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| Dune In yts |
The Dream of Villeneuve
After a long wait, the fateful day has arrived. The world premiere of Dune by Denis Villeneuve, a new film adaptation of the novel by Frank Herbert, a milestone in science fiction literature already transposed to the big screen in 1984, was held today 3 September 2021 at the 78th Venice International Film Festival. by David Lynch and also in a television series in the early 2000s.
The one set by the author of Blade Runner 2049 in development was, however, a different and more complex goal, meticulous and daring, wanting to solve once and for all the problems inherent in the condensation of the original material in Lynch's film and also drawing on some inspiration coming from the never-realized work of Alejandro Jodorowski.
An ideal bridge between the great authorial past and a more mainstream vision but with a strong artistic character of the director himself, who by choosing to divide the adaptation into two films has had the opportunity to deeply enter into the sci-fi epic conceived by Herbert, packaging a first deeply introductory title but also meticulously faithful to the book from which it is taken, obsessive and scrupulous to excess.
Not a passage or a dialogue is lost, Villeneuve, setting up under the aegis Legendary Pictures and Warner Bros. a mammoth spectacle reverential to an essential novel of the genre, scenographically impacting and visually incisive.
That of the director is a pop poetics that focuses on sustained formal tones and is only apparently aimed at a mass audience because the truth is that the author's style does not suit the mainstream tastes of today's audience. And Dune is certainly no less, both in aesthetics and in content, despite everything that has been done to make it as "modern" as possible and revise Herbert's many bizarre and iconic inventions in an attractive and adaptable key.
Just like Paul's visions, we witness Villeneuve's daydream, who, assisted by Hans Zimmer's thunderous music - energetic and anguished - and by Greig Fraser's photography, manages to achieve what is currently the best transposition of the book for overview and spasmodic attachment to the starting material.
The structural problems of Dune
The most incredible paradox of this new Dune is that, despite being an excellent adaptation, it, unfortunately, fails to be the epochal film we expected. The reason lies not in the form nor in the choral cast, which from Chalamet as Paul Atreides to Stellan Skarsgard as Baron Harkonnen is centered and successful.
Indeed Villeneuve even manages to bring out the best of Jason Momoa's dramatic talents as Duncan Idaho and make the most of Oscar Isaac as he plays him. The problem lies elsewhere and to be exact in the calm rhythm and in the same dilation of the execution times for a first chapter which is practically an advance on the more full-bodied story that we will see later.
In this sense, the film presents itself as a sort of DuneZionario, a collection of characters, words and notions that the viewer needs to enter the world of action in the best possible way, but on balance there is action. very little, with sequences of incredible potential often sacrificed in the name of a very long field or a cut-off that could have been avoided. The paradox lies precisely in the fact that, despite being a faithful title with refined aesthetics, this first Dune flaws in the rhythm and in the verbose narrative and visual, which, net of the imaginative show described above, often turns out to be exhausting.
The reason is that there is actually little to say in this beginning, at least in the main plot, and apart from the plot twist that many of you will no doubt know and which comes in more or fewer three-quarters of a title, the rest is a Villeneuve's lectio magistralis on the dangers of Arrakis and on the hierarchy of universal houses. Powerful descriptive images, boundless ocher landscapes and a Shai-Hulud just immortalized are not enough to make the new Dune a masterpiece.
Of course, Herbert's work is in itself a river of elements, names, characters, languages and customs that are difficult to adapt without opting for ceremonious respect or full interpretative freedom, in a formal sense, but Villeneuve by choosing the first possibility is voluntarily assumed the risk of packing an intellectual and disproportionate science fiction epic with all its vices and all its virtues, and this courage must be recognized, the result clearly rewarded.
Expected, debated, feared, postponed: Denis Villeneuve's new Dune is finally here and, after all, it is just as we expected, faithful to the limit of reverential Frank Herbert's original work and a conceptual bridge between the Lynchian and Jodoroswkian authorial past and the stylistic grammar of the author of Blade Runner 2049. This makes it rich in merits but also in various structural defects, resulting in any case the best transposition ever produced of the work, which does not necessarily include elements such as originality or virtuosity - which in fact does not there are.
Perfect is the choral cast put together by the director, from Timothée Chalamet to Rebecca Ferguson. On balance, this first chapter of the new adaptation of Dune is deeply introductory and dedicated above all to the precise and substantial disclosure of the essential notions of the universe of action, but after all, it is part of Villeneuve's project, which we now only hope will be able to find a conclusion. otherwise it would be a big problem.