I saw the new Dune, and after loving Blade Runner 2049, I am shocked how much I disliked Villeneuve's take on Dune. Aside from quality special FX and action scenes, Dune 2021 offers nothing that David Lynch didn't do much better almost 40 years ago.
From production design to color grading to acting, music, pacing and most importantly tone, the new movie is a mess.
Villeneuve tries so hard to be cinematic here. He goes in for closeups, with short focal range, trying to make scenes intimate, but only succeeds in making the movie feel small where Lynch's felt grand and spaceous.
Gone is the splendid decor of the 84 version, the eerie industrial hellscapes of Giedi Prime, gone is the Emperor (entirely), the politics, the guild, the opening narration easing you into Herbert's vast sci fi universe, instead replaced by cookie cutter nonsense about oppression that we've heard a million times before.
Everything that was memorable about Lynch's original is either dumbed down or gone. The internal monologues, the shock quality of the Harkonnens, the freaky bald headed Bene Gesserit or the vagina face guild navigator - Warner took the edge off the new movie to make it palatable to Chinese audiences. It's a bland, McDonalds like fast food meal, unironically served entirely without spices or artistic vision.
Hans Zimmer, whom I normally enjoy, drops the ball here, with the soundtrack blaring and waling at moments that call for a quiet soundtrack. Nothing comes close to the spiritual, ethereal soundtrack of the original. Or even the video game soundtrack by Stephane Picq, which was hauntingly beautiful and unique.
The actor's accents also don't mesh well. Accents are all over the place, with some characters nearly impossible to understand without subtitles. Jason Momoa feels like he's doing an entirely different film, and aside from Rebecca Fergusson and Timothée Chalamet, most of the acting is objectively bad. The Harkonnens are generic boring black dressed sci fi villains, with Stellan Skarsgard sleepwalking through his few lines. Utterly boring compared to Kenneth MacMillan's maniical floating Lunatic Baron in the original.