6/10

If it's the 2020s and you have at your disposal hundreds of millions of dollars, a choice of A-list actors, superb sets, the best possible digital effects, a top soundtrack composer and the support of a gigantic film studio, and you decide to funnel all these forces into a new epic film based on the Dune novel, then the results are not in doubt.

Trailers for the movie looked so much like every fan's mental vision of the book that it might have backfired and produced an underwhelming effect. I personally thought "Oh yes, it looks like Dune alright, lifted straight from the pages to the screen (and crossed with Lawrence of Arabia)".

Villeneuve had reproduced the look and feel of the Dune universe with such astonishing fidelity that it left only one obvious question dangling:

How would the story and characters be altered to ruin the movie?

It was inevitable. The science fiction genre suffers terribly from altered screenplays that distort or dilute their origins, and Dune 2021 would not be exempt. I suspect that most movie corruptions and alterations come down from the 'big boys' of the studios who look at the scripts and say "I don't understand that character, replace him with a pretty strong-willed female", or "I can't understand that technology, replace it with a ray-gun". Now we know that the fat corrupt sleazeball Harvey Weinstein was a typical case of an interfering studio head, constantly tampering with scripts and dumbing down plots in the idiotic hope that it would put more bums on seats and make more money.

That rant aside ... it's was just a question of how Dune would be adjusted for the big screen. Had the 'big boys' put their greasy fingers on the script and badgered Villeneuve to make changes?

[Spoilers Ahead]

The main plot arc from the book remains intact and no significant extraneous characters were invented for the movie. All of the famous characters from the book basically follow their prescribed destinies and look and behave as expected. However, small screenplay changes were made that would be very noticeable to fans.

While watching this movie I had flashbacks to viewing Lord of The Rings for the first time. If you are dedicated fan of genre works, then the moment the dialogue or plot of a screenplay drifts off or has inaccuracies, it sets off alarm bells in your head. I had this feeling at times during Dune. Some character would pause and look into the distance and say something supposedly profound and I'd think "No one ever said that". Or someone would dramatically announce they're going to escape to the such-and-such place and I'd think "There's no such place". I understand that making a film out of a well-known cult work is tricky because you have walk the fine line between keeping nit-picking fans happy and keeping the screen momentum rolling, so I can begrudgingly overlook small changes.

This movie had some changes that left me a bit irritable because they didn't seem to have any point.

• Duncan Idaho had an extraordinary amount of time on screen. In the book he's just one of many interesting core characters, but he sadly croaks quite early in the story in a heroic manner. I suspect that Jason Momoa received so much attention simply because he's one of the hottest A-listers around at the moment and they wanted to milk his popularity.
• Other characters were displaced by the extended screen presence of Jason Momoa. We quickly met most of the Atreides family and their retinue of attendant characters early in the movie, but we barely saw them again. All of these extra characters have really rich and interesting backgrounds, so I was disappointed to see so little of them. I presume (and hope) that some of them are being saved-up for the next movie.
• Liet Kynes was transformed from 1984's Max von Sydow into a 'charismatic strong-willed female'. This was an inevitable fate for at least one of the original characters and it's almost a trope now that such characters are mandatory. The character also had a exaggerated amount of development and screen time that didn't really seem to lead anywhere useful.
• The 'Research Facility' they escaped to was completely concocted and seemed to serve no purpose other than to be a place where they could delay the preordained deaths of Liet Kynes and Duncan Idaho for as long as possible while amplifying their heroism. The scene where the Saudarkar soldiers were using a lazbeam to cut through a huge steel door was an unexpected little bit of cool hard SF taken from the book.

Javier Badem's performance as Stilgar was fabulous. He had to spout some made-up dialogue, but he even made that sound mesmerising as he swaggered around the sets (close your eyes and you can imagine the adventues of the Cat from Shrek on an alien planet).

The new Vladimir Harkonnen portrayal is blessed relief after the disgustingly comical one from the 1984 movie. Now he feels much closer to the cruel and scheming character in the book.

The soundtrack by Hans Zimmer blends smoothly into the movie. Hans normally has all the knobs turned up to 11, so it's nice to see him ease back and make some atmospheric and exotic music. There's a bit of an overabundance of drums at times, and I don't know how laughter from preview audiences didn't get the bagpipes removed from the final cut.

So overall, Dune 2021 is a pretty impressive movie which generally captures the atmosphere, characters, plots, sub-plots and action of the book, but it could have been better. In fact, it could have been brilliant and become a cult movie, but I don't think that's going to happen because it doesn't dig into the cultures and characters in the Dune universe. Most of the screen time is occupied by only a handful of the available characters, and we don't get inside their heads enough to feel deeply engaged with them.

Sometimes I felt like I was watching a big-budget documentary about Dune.

Most impressively (unlike No Time to Die and Matrix IV), this movie does have a bit of revisit value. There are some scenes that I don't think I quite absorbed properly on first viewing, so during some future idle time I'll play the movie again, but I'll skip over the tedious exposition parts and focus on the scenes of interest. Fast forwarding through the second viewing of a major movie is about the closest admission you'll get from me that the movie was ... err ... sort of ... acceptable.

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