Review: ‘Dune’ is a vast, beautiful film that loses sight of its emotional core

Dune

Expectation, thy name is Dune. Years in the making and then delayed for an entire year thanks to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Dune has the weight of expectations hanging over it. Director Denis Villeneuve is an accomplished visionary with a clear eye for details and world-building alike, but how can the story of Dune –a famously dense work– be adapted into a movie?

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’Dune’ Trailer: Stop what you’re doing right now and watch this

Dune

If you have been paying attention to cinema these last few years then the name Denis Villeneuve should be an exciting one to you. His particular aesthetic sense for visual narrative has made him one of the most well regarded director of the day.

If you’re a fan of science fiction then the name Dune should also excite you, being that Dune is one of –if not the– most influential and important science fiction novels of all time.

“Denis Villeneuve has been making a Dune movie” is maybe the most exciting sentence I have read or uttered this year.

Here’s a trailer for it.

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Review: ‘Doctor Sleep’ shines in more ways than one

How do you make a sequel to a classic? It’s a difficult thing; the balance between paying homage to what came before and forging something new is difficult. An inch too far in either direction, and you risk the ire of someone, either the fan who wants something new or the fan who wants the same thing all over again.

Doctor Sleep makes the question even more difficult. The film The Shining is a stone-cold classic to reuse the word. Adapted from Stephen Kings novel of the same name, it takes many liberties with the story, so much so that King himself famously did not like it. King wrote the novel Doctor Sleep 36 years later as a sequel. So the question is, how do you adapt a novel that serves as a sequel to a classic book and film, each of which has distinctly different arcs and in particular endings?

The answer is, of course, with great care, which is exactly what director Mike Flanagan has done.

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