Denis Villeneuve
Dune

I was about to go to sleep disappointed. After months of waiting, this Dune left a slightly bitter taste in my mouth, because in two and a half hours we barely have time to enter Herbert's universe, and then who knows when we'll meet again. But now, as if through an epiphany, almost as if I had inhaled some spice particles, I have understood Villeneuve's intentions.

The reduction of content we witness with this film, which perhaps covers half of the first book, is nothing but an enrichment, a working on details, chiseling them with care and amplifying the perceptions, because before the events, Dune is in the settings and the sensations; its essence hovers in the sand of the desert. A care and devotion that is a direct consequence of the enormous respect the director has for the novel.

The work of reduction is always the most difficult and costly, especially these days, but our director has accustomed us to a non-trivial attention to his creations. And so if approaching Dune in broad strokes would have made it a blockbuster not too different from many others, the filmmaker slows down, stretching some moments almost to spasm: you almost feel a strain, the entire weight of the events falls onto our perceptions as an audience eager in the darkness of the theater. The environment, the darkness, the deep problematic nature of everything gives the narrative a sense of suffocation, just as if we were also on Arrakis.

Long sequences in the desert, tragic nights, a slow dying, infernal clangs vomiting terror into the darkest corners of this universe. Worms that devour our perceptions, an aridity that makes its way into our hearts. An auteur film. Villeneuve seems to play scenes with a violin bow, and slows movements until the melody turns into a dark rasp. Here in bed, as I write, after the initial sense of incompleteness, I relive Paul's forewarnings, tremble with Jessica and feel suffocated with Duke Leto. The greed of the Harkonnens and the resentment of the Fremen have slowly penetrated me, I feel them under the skin. I know that the battle, the war, will be consecrated to faith in that cinema which (in a few enlightened cases like this) does not accept easy solutions. Films like riddles don't give you everything; they ask you to give something, to feel something.

As for the rest, especially in the first half, my constant thought was directed at the incredible power of Villeneuve's vision. The completeness is stunning (I would almost call it golden) that emerges from every frame. Cinema that is not a juxtaposition of narrative contents, but a painting on film, conveying through the unspoken of the images a series of filigrees of meaning. Every detail speaks, every choice has consequences (sometimes ignored) in the mind of the viewer. Denis's paintings whisper things to us. The shape of a spaceship, the clothes worn by the populations, the austerity of the palaces, the vastness of the desert: cinematic art - when it's pure - knows how to deeply examine every detail, every object, every environment to extract a meaning. It always depends on the depth of the eye that watches.

And here there is all the energy and poetry of a director who takes nothing for granted when he opens the lens and shapes his vision, unique and unrepeatable. Especially in the first part of the film, when the action is more subdued, one truly gets lost in the beauty and originality of each auteur vision. Villeneuve's eye rewrites the sequences, eliminating any possible clichés of staging, perhaps the result of previous genre conventions. No, he looks with new eyes.

But it's not enough, and so he throws into our ears that volcanic flow which is Hans Zimmer's soundtrack. Because it's necessary to stun our hearing too, the stimulus of another sense allows it to go beyond, and further enriches our perceptions, already fiercely subdued in the visual component. It intoxicates us, suffocates us with the vision of Arrakis, but what bends us, brings us to our knees are the terrifying roars entrusted to Zimmer.

It's not a smooth film, this is obvious, it’s not easily intelligible, just as the book isn't. The handling of secondary characters is debatable (perhaps the only real mistake of the director) and the pace is perhaps excessively... elephantine. Too much love in some aspects has led to a heaviness that is not always (almost never) rewarded by an effective content yield. It is a hard test, with no immediate reward, like those Paul is forced into. A film decidedly out of time (and this is not a flaw), memorable in some ways, almost a manifesto of a new (rediscovered) sensitivity and respect for this art, which cannot think to live (or survive) if it no longer knows how to be demanding with itself and its audience.