Dune: Part Two

2024

★★★½

The latest Dune is only slightly better than the previous one, but it is still tedious to watch and lacks a cinematic narrative construction. It seems more suited for television. You could give the audience three more hours while still only mining book one and there’d be no pushback. Additionally its postmodern angle (rejection of grand narratives {so hot right now}) is more in line with Game of Thrones—so why are we getting a Lord of the Rings (modernist) screen treatment? 
I'm not suggesting that a modernist or postmodernist angle couldn't be done well in either tv or film (far from it). But each approach has its trade-offs, and I wish that Villeneuve's Dune had a clearer cinematic translation. Right now, it's in a no man's desert of TV narrative with an eight figure budget on an IMAX screen, and that does not make cinema.

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