for audiences that potentially may find the plot confusing, the film still works on a deeply experiential, visceral level.” – Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist

“The sense of scale conjured up is, from moment to moment, frequently astonishing.” – Ben Travis, Empire Magazine

“ Dune looks great, but outside of the fantastical design, the muted palette borders on drab.” – Richard Trenholm, CNET

And how does it sound?

“ Dune [is] a symphony for the ears as well as a feast for the eyes.” – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

“ Dune  is also an auditory journey, not only featuring enveloping sound editing, but one of the best scores Hans Zimmer has ever composed.” – Eric Eisenberg, Cinema Blend

“The visual vastness is matched by a  Hans Zimmer  score that is, to use a technical term, full-Zimmer.” – Ben Travis, Empire Magazine

“Composer Hans Zimmer inspires great awe with a booming score, but not one  BRAAAM  in sight, thankfully.” – Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist

  What is the overall experience like?

“As a visual and visceral experience, Dune is undeniably transporting. As a spectacle for the mind and heart, it never quite leaves Earth behind.” – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

“ Dune is certainly capable of transporting us to its alien landscapes via its many technical achievements… There is no detail spared in immersing us in this fantastical world.” – Scott Collura, IGN

“You feel like you’re looking into a window across space and time… The line between fiction and reality fades from your mind, and it’s breathtaking.” – Eric Eisenberg, Cinema Blend

“Villeneuve’s  Dune  is the sandworm exploding out from the darkness below. It is a film of such literal and emotional largeness that it overwhelms the senses.” – Clarisse Loughrey, Independent

How are the performances?

“Chalamet confirms on a grand scale what arthouse audiences have long known about his charisma.” – David Crow, Den of Geek

“Timothee Chalamet once again gives another exceptional performance.” – Jimmy O, JoBlo’s Movie Emporium

“Among the uniformly excellent performances, Timothée Chalamet holds his own in his first blockbuster leading role.” – Ben Travis, Empire Magazine

“Chalamet, playing it earnestly and effectively, is perfectly cast here, and both Ferguson and Isaac are excellent, as is Skarsgård.” – Pete Hammond, Deadline

“Everyone flawlessly gets at the core of who they are playing. Timothee Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson and Oscar Isaac are the triumvirate that lead the cast, and they are all phenomenal.” – Eric Eisenberg, Cinema Blend

“Momoa, in particular, bringing a swagger and excitement beyond anything we’ve seen from him before.” – Germain Lussier, io9.com

“The actors here all give good, serious performances, but in a sense it isn’t an actor’s film, because they are playing archetypes.” – Catherine Bray, Film of the Week

“No one has much time to distinguish themselves, all functioning as mere fleshy cogs in Villeneuve’s churning machine.” – Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair

Is it a fun movie?

“The script benefits from injecting occasional bits of humor into the universe-shaping events of the film.” – Scott Collura, IGN

“ Dune  is so aesthetically rich and monolithic that a few brief, misguided stabs at Marvel-style humor early on feel almost like blasphemy.” – Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly

“If what you love most about Marvel is the quips, you might not like Dune very much…it is deadly serious…a relief I hadn’t realized I needed.” – Catherine Bray, Film of the Week

“While Villeneuve has been and likely remains one of the most humorless filmmakers alive, the novel wasn’t a barrel of laughs either, and it’s salutary that Villeneuve honored the scant light notes in the script.” – Glenn Kenny, RogerEbert.com

“ Dune  lumbers with such aloof, uninviting self-seriousness that it’s hard to love, hard to even celebrate as an assured piece of tentpole authorship.” – Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair

“My only grievance is that hardly anyone in this film ever smiles…everyone in Dune is grimly serious. You kind of wish someone would shake Paul’s hand with a joy buzzer.” – Roger Friedman, Showbiz 411

Does it feel unfinished?

“The film is ultimately a long and overwrought prologue — a prelude to action rather than its own autonomous story.” – Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair

“The real meal doesn’t really begin until Part Two , and that’s probably one of the minor disappointments of its inconclusive finale.” – Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist

“It does wind up feeling incomplete… like the serving of a decadent and delicious appetizer that comes out while the epic entrée to come is still braising in the kitchen.” – Eric Eisenberg, Cinema Blend

“It feels so completely sure of itself and so legitimately stunning, that it’s a huge shame that the next chapter is in fact subject to the whims of the marketplace… Surely, there has to be more.” – Catherine Bray, Film of the Week

“To be left dangling without Dune: Part Two would be a particular heartbreak. Here’s hoping we won’t only be seeing it in our dreams.” – Ben Travis, Empire Magazine

Is it difficult to assess this first chapter on its own?

“It will require reassessment when the rest of the director’s vision is revealed – and if there is a movie god, we’ll see that happen sooner rather than later.” – Eric Eisenberg, Cinema Blend

“What could happen in the future isn’t something you can think about when critiquing a movie though. There’s this movie, this story, and if it doesn’t work on its own, that would problem. It’s not a problem here.” – Germain Lussier, io9.com

Dune is in theaters and on HBO Max on October 22, 2021.

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Review: Denis Villeneuve's sci-fi epic 'Dune' is a mixed bag of eye-popping sci-fi, lackluster storytelling

The sci-fi epic “ Dune ” boasts a few films’ worth of giant sandworms, amazing spaceships, cosmic armies and galactic political drama, though it essentially is only half a movie.

Director Denis Villeneuve ’s visually arresting big-budget adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic – well, a good bit of the novel anyway – is an odd bird and a mixed bag. “Dune” (★★½ out of four; rated PG-13; in theaters and on HBO Max ) is impressively ambitious in scale, like Villeneuve mashing up the worlds of “Star Wars” and “Game of Thrones,” but with that unmistakable signature style he showcased with “Arrival” and “ Blade Runner 2049 .”

While the film (currently playing the film-festival circuit, hopping from Venice to Toronto to New York) has a lot going for it, including a pretty stellar cast, real-world metaphors and an intriguing twist on a war-movie aesthetic, it's lacking in character development, and aspects of the book's substantial mythology are tossed in to keep your head swimming over 2½ hours.

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In the year 10191, the noble House of Atreides – led by Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac) – is tapped to relocate from the rather pleasant planet of Caladan to dangerous, desert-filled Arrakis to oversee the mining of Spice, a precious resource that does wonders for human existence and makes interstellar travel possible, and to tame the indigenous Fremen. Leto’s teenage son, Paul (Timothée Chalamet), has had vivid dreams of this new place – specifically a young Fremen girl with shining blue eyes named Chani (Zendaya) – and this phenomenon has brought extra attention from the Bene Gesserit, an all-female order with superpowers including Paul’s warrior priestess mom, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson).

Paul is seen in some circles as a messiah, so he’s caught between an ancient prophecy and being an heir to a renowned house. Their rivals in villainous House Harkonnen – including Baron Harkonnen (a near-unrecognizable Stellan Skarsgard), a slovenly mix of Jabba the Hutt, Colonel Kurtz and the Emperor from “Star Wars” – were Spice stewards for 80 years, and they’re out to sabotage their successors. And the Fremen, led by the enigmatic Stilgar (Javier Bardem), are the most unpredictable wild cards of them all, though they loom large in Paul’s story.

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Alongside themes of ecology and colonialism, the movie boasts plenty of factions and personalities, though good luck actually investing in any of them. Chalamet’s a talented actor, but Paul’s a tortured, broody sort, while Isaac and Ferguson do what they can with fairly dry parental figures.

Everything’s overly serious in “Dune,” though the guy who's most enjoyable (and has the best name) is Jason Momoa as Atreides sword master Duncan Idaho, a fearless warrior loyal to his crew yet absolutely joyful whenever his old student Paul is around. Also noteworthy is Dr. Liet Kynes (Sharon Duncan-Brewster), a gender-swapped Fremen figure from the Herbert book who works for the emperor (yes, “Dune” has one of those, too) transitioning Arrakis to Atreides’ control.

The other issue for Paul and Co. is that there’s much more to their tale not in this movie. Unlike, say, the horror film “It,” where the first film stood as a singular story and you didn’t have to see its sequel, “Dune” doesn’t: It gets to a point and just ends, not to mention being extremely anticlimactic. Imagine watching the original “Star Wars” if they blew up the Death Star midway through and then Luke Skywalker tussled with a few Tusken Raiders in the finale. (George Lucas was influenced by "Dune," and audiences will find the use of “the Voice,” a psychic ability wielded by Paul and his mother, to be very Force-like, though there is some striking sonic originality here.)

Even with its imperfections, “Dune” as an experience is awesome, 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.

You’ll just need to hope for a "Dune" sequel – or head to the books – for it all to make sense. Sure, it's got Spice, but better storytelling would be nice.

More: Timothée Chalamet set to play Willy Wonka in origin story film 'Wonka'

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‘Dune: Part Two’ Review: Denis Villeneuve’s Sci-Fi Epic Is Staggering to Look at but Agonizing to Watch

David ehrlich.

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Denis Villeneuve has insisted that “ Dune: Part Two ” would be a direct continuation of its predecessor rather than a sequel, and the man has absolutely made good on that promise: Not only does this new movie pick up exactly where the last one left off, it also carries over the strengths and weaknesses that made the previous chapter so astonishing to look at but stultifying to watch. 

Once again, the biblical solemnity of Villeneuve’s approach — along with the tactile brutalism of his design — have combined into a Timothée Chalamet movie that shimmers with the patina of an epic myth. And once again, the awesome spectacle that Villeneuve mines from all that scenery is betrayed by the smallness of the human drama he stages against it, with the majesty of the movie’s first hour desiccating into the stuff of pure tedium as Paul Atreides struggles to find his voice amid the visions that compel him forward. It’s a struggle that “ Dune: Part Two ” continues to embody all too well. 

This isn’t quite the same common — and admittedly boring — criticism that’s been leveled against massive studio movies since the industry first started making them. This isn’t a case of sound and fury signifying nothing, or one of special effects signifying even less. The artistry of this film ’s craftsmanship and the sincerity of its application would in and of themselves make it disingenuous to compare “Dune: Part Two” to the likes of, say, “Jurassic World” and Disney’s “live-action” remake of “The Lion King.” 

If “Dune: Part Two” is more nuanced and action-packed than the previous installment, and Chalamet’s twiggy princeling a far less passive hero than he was the first time around, the relative density of the drama that Villenueve has packed into this movie is deflated by a similar uptick in the grandiosity of the spectacle that surrounds it. Much like his protagonist, the filmmaker is straining to reconcile a larger-than-life sense of predestination with the intimate pain of a moral dilemma, but his own failure to achieve that balance makes it all but impossible for Paul to succeed on the same terms. 

Yes, this is a vaguely Oedipal tragedy about a manchild lurching towards the same violent outcome that he’s so determined to avoid (you’ll have to wait for the not-yet-announced but inevitable “Part Three” to see how that plays out), and of course there’s an ancient power in the story of someone fighting against the fate that’s been written for them. But the iron grip of that inevitability should only make it more heart-wrenching to follow Paul as he tries to find his role among the Fremen of Arrakis and avenge his father without instigating an intergalactic holy war. 

This time, however, the road towards that colossal letdown is a bit smoother. Villeneuve and co-writer Jon Spaihts have already teased out the lay of the land, and so “Dune: Part Two” is able to dig a little deeper from the moment it starts — to actually show us some of the places that were alluded to in the previous movie, and to complicate the white savior myth that Paul brings with him when he and his pregnant mom (Rebecca Ferguson as Lady Jessica) are escorted to the secret Fremen community of Sietch Tabr. 

These early scenes represent the very best of what Villeneuve can bring to this story, as they viscerally bring to life “a place where nothing can live without faith.” It’s because the arid deserts are so merciless that we can understand why the Fremen suck the moisture out of their enemies’ bodies and honor their own dead by pouring their water into a giant pool, and it’s because of an indelible new track from Hans Zimmer’s semi-recycled score — a bittersweet wail that cuts deeper than any of the music he wrote for “Part One” and sustains the emotion of this movie long after the script has run out of steam — that we can parse the complicated roles that anger, pride, and resentment play in the Fremen’s need for outside help.

That clarity lends a welcome shot in the arm to the thrilling action sequences that Villeneuve stages on the sand, which are clear and concussive enough to compensate for their brevity. These setpieces — which peak with a sandworm-riding trial so exhilarating that the rest of the movie can’t help but feel like a letdown — are also more exciting than anything that follows because they allow Paul to forge his relationship with the two Fremen who will most directly impact his fate.

And then, of course, there’s Chani. The skeptical and self-reliant Fremen was the patron saint of everything that didn’t work about the last movie, as Spaihts and Villeneueve reduced her character to a living reminder of all the sacrifices their adaptation had to make on its way to the screen. In “Part Two,” Chani is allowed to take her rightful place at the heart of Paul’s story, even as she questions whether or not it should belong to him (and even as the script dramatically streamlines her role in it). 

Zendaya is more than up for the challenge. Not to belittle Chalamet, whose furrowed brow sows doubt in all the right places, but the most interesting thing about Paul’s trajectory is how it’s reflected across Zendaya’s face. So much of this increasingly interminable film is spent on slow-motion shots of silhouettes walking towards the sunset as Zimmer goes ham over the soundtrack, but all it takes is a single reaction shot of Chani for the drama to snap back into focus.

And bless the Maker and his water for that, because as soon as “Dune: Part Two” begins to shift its attention away from the Sietch, palpable emotion becomes as precious and hard to find in this movie as moisture in the deserts of Arrakis. The problem starts with the villainous Harkonnen, who are somehow even less compelling here than they were in the previous movie. Parodies of colonial evil, these hairless world-eaters are such one-dimensional rage cases that they make the Sith feel almost Shakespearian by comparison. Dave Bautista still cuts quite a figure as Glossu Rabban Harkonnen, but his entire character amounts to a distended scream — there are no fewer than three scenes in this movie where Rabban or one of the other Harkonnen murder a henchman just to release some steam. 

Villeneuve introduces him in a hideous, monochromatic fight sequence that so clumsily literalizes the film’s black-and-white moral binary that it feels like a detour into a Zack Snyder movie, and from that point on Feyd-Rautha never has a chance to rise above his look to become a rival worthy of Paul’s ascendance. His only scene that doesn’t bring “Part Two” to an absolute standstill involves Léa Seydoux dropping by for some light “Under the Skin” cosplay. 

The Emperor’s arrival is meant to reflect Paul’s discovery that power cannot be tamed, and that “the heart is not meant to rule,” but his non-presence only manages to incite one of the largest and most underwhelming final battles a sci-fi blockbuster of this scale has ever served up. That anticlimax may be true to the plot of Herbert’s novel, but it reflects the missteps of Villeneuve’s stolid adaptation. In a film so booming and immense that it seems like sandworms are rumbling under your feet, a film that best identifies with the Bene Gesserit’s detached and ultra-wide POV on this story, even the most significant events tend to blow over like farts in the wind. Even the oldest and most oft-told of myths feel more alive in the moment.

Warner Bros. will release “Dune: Part Two” in theaters on Friday, March 1.

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Common Sense Media Review

Lots of fighting in vivid but long sci-fi adaptation.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Dune is based on Frank Herbert's epic 1965 novel (previously adapted for the big screen in 1984 and for TV in 2000). It covers the first half of the book and stars Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya. Sci-fi action violence includes lots of fighting, both on the battlefield and one on one,…

Why Age 13+?

Sci-fi action-style guns and shooting. People get shot; deaths/dead bodies. Figh

Infrequent use of "hell," "s--t," "ass," "damn." "My God" used as an exclamation

Kissing. A man appears to be naked; nothing explicit shown. Shirtless man.

"Spice" is described as a drug that has good properties but is also addictive; t

Any Positive Content?

Paul comes off as a fairly traditional hero but also has started down a dark pat

Male-driven narrative, but women in supporting roles are quite powerful and admi

This film covers the first half of the source novel, so many of the book's bigge

Violence & Scariness

Sci-fi action-style guns and shooting. People get shot; deaths/dead bodies. Fighting with swords, blades, other weapons. Battles. Explosions. Character stabbed. Character impaled with dart. Neck-slicing. Beheadings. Characters swallowed by sandworm. Not much blood, but scenes include a bloody hand, bloody knife, blood spot. Poison gas. Crash-landing. Rape is mentioned in dialogue.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Infrequent use of "hell," "s--t," "ass," "damn." "My God" used as an exclamation.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

"Spice" is described as a drug that has good properties but is also addictive; the only side effect is that it turns users' eyes luminous blue. It's not really depicted as a substance that can be abused. It's more just "the thing" that both the heroes and villains want to get their hands on.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Role Models

Paul comes off as a fairly traditional hero but also has started down a dark path by beginning to use a prophecy to his own advantage, setting himself up as a kind of messiah. To prove himself worthy of the Fremen, he kills a man; there are no consequences. His father, Duke Leto, is a far better role model; he's shown to be kind, benevolent, wise, understanding, although his trust and loyalty eventually ( spoiler alert ) get him killed.

Diverse Representations

Male-driven narrative, but women in supporting roles are quite powerful and admirable. This version improves on previous iterations' all-White casts by including diverse actors (Latino, Hawaiian/Polynesian, Asian, Black), but main characters are still all White, and ( spoiler alert ) virtually all characters of color die. Has raised concerns in the way it leans on Middle Eastern culture for world-building but doesn't include any MENA actors. No body/size diversity, unless you count the Baron, whose grotesqueness is unfortunately tied to his larger size and eating.

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Positive Messages

This film covers the first half of the source novel, so many of the book's bigger themes -- including religion and environmentalism -- aren't fully explored. One theme that does arise involves control of Arrakis: The villains (House Harkonnen) oppress the Fremen, while the heroes (House Atreides) try to work alongside them.

Parents need to know that Dune is based on Frank Herbert's epic 1965 novel (previously adapted for the big screen in 1984 and for TV in 2000). It covers the first half of the book and stars Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya . Sci-fi action violence includes lots of fighting, both on the battlefield and one on one, with guns, knives, and other weapons. There are also beheadings and explosions, and characters are stabbed and/or cut open, poisoned, and eaten by worms. A little bit of blood is shown, and characters die. There's kissing and partial male nudity (no sensitive body parts shown). Infrequent language includes "s--t," "ass," and "hell." The story is about a drug known as "spice," but it's more of a thing for everyone to fight over than a real drug. While this (long) movie isn't without its flaws, director Denis Villeneuve gives it a languid smoothness that makes for an enthralling tale (which continues in Dune: Part Two ). To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (26)
• Kids say (104)

Based on 26 parent reviews

Jaw-dropping prologue has intense violence

A fan and a father, what's the story.

In DUNE, the desert planet Arrakis is the source of a valuable drug, called "spice," that allows users to travel vast distances. Spice mining and distribution on Arrakis are controlled by the evil Baron Harkonnen ( Stellan Skarsgard ), whose armies oppress the planet's Fremen people. Under orders from the emperor, Duke Leto Atreides ( Oscar Isaac ) takes over the stewardship of Arrakis and moves there with his wife, Lady Jessica ( Rebecca Ferguson ), and son, Paul ( Timothée Chalamet ). Lady Jessica has been teaching Paul in the ways of the Bene Gesserit, and, once on Arrakis, some of the Fremen begin to suspect that Paul may be a prophesied "chosen one." But after a betrayal, Lady Jessica and Paul find themselves in the desert, hunted by giant sandworms, with the mysterious Fremen their only chance of survival.

Is It Any Good?

In this first of two Dune movies, director Denis Villeneuve smooths out the most cumbersome parts of Frank Herbert's original tale, providing enough spectacle to overcome the dull bits. With echoes of his earlier films Arrival and Blade Runner 2049 , Villeneuve brings a languid moodiness to the storytelling here, slowing things down and allowing viewers time to take in the vast sets (built broad and low to fit the widescreen frame) and devices -- like the amazing, if impractical, ships modeled after dragonflies -- and to keep track of the story's innumerable characters. This rhythm builds to the tale's memorable, invigorating highlights -- such as Paul dodging a life-threatening hunter-seeker or enduring the painful gom jabbar test, or the first appearance of the massive sandworms -- and makes them feel extra vivid.

The movie even manages to soften the old, tired "chosen one" device, as well as the simplistic plot strands that are covered up by heaps of sci-fi names (how do you pronounce "Thufir Hawat" anyway?), places, and devices, making things flow more organically. It's even possible to remember that the original novel, published in 1965, actually inspired much that came after it, including Star Wars and The Matrix . Villeneuve can't quite downplay the source material's choking seriousness, but there are lighter moments. Skarsgard's Baron is a highlight; he's so grotesque that you can't look away. And then there's a swaggering Jason Momoa as swordmaster Duncan, who seems to be the only one having any fun. As with Blade Runner 2049 , Dune goes on too long, with too many scenes of fighting, and this version lacks the quirky personality of the 1984 David Lynch take , but it's far more rousing.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Dune 's violence . How did it make you feel? Was it exciting? Shocking? What did the movie show or not show to achieve this effect? Why is that important?

Why is "spice" considered a drug ? Is meant to represent drugs as we know them? Is it glamorized? Are there consequences for using it?

What are some of the movie's themes? How can sci-fi be used to explore real-life issues like colonialism and representation? How are the Fremen represented in the film?

How does this movie compare to the novel, the previous movie, and/or the TV movie? How is it different from those versions? How is it the same?

Is Paul a role model ? What makes him seem heroic? What behaviors suggest otherwise?

Movie Details

• In theaters : October 22, 2021
• On DVD or streaming : January 11, 2022
• Cast : Timothée Chalamet , Zendaya , Rebecca Ferguson , Oscar Isaac
• Director : Denis Villeneuve
• Inclusion Information : Female actors, Black actors, Multiracial actors, Latino actors
• Studio : Warner Bros.
• Genre : Science Fiction
• Topics : Book Characters , Space and Aliens
• Run time : 155 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : sequences of strong violence, some disturbing images and suggestive material
• Awards : Academy Award , Golden Globe - Golden Globe Award Winner
• Last updated : July 21, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Dune: Part Two

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Star Wars: Episode VII: The Force Awakens

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‘Dune’ Review: Denis Villeneuve's Sci-Fi Epic Has a Cold Heart on a Hot Planet

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The 10 Worst Changes the 'Dune' Movies Made From the Novels, Ranked

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Director Denis Villeneuve takes his sci-fi seriously. While most mainstream, studio sci-fi goes for something more in the vein of Star Wars with dashing adventure, a healthy dose of humor, and not worrying about explaining anything too much, Villeneuve gets in the weeds. While his previous science fiction movies, Arrival and Blade Runner 2049 , were able to embrace a deadly serious tone while never losing their emotional core, his latest film, half an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s epic Dune (the movie states that it’s “Part One” although a second part has yet to receive a green light as of mid-October 2021), is a distant affair despite its exquisite craftsmanship. Despite having more time than the 1984 David Lynch film to tell the story, Villeneuve’s Dune never manages to dive deeper into the character relationship, instead getting down in the plotting issues of intergalactic colonial mining operations between royal houses and how it intersects with a rising messiah figure. These are heady concepts, but they lack any kind of emotional weight because we don’t care about the people in this vast tapestry. Instead, despite its outstanding cast, they’re all absorbed into the rich milieu of this sci-fi epic without ever making the case about why we should be invested. The spice may flow, but this narrative doesn’t.

The planet of Arrakis is the location of “spice”, a substance that is of religious significance to the local population, the Freman, but is highly coveted by the rest of the galaxy because it’s what makes space travel possible. Arrakis was previously occupied by the ruthless House Harkonnen, but the Emperor has decided to now give the license to House Atreides in the hopes that they will fail since their rising power is a threat to the Imperium. Against this backdrop is Paul Atreides ( Timothée Chalamet ), the prince of House Atreides, who’s the son of its ruler Duke Leto ( Oscar Isaac ) and his concubine Lady Jessica ( Jessica Ferguson ), who is also a member of the all-female Bene Gesserit, a religious order pulling the strings. As Paul begins to have visions of Arrakis and its Freman, especially a young woman named Chani ( Zendaya ), he also becomes part of a prophecy that could see him rise to a messiah figure for the Freman and someone who could change the order of the galaxy.

RELATED: Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya on ‘Dune,’ the Sequel, and How Denis Villeneuve Brought a Universe to Life

You’ll note character relationships didn’t factor a lot into that synopsis, and that’s because they don’t really matter. Almost all the relationships in Dune are perfunctory and designed to prop up the plotting and world-building rather than the other way around. We know Duke Leto loves Paul because he tells him. We know that Lady Jessica loves Paul because she looks distraught when he’s tested by the Bene Gesserit. But the texture and nuance of these relationships are non-existent. They exist only in the realm of archetype and devoid of much shading. Even when we’re given a glimpse of a history between two characters—like the camaraderie between Paul and soldier Duncan Idaho ( Jason Momoa , the only person in this movie who seems like he’s happy to be there)—they have just a handful of scenes together, so there’s no chance to build anything. Dune is a movie where Paul grows and changes not because of his interactions with other people, but because he’s “destined” and so the plot is sporadically marked by various awakenings and mystical happenings, but nothing that derives from Paul being particularly interesting despite Chalamet giving it his all.

The problem isn’t that Villeneuve treats this big sci-fi story with a stone-faced resolve. If anything, the total lack of irony makes it easier to invest in a plot that’s taking numerous big swings and counting on the audience to follow along. This isn’t Star Wars (even though at one point Paul basically has to use the Force to fly through a sandstorm), and Villeneuve expects you to keep up with terms like “Bene Gesserit” “Gom Jabbar”, and “Lisan al-Gaib” (there’s also a heavy Orientalist slant that the film never wrestles with or addresses). Villeneuve is also counting on the audience to accept only half the story, which makes Dune feel not only anticlimactic, but uncertain about if it’s building into anything in particular. For a movie where “fear is the mindkiller” is a repeated mantra, it takes almost the entire 150-minute runtime to find out what exactly Paul fears. That we gleam so little insight from our protagonist makes Dune like a magnificently ornate, empty box.

I don’t want to diminish that craftsmanship because what cinematographer Grieg Fraser and composer Hans Zimmer contribute here is truly astounding. Dune is a triumph of world-building, and other sci-fi features would be wise to take notes from how much Villenueve is able to convey just through the costumes and settings. It’s hard to make sci-fi that feels both new and familiar, and Dune dances on that tightrope. We know that House Atreides is a bit more ambiguous than the clearly evil House Harkonnen because while Duke Leto says he wants to forge an alliance with the Freman, the Atreides’ style is still militaristic and spartan. For a movie that tells you a lot and expects you to keep up, you can still sit back and marvel at this world that Villeneuve has crafted.

But for all its beauty and sand-shaking score (if you do see Dune , the theatrical experience is the way to go), I couldn’t shake the hollowness of the whole endeavor. Perhaps it will all come together if “Part Two” ever happens (although I’m skeptical given that this isn’t a particularly entertaining movie, so I’m dubious about the audience’s appetite for deadly serious epic science fiction, especially after the poor box office returns on Blade Runner 2049 ), but for now Dune is a lot of “what” without ever bothering to give a reason about why the audience should care. Perhaps some will be riveted by the political and religious intrigue brewing in the background, but that provides scant reason to care about these characters. I love that Villeneuve is fully invested in crafting the world of Dune , but I wish that care and craft had been equally applied to the people that inhabit it.

Dune arrives in theaters and on HBO Max on October 21st.

KEEP READING: ‘Dune’ Final Trailer Goes Deep Into the Story of Denis Villeneuve’s Sci-Fi Epic

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Sci-Fi epic 'Dune' is an immersive but incomplete experience

Justin Chang

Timothée Chalamet is a royal heir, and Rebecca Ferguson is his mother in Dune . Chiabella James/Warner Bros. Pictures hide caption

Timothée Chalamet is a royal heir, and Rebecca Ferguson is his mother in Dune .

Dune may not be the best new movie you'll see this year, but it's easily the most new movie you'll see this year. I left the theater feeling overwhelmed and a little parched, as though I'd spent two hours and 35 minutes being pummeled by hot desert winds and blinding sandstorms. The world of Frank Herbert's novel feels big and immersive here in a way it never has on-screen, with its futuristic spacecraft, cavernous fortresses and, of course, terrifying sand worms.

I've never been a huge fan of Denis Villeneuve's technically stupendous but oddly soulless movies, like Prisoners and Incendies , or bought into the notion that he's some kind of second coming of Stanley Kubrick. Still, there's no question that he's well prepared for this assignment as the director of moodily ambitious science fiction like Arrival , probably his best film, and Blade Runner 2049 .

With Dune , Villeneuve and his co-writers, Jon Spaihts and Eric Roth, have made a lucid adaptation of a book that's long been deemed unfilmable: The Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky famously abandoned his Dune movie in the '70s, and David Lynch 's 1984 version was deemed such a disaster that Lynch himself disowned it. There was also a bland 2000 miniseries that at least understood that the book might be too dense to squeeze into a single film.

Reporter's Notebook

With 'dune,' denis villeneuve has made hollywood's definitive post-9/11 epic.

That may be why Villeneuve opted to split Dune into two movies. This first installment is a largely faithful retelling of a complicated story. Many millennia into the future, the universe has become a vast feudal society — a sort of interstellar Game of Thrones — in which noble houses control different planets. The most coveted is the desert planet Arrakis, or Dune, the source of a powerful, life-extending substance called spice.

As the story opens, there's been an imperial decree that control of Arrakis will be taken away from the treacherous House Harkonnen and handed over to its longtime rival, House Atreides. It's a triumph for the good Duke Leto Atreides ( Oscar Isaac ), though he and his advisers, played by actors including Jason Momoa and Josh Brolin , suspect they may be walking into a trap.

Pop Culture Happy Hour

'dune': a sweeping, spectacular spice-opera — half of one, anyway.

Timothée Chalamet is a great choice for the duke's son Paul, a coddled royal heir who could be the "Kwisatz Haderach" — that's Dune- speak for messiah figure or superbeing. For the most part, the movie keeps Herbert's made-up languages to a minimum.

Villeneuve wants even novices to be able to follow along. He plays up the book's ever-resonant subtexts of colonial oppression and ecological disaster. And he's cast even the smaller roles with magnetic actors, like Charlotte Rampling and Stellan Skarsgard, who keep you watching even when the plot begins to tilt into abstraction. Rebecca Ferguson brings a welcome warmth to Lady Jessica, Paul's mother, with whom he flees into the desert when House Atreides comes under attack. And Zendaya and Javier Bardem turn up among the Fremen, the brutally oppressed Indigenous people of Arrakis, who will play a larger role in part two.

Movie Interviews

Doomed 'dune' was generations ahead of its time.

For sheer seat-rattling spectacle, Dune is undeniably staggering. The attack on House Atreides is staged with a brooding, quasi-Shakespearean grandeur. And then there are those giant sand worms winding their way through the story, so mysterious and mesmerizing to behold that you almost wouldn't mind being eaten by one, just to see what it's like.

But there's also something crucial missing . Much of the plot is advanced through elements of mind reading and mind control, so it's a shame that the movie never really gets inside its characters' heads. As with so many of Villeneuve's films, the visuals are stunning but the storytelling feels rudimentary; you get the sense that he's managed his source material without fully mastering it. In some ways, Lynch's Dune actually got closer to the mind-bending strangeness of Herbert's novel; it had a touch of visionary madness that this movie could use a little more of.

Even though Villeneuve's Dune is incomplete by design, there's something odd and unsatisfying about the point at which it slams to a halt. Still, it duly whets your appetite for part two, assuming it gets made; that will depend on whether part one does well enough at the box office. I hope Villeneuve gets the chance to finish what he started. This first Dune may not be a great movie — or even half a great movie — but Dune the planet is gorgeous enough that I wouldn't mind a return visit.

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Early signs look very good for  Dune , but why are critics so high on Denis Villeneuve's sci-fi epic ? For many years, Frank Herbert's 1965  Dune novel was deemed impossible to film; the alien landscapes, enormous creatures and sweeping scale thought too grandiose for live-action. David Lynch's highly divisive 1984 Dune adaptation solidified that stance, but it was only a matter of time until another bold director took the reigns with a major studio budget and the benefits of modern special effects. Denis Villeneuve is that director, Warner Bros. is that studio, and 2021's  Dune is that adaptation.

Boasting an all-star cast that includes  Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Oscar Isaac , Jason Momoa, Rebecca Ferguson, Dave Bautista *deep breath* Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem, and many more, fans are expecting  Dune  to finally do the source material justice. Reaction to trailers and images has been largely positive, and Villeneuve speaks with such reverence to Herbert's world, there's little doubt he's one of few auteurs with any hope of making a  Dune  movie that's authentic enough for the Arrakis faithful, but accessible enough for the uninitiated. Like 2021's other Warner Bros. releases,  Dune will premiere on both HBO Max , and in theaters.

Related:  Why Dune 2021 Can’t Be A True Book Adaptation

At the time of writing,  Dune sits at an impressive 87% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, based on over 150 reviews. That figure will undoubtedly change once  Dune releases to the general public, and it's not unusual for the Rotten Tomatoes audience score to skew significantly higher or lower than the critics' Tomatometer. For now, however,  Dune has cause to celebrate, as reviews heap praise upon Villeneuve's ambition and visual splendor, as well as the individual performances and ability to capture Frank Herbert's vision on film. Here's a taste of what the critics are saying:

Villeneuve's new adaptation of Frank Herbert's classic 1965 novel is exactly the kind of lush, lofty filmmaking wide screens were made for; a sensory experience so opulent and overwhelming it begs to be seen big, or not at all.

The Guardian :

Good heavens, what a film. The drama is played out with relish by an ensemble cast and Villeneuve is confident enough to let the temperature slowly build before the big operatic set-pieces eventually break cover. He has constructed an entire world for us here, thick with myth and mystery.

Dune feels most reminiscent of The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring . Like Fellowship , it’s merely the opening part of a story, but manages to feel like a masterwork in its own right. Like Fellowship , it establishes a sprawling and complex world that feels both familiar and utterly new with the lightest of touches.

Den Of Geek :

An experience that’s made one of the most foreboding science fiction sagas ever conceived fairly accessible to any audience willing to be transported. Dune is an astonishing swing of ambition and passion from filmmakers at the top of their craft, and it more often than not connects like a thunderbolt.

The Independent :

Villeneuve’s Dune is the sandworm exploding out from the darkness below. It is a film of such literal and emotional largeness that it overwhelms the senses. If all goes well, it should reinvigorate the book’s legacy in the same way Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy did for JRR Tolkien’s work.

“Dune” is so sublimely rendered that you could easily follow it with the sound off, sans Hans Zimmer’s hulking score. With an immense sense of scale ranging from mosquito to (Jason) Momoa, “Dune” renders an age-old tale of palace intrigue and indigenous struggle in exaggerated cosmic contours. Like any drift of sand, “Dune” feels sculpted by elemental, primal forces.

Many of the above reviews concur when it comes to  Dune 's strengths, and agree that Villeneuve's world-building is chief among them. There's little doubt that those who purchase a ticket (or, indeed, load up HBO Max) are in for a sensory battering, the likes of which sci-fi fans haven't experienced for some years.  Dune 's ability to craft a believable, compelling Arrakis with its cultures, quirks and peoples has been roundly applauded and, for this reason, most reviews admit that 2021's  Dune adaptation is a mostly faithful reflection of Frank Herbert's original novel - or as close as any film could reasonably get. Multiple reviews are comparing  Dune to Peter Jackson's  Lord of the Rings , and that's a hefty pat on the back by itself. Jackson's trilogy set a new standard for epic cinema, and 20 years later,  Dune appears to be rewriting the rule book. With that said, not all  Dune reviews are glowing and, once again, there's consensus among the criticism. Here's a cross-section of the negative takes:

The ensemble is committed, but the storytelling is liminal. Whether  Dune: Part Two  will ever be made is a question mark, and standing on its own,  Dune: Part One  is all setup with very little payoff.

IndieWire :

The first and most fundamental problem is a screenplay (credited to the heavyweight trio of Eric Roth, Jon Spaihts, and Villeneuve himself) that drills into Herbert’s novel with all the thunder and calamity of a spice harvester, but mines precious little substance from underneath the surface.

“Dune” makes the worms, the dunes, the paramilitary spectacle, and the kid-savior-tests-his-mettle plot immersive — for a while. But then, as the movie begins to run out of tricks, it turns woozy and amorphous.

The overwhelming problem most reviews (even the positive ones) have about  Dune is how incomplete the movie feels. Denis Villeneuve has always spoken transparently about his intention to make a sequel covering the second half of Herbert's novel, but a significant portion of the write-ups are accusing Dune of focusing too hard on setup, and not telling a compelling enough story in isolation. A few go even further, and criticize Villeneuve for covering up lackluster storytelling with sumptuous visuals. Predictably, some fans of Frank Herbert's  Dune novel have taken exception to some of Velleneuve's handling of the book, describing  Dune as a "streamlined" version of the source material that filters the outright strangeness and finer details Herbert included.

On the whole, however, Dune reviews err predominantly toward the desirable end of the spectrum, with more critics singing Denis Villeneuve's praises than dusting off their pitchforks. Whether that enthusiasm will translate into a sequel remains to be seen, but everyone agrees that  Dune desperately needs a continuation - either because the first is so good, or because it'll be incomplete otherwise.

More:  What You Need To Know Before Seeing Dune

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Dune Doesn’t Care If You Like It

Vulture is recirculating its coverage of Dune in celebration of the epic’s long-awaited release on HBO Max and theaters .

Sandworms, the signature creation of Frank Herbert’s Dune series, are colossal beings that live in the deserts of the planet Arrakis, which the worms travel through the way a shark might through water. Their dominance over the land has them alternately revered and feared by the different human populations who also live there, carving out lives in the unforgiving environs. The worms are drawn to anything out on the sand, capable of sensing vibrations from far away, and emerge from underneath their targets, the ground giving way to a gaping maw for anyone unfortunate enough to be in the area. When David Lynch directed his ill-omened 1984 adaptation of the original 1965 novel, he gave his sandworms multi-lobed mouths that opened like monstrous flowers, much like they had in John Schoenherr’s dust-jacket illustrations. It’s a dependable method for making anatomy look ominous — just have it look like a toothy vulva — but it’s not an approach Denis Villeneuve replicates in his own sumptuous and strange new take on Herbert’s source material.

Villeneuve’s sandworms, like so many details of his new movie, strive to come across as genuinely otherworldly and from a context other than our own. They have a tunnel-like quality that’s organic only in the sense that microscopic organisms that turn out to be nightmare fuel when given their close-up are still organic, ending abruptly in circular jaws that are permanently agape and ringed by a filter made up of rows of needle-like teeth. When Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), Dune ’s reluctant messiah figure, has an encounter with one after fleeing into the desert, the worm lifts its massive noggin out of the drifts right in front of him, and he stares into its unseeing countenance in a moment that’s meant to be electric with the terrifying majesty of this utterly alien life-form. But, gazing into that eyeless hole with clenching interiors glimpsed in its shadowy depths, it might also cross your mind that the reimagined worm left its old vagina dentata influences behind only to end up resembling a giant asshole.

The human imagination is not as limitless as we like to pretend, and it’s funny how often, in trying to get beyond the boundaries of the known, we just end up circling back to our own privates. That’s the challenge of science fiction, to create a real sense of distance and otherness when so much of storytelling rests on evoking the familiar. It’s a challenge that Dune takes up with an admirable and maybe doomed determination, rendering Herbert’s rival intergalactic aristocrats and space witches on an awe-inspiring, gloriously unfriendly scale. Herbert himself didn’t build his world from scratch: The squabbled-over Arrakis, the only source for a substance called spice that’s essential to interstellar travel, is at the heart of what are basically oil wars writ large. And Dune does have the contours of a space opera, with its sand monsters and ghoulish villains and fine-boned princeling destined to meet the literal woman of this dreams — Chani, a member of the indigenous Fremen population played by Zendaya, who will presumably get more to do if the sequel actually happens — and lead humanity toward a better future. But Villeneuve isn’t interested in making a swashbuckling romantic adventure that happens to have sci-fi trappings.

His 2016 film Arrival was about trying to communicate with extraterrestrials who experience existence in an entirely different way from us, and Dune is bent on depicting a far future humanity in which traces of the familiar — bagpipes played at a ceremony, an ancestor’s penchant for bull-fighting — just end up emphasizing how distant the characters’ desires and motivations can be. They aren’t entirely inscrutable: Oscar Isaac plays Paul’s father, Duke Leto Atreides, as a careworn but kind ruler who’s aware he’s being steered into a trap when asked to take over Arrakis. Leto’s trusted military advisers, Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa) and Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin), serve as surrogate fond old brothers and stern uncles to Paul, while as Paul’s mother and Leto’s concubine Lady Jessica, Rebecca Ferguson embodies the fretful tension of a woman torn between protecting her son and preparing him to face unavoidable danger. But Jessica also happens to be a loyal member of the Bene Gesserit, a matriarchal order of psychic women who manipulate politics while masterminding an unfathomable multi-century breeding program to create the Kwisatz Haderach — a messiah who may or may not be Paul.

The most daring aspect of Dune is not that it only tells half a narrative, or that it opts to immerse its audience in its richly rendered universe, assuming they can keep up without guide ropes. It’s carried pretty far on the strength of spectacle alone, with its spaceships hanging impossibly still in the air, its thrumming Hans Zimmer score, and its pallid antagonist, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård channeling Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz), floating around on anti-gravity boosters like a menacing balloon. No, the most daring aspect of Dune is how much unease it creates around the idea of a chosen one, from the Leni Riefenstahl–inspired military ceremony in which Leto and Paul receive their commission to take care of Arrakis to the fact that Paul is the product of eugenics. It begins with Chani talking in voiceover about the colonization of the Fremen’s land and the oppression they’ve experienced at the hands of rapacious outsiders, and then turns to a white savior whose greatness is entirely synthetic, engineered via planted prophecies and genetic manipulation. Paul’s reluctance to fall into the role created for him isn’t the usual self-doubt, but the dread of someone who begins to believe he’s meant to initiate a holy war. Being the hero of the story has never looked so poisoned, and that alone is thrilling enough to hope Villeneuve gets to make part two of this impressively batshit venture.

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Lego Dune Atreides Royal Ornithopter (10327) review: "Not for spice, not for riches, but for Lego"

GamesRadar+ Verdict

The Lego Dune Atreides Royal Ornithopter is another slam dunk from the Lego Icons team. It perfectly replicates the sci-fi creation from the movie, and its moving parts are a delight to see working. There’s a lot of Technic Lego hiding in this set though, and that won’t be to everyone’s tastes, but the punishment on your thumbs is well worth the end result.

Moving wings are incredible

Unique and awesome design

Loads of minifigures

No stickers!

Lots of Technic pieces (painful on the thumbs)

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• Should you buy
• How we tested

Call me Lisan al Gaib, because I bring your salvation… okay, that’s a bit strong, but I do bring a review of the Lego Dune Atreides Royal Ornithopter set. One of the most iconic vehicles in the Dune universe, the Ornithopter is the best form of transport if you need to get around on the desert planet of Arrakis without disturbing the sandworms, and now it has been brought to life as a beautiful 1,369-piece Lego set.

It’s a great time for fans of both cinema and Lego, with some of the best Lego sets in recent years being tie-ins for big screen movies, both old and new. We’ve seen Lord of the Rings sets for Rivendell and Barad Dur , and there’s also a Jaws set that’s just around the corner. 

But this isn’t the time for fantasy; we’re getting out sci-fi on so, let’s sandwalk over to the table and get building this thing. Hey, stop laughing at my sandwalk, you want to get eaten by a sandworm? I didn’t think so.

Lego Dune Atreides Royal Ornithopter features

• Eight minifigures
• Moving wings and landing gear
• Based on Dune: Part 1

The Lego Dune Atreides Royal Ornithopter was launched to coincide with the release of Dune: Part 2 back in February 2024. While the movie itself is PG-13, this set is recommended for ages 18 and up. Teenagers can handle violent scenes and ruminations on what it means to be human, but a moderately complex Lego build is seemingly beyond them. 

Jokes aside, this kit would be absolutely fine for most teenagers.

The Ornithopter is a dragonfly-inspired sci-fi version of a helicopter in the Dune universe, and it’s one of the main modes of transportation for members of House Atreides when they first arrive on the desert planet. This Lego version replicates the iconic profile of the aircraft beautifully, while also going the extra mile and including mechanisms to extend and retract the wings and landing gear.

Fans of the movies will also be thrilled by the healthy roster of minifigures that come with the set. There are eight figures comprising all the major characters in the first movie: Paul Atreides, Lady Jessica, Gurney Halleck, Chani, Leto Atreides, Liet Kynes, Duncan Idaho and Baron Harkonnen in his hilariously long robe.

Lego Dune Atreides Royal Ornithopter build

• 3-4 hour build
• Lots of Technic pieces
• Fun build with plenty of variety

With 1,369 pieces, the Dune Ornithopter is a mid-sized Lego set that took me around 3-4 hours to assemble over a couple of days. It could easily be done in one night if you have thumbs of steel, but the large number of Technic pieces in this set meant pushing a lot of pins into holes, which can take a toll on your hands.

They’re not here without good reason though, as there are a lot of mechanisms that are needed for the moving parts of the Dune Ornithopter — namely the landing gear and folding wings. Given the relatively simple shape of the Ornithopter’s fuselage, the build process is fairly straightforward, with most of the construction focused on the main body of the aircraft, attaching the various gears and linkages as appropriate.

To keep things fresh, eight out of the ten bags of Lego pieces contain one of the minifigures. Once the fuselage is done, you then move onto assembling the cockpit and finally attaching the rather remarkable wings.

Despite my complaints about my poor thumbs, I had a lot of fun assembling the Lego Ornithopter. It has a good mix of regular and Technic Lego pieces, and there aren’t really any repetitive sections to drag the pace down. There are also no stickers in the set, with all the details coming from printed pieces — huzzah!

Lego Dune Atreides Royal Ornithopter design

• Folding wings and landing gear
• Clear cockpit with room for pilots
• Wings can actually move

When it’s all assembled, the Lego Ornithopter is a real work of art that perfectly captures that sleek and unusual design from the movies. It’s not the most colorful piece, sporting the gray paintjob of its movie counterpart, but it’s full of sharp lines and fascinating details that draw the eye.

At the back of the craft is the boarding ramp, which can be raised or lowered using a cleverly-disguised dial on the side of the hull. You’ll have it down by default, as the controls are tied together with the landing gear.

The cockpit looks great too, with that unique inverted triangle shape that sees it get wider at the top. If you detach the cockpit glass, you can fit two minifigures in the pilot seats, which come with little printed computer screens and moving levers to represent the flight controls.

The wings are definitely the most striking part of the set, especially when they’re extended out to their full width via the sliding lever on the top. The Lego Ornithopter has an impressive wingspan of around 31-inches (79 cm), and there is even a button on top that you can press rapidly to flap the wings, which is a very nice touch. In practice, you’re only going to extend the wings when you’re showing it off to friends though, as it’ll be impossible to display on any normal shelf with the wings out. Fortunately, with the wings tucked in the Ornithopter shrinks down to a very display-friendly profile.

I have found that there is a panel near the wing assembly that occasionally pops off when I extend the wings out. One of the gear linkages is clearly catching on it as it moves past. It’s a minor annoyance, but on a $165/£150 set, minor annoyances are worth mentioning. 

Outside of the craft itself, you also get a very decent array of minifigures. Most of them are fairly standard — Lady Jessica has a dress instead of legs, and a couple of them have helmet on or off head options. The star of the show is definitely Baron Harkonnen though. Look at this big tall boi… he’s hilarious! His robe is fashioned from a long piece of fabric that hooks under his head, and I love him.

Should you buy the Lego Dune Atreides Royal Ornithopter?

Whether you're a fan of the movies, the books , or both, the Lego Dune Atreides Royal Ornithopter is an absolute must-have for Dune fans. As a display piece, it looks fantastic and thanks to the folding wings, it fits neatly on normal-sized display shelves. Then, when you want to show it off, you can extend the wings out and blow some minds.

It’s not the cheapest Lego set out there, especially for the relatively tame piece count (for the price), but you get your money’s worth with the build thanks to the blend of classic Lego and fancy Technic mechanisms — just do it in a couple of sessions to stop your thumbs from falling off.

Buy it if...

✅ You love the Dune franchise This set is a no-brainer for Dune fans, as the Ornithopter is one of the only really iconic vehicles in the franchise (and we’re not expecting a Lego Sandworm anytime soon).

✅ You like Lego with moving parts The folding and flapping wings are a work of lego art, so if you appreciate the technical wizardry of lego builds, as well the final result, this is the one for you. 

Don't buy it if...

❌ You don’t like Technic Lego There are a lot of Technic pieces in this set to accommodate the moving parts, so if you're a traditional bricky, give this one a miss.

How we tested the Lego Dune Atreides Royal Ornithopter

This review was conducted with a sample provided by a third-party PR company on behalf of Lego.

I built this set over the course of two evenings, and it took around 3-4 hours to complete. I followed the instructions, making notes of sections that were difficult, confusing or, in this case, painful, as well as highlighting enjoyable aspects of the build.

Once the build was finished, I considered the overall design: how good it looks, how accurately it replicates the Ornithopter from the movie, and any special features that it has (or is lacking).

You can find out more about our process in our ' how we test ' guide. 

For more bricky goodness, check out our guide to the best Lego Star Wars sets . You can also boost your collection for less with these Lego deals .

Ian Stokes is an experienced writer and journalist. You'll see his words on GamesRadar+ from time to time, but Ian spends the majority of his time working on other Future Plc publications. He has served as the Reviews Editor for Top Ten Reviews and led the tech/entertainment sections of LiveScience and Space.com as Tech and Entertainment Editor.

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'Everything Was Very Secret': Jenna Ortega on Auditioning for Major Dune Role

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Jenna Ortega is one of today's biggest stars, from her leading role in Netflix's Wednesday to her return to the big screen this fall in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice . Additionally, her rise to stardom almost included a major role in another popular franchise.

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'It Was a Jump Scare': Michael Keaton Frightened Beetlejuice 2's Jenna Ortega the First Time They Met

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" I auditioned for Dune when I was about 15 ," Ortega said. "I remember just being a big fan of that film, and the franchise, and everything like that, and being really excited for that, because Denis is one of my favorite filmmakers. I think it was Chani . I think it was Zendaya's [role]. But they weren't saying that. Everything was very secret."

I think it was Zendaya's [role]. But they weren't saying that.

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Everything To Know About ‘Dune: Messiah’: Cast, Plot, Release Date, And More

Where to stream:.

• Dune: Part 2
• Denis Villeneuve

‘Dune: Part Two’ Ending Explained: Look to Chani

Could ‘dune: prophecy’ tie into anya taylor-joy’s future with the ‘dune’ franchise, use this hack to stream ‘dune: part two’ for less, stream it or skip it: ‘dune: part two’ on hbo max, denis villeneuve’s grand action epic that easily bests its predecessor.

If you’re a Dune fan, you may have heard some recent buzz about a potential upcoming installment.

Director Denis Villeneuve ‘s films are adaptations of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novels . While Herbert only crafted six books himself, a number of novels have also been co-written by his son, Brian Herbert, and Kevin J. Anderson.

The most recent film installment, Dune: Part Two , starred Timothée Chalamet , Zendaya , Austin Butler and Florence Pugh , and even featured a cameo from Anya Taylor-Joy . Part Two was also filmed in various locations spanning Asia, Africa, and Europe.

Curious to know if there will be a third movie? We’re here to help.

Here’s what we know about the upcoming third film.

Is a third Dune film happening?

Yes! Deadline reported that a third film is currently in development, and will mark the final film of the Dune trilogy.

Is Denis Villeneuve still on the project?

Yes, again — Villeneuve is developing the film with Legendary Entertainment, per Deadline. Not only is Villeneuve working on this project, but he is also in talks to direct another book-to-movie adaptation, Nuclear War: A Scenario .

What’s the plot of Dune: Messiah ?

The film is slated to be an adaptation of Herbert’s Dune Messiah , which marked the second installment in his series that “explores new developments on the desert planet Arrakis, with its intricate social order and its strange threatening environment,” per publisher Macmillan .

“ Dune Messiah  picks up the story of the man known as Maud’dib, heir to a power unimaginable, bringing to fruition an ambition of unparalleled scale: the centuries-old scheme to create a superbeing who reigns not in the heavens but among men,” Macmillan’s description continues. “But the question is: Do all paths of glory lead to the grave?”

Villeneuve described the novel to Empire as being “written in reaction to the fact that people perceived Paul Atreides as a hero.”

Who is in the cast of the third film?

As the film is still in development, few details have been shared surrounding the cast. However, we can likely expect stars from the first two films to return, including Chalamet and Zendaya.

When will the film be released?

There is no official release date, but media outlets are reporting that Villeneuve is set to take on the next film prior to adapting Nuclear War: A Scenario . Also, Dune: Part Two only hit theaters on March 1, so we might be waiting for a while on this next movie.

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