"Desert power."
Dune review
Fair warning, this is a rewatch. When I first watched the movie with a friend, I thought of it as a beautiful, visually immersive experience that I felt would be much better experienced If i knew more about the book. And that was sadly, all I thought about it at that moment.
Whenever a movie starts with a Part One in it's title, I get a hesitation. And Dune's only covering one half of the FIRST book. This was going to be slow, this was going to have a lot of filler, this was going to have information and scenes that are not at any point integral to the main story and it won't be very pretty because they would save most of the budget for the second film. These were my initial thoughts when I set down to watch it again, having long forgotten most of the plot of the movie from before.
Dune was nothing like that. Dune is probably the best science-fiction movie I have seen this year. It is beautiful first of all, the movie somehow manages to balance shots of nature and shots of sci-fi tech and really mixes them well together to create a very immersive setting. I was in awe when Paul walks away from the beach with a ship in the background rising from the water.
It's also a really fucking compelling movie. Even though this is all serious hard science fiction stuff, there is no point in the movie where you feel lost or confused. It just works and you immediately know what each character thinks and feels. The transition from the novel to film feels very smooth in that regard though I have never read the book haha
Dune sounds really cool too, the soundtrack has this rhythmic thumping to it that just sounds so good and the soundtrack is appropiately quite, kicking in only at intense moments. The ships sound cool as hell
This is a pretty long movie, probably the longest I have seen in a while at 2h 35m but I wasn't bored for a single second because it has a very engaging pace and you get treated to a piece of lore or a beautiful shot of landscape in-between some really exciting fight and action sequences.
Overall, I would give this movie a highly recommended even if you have never seen a science movie 9/10
P/S: What's with the fight scenes? They were the only distracting bits to me and why I don't give it a perfect score. They just feel....forcefully quiet.
I've read through the book and even into some of the sequel books, but for some reason have only watched the first movie (Part One). I thought it was good, it generally follows the books pretty well, there wasn't a point where I was like, "Wait a minute!" other than I have had Stellan Skarsgård as Liet-Kynes in my head for awhile now, so him being Baron Harkonnen is kind of weird for me. It's not 100% book accurate, but it was good enough for me. For some reason, even though I have it on hand and I enjoyed part one, I haven't had a burning desire to watch Part Two yet. Partly it's just not having alot of time to watch movies in general, but for some reason I'm hesitating to get into Part Two.
One thing that the movies miss from the books, which seems like it would be hard to pull off, is that NOBODY in Dune just has a normal conversation with each other. Literally everytime there is dialogue in the book, at least one of the characters is psycho-analyzing every word for some sort of ulterior motive, or some hidden meaning within a meaning or something, it's actually kind of annoying and I'm glad they didn't attempt to work that into the movie.
Did we read the same book, because my impression was that it was almost entirely written from the perspective of main characters that were looking for conspiracies everywhere. Paul and his mother in particular were literally constantly attempting to detect the machinations and plots of others in order to either manipulate their allegiances or literally predict the future. The were the center of an ulterior motive tornado for the Fremen. The mythos they exploited to grab power was built on the foundations of other Bene Gesserit missionaries before them, an army of ulterior motives. The entire theme of the book was secret manipulation of the masses in order to maintain and grow political power. You don't survive in the Dune Universe without psychoanalysis of every interact for ulterior motives.