Ok, it looks great. Let's just leave it at that. Denis Villeneuve seems to take overly ambitious, under realized high concept properties; and turn them into really long 90's perfume commercials. I am waiting for his Scent of Total Recall next. In seriousness, the movie looks great. He covers over his bland treatment with a slick style that beguiles you into mistaking good lighting for good story telling. His telling of Dune is more inspired by Dune, than the original material. Unlike Cruella, which exceeds the original source, this is a much smaller and less interesting version. Backing away from Dune's abstract space opera, heavy with social, sexual, political, religious, and historic overtones; Villeneuve attempts to make Dune a love story that reflects the current world. It may have been better if he went all the way. Paul is just a person and not the a super human proto-diety resulting from a 10,000 year breeding program. The Freeman are an indigenous people of a planet, and not just another group of humans from Earth. Paul has a choice to have a 20th century Earth love story, and is not the son of a concubine borne into a world where marriage is about securing alliances and bloodlines. If Villeneuve clearly broke with the world setup by Frank Herbert and its rules, then maybe a movie about a reluctant messiah who wants to live a simple life with his true love would have worked. Instead, everyone just comes as stilted and unreliable. There is no emotion. You don't care. Everyone comes off as either psychotic, emotionally void, or just always angry. In trying to modernize the story, he minimized it. He lost the grandeur that makes the novel so enduring, and failed to replace it with a story where you care. | 