summerloud

I seriously cannot fathom how this movie has 8 of 10 people saying it's brilliant.

The only possible explanation that I come up with, is that most people stop watching this and never bother to review it.

Everything about this is bad. Acting is horrible. The music is atrocious and does not fit at all. The characters are cardboard cutout cliches.

The premise might sound like it could have potential, but it's pulled off in a way that makes me wonder how anyone could think its deep or thought-provoking.

I just dont understand what is happening in the review section here... that is honestly the only interesting thing about this movie.

Is every Ridley Scott movie the same, or am i just jaded?

Seriously, I can't enjoy movies like this any more. The same old plot clichês, the same ridiculous super good vs super evil tropes. Every single fight plays out exactly the way it did a thousand times before, down to the last detail.

Every single "good" character is 100% aligned with our 21st century values. Every single bad character is evil in every conceivable way. Where are the grey tones for god's sake? Where is historical accuracy? Can't Hollywood tone it down just a little bit? Am I the only one tired of this?

At least we won't have to endure Ridley Scott's movies for much longer, and he completely demolished his own legacy with Napoleon.

If you are reading this, you probably already heard a thousand times that the movie is visually stunning, and while i agree (that's why I am giving it 7 stars, despite all the criticism below), it puts visuals above everything else, killing logic and storytelling in the process.

The stark, sometimes almost monochrome visual style, is very much contemporary, and I dare to say that it will not age well. At least I hope so, because it will mean that people will rediscover colors.

Everything has to be black, white and one additional color. This means everything on Dune consists of bare stone walls an sand. People are living this way? No furniture, no textiles, no food. Sand and stone. No life!

Everything has to be black, even the good guys. Even the Fremen stillsuits are black, which is the worst possible color to pick for a suit that is supposed to help you survive in the desert.

The lifelessness does not stop there - even the emperor of the galaxy is a bland lifeless colorless type, that looks like he just stepped out of a retirement home (maybe that's some kind of intented political message?)

My second biggest gripe is also a very contemporary problem - Paul, the ubermensch messiah, can't do a single action scene without looking for his girl to support, because the message that she is as strong as him, powerful, independent, etc etc, of course has to be driven home, as is customary today. They even sacrifice the original plot (where she is a mother), in order to have her be a kick ass fighter, because we surely don't get enough female fighters in nowaday's cinema.

All in all, I liked the books ok, but let's face it: Dune did not age well as a story. It's too complex to be popcorn SciFi like Star Wars, and too illogical to be taken seriously. Nothing in the story makes sense, the whole setup is completely ridiculous. Unlike Star Wars, it also completely fails to make the universe feel big, filled with life. Even the major houses feel like a joke - we get these battles between the supposedly most powerful players in the galaxy, and it's like a hundred dudes killing each other with knives.

In my opinion, the only one who could have ever really made a good movie out of Dune was Jodorowky. At least that would have been psychedelic, which is another aspect this movie is completely lacking. The main point of the movie is a drug that lets you bend spacetime and see the future, and we do not get a single psychedelic shot in 6 hours?

To sum it up, it feels like Villeneuve made a movie that is so visually stunning that you hardly can not like it at all, while completely missing the point of a book, that aged badly in of itself.