Khoi Vinh’s review published on Letterboxd:
I went back for another viewing, just to be sure I hadn’t been hoodwinked the first time by the majesty and scale of this movie’s visual spectacle. The verdict is, nope, this is not superficial “cinema of attraction”-style box office filmmaking. It’s true auteurism, an honest-to-goodness masterpiece, where the visual juggernaut of a man riding a building-sized sandworm is equaled by—does not drown out—the emotional authenticity of real, fully dimensional characters.
Even on a second viewing. I was at my most choked up, both from joy and empathy, when the principal characters are simply sitting around in a tent after an epic battle scene, space-vaping or something; the intimacy and realness of their exchange, not to mention the warmth of the performances, was just so powerful, almost intoxicating in its immersion into such a foreign land. There’s also a moment where Harkonnen storm troopers run up the side of a cliff and almost gently propel themselves off into the air, lifting themselves upwards in an antigravitational leap that’s just gorgeous. On paper it’s less impressive than the flying that superheroes do all over blockbuster cinema, but this expression of it is so organic, so human and so believable that it manages to be many, many times more impressive. It’s just good taste.
This second watch also underscored for me just how much Villeneuve changed in this story from the original Herbert text—and how smart all of the decisions are. The arc that he’s built for Zendaya’s Chani makes so much more sense, both dramatically—it gives the character a much greater foundation—and politically—it escalates Herbert’s original “girlfriend” conception of the role to something more substantial and pivotal to the story.
Villeneuve’s Chani is much more of an audience surrogate, even if she knows and understands the world and lore much better than the Paul character. She’s a beacon for our skepticism of hero worship that drives the second half of the story. And Zendaya kills it. She delivers her dialog with complete conviction, and every disapproving glance she gives is moving the counterstory forward, adding complexity and richness to the hero’s journey. Chani’s conduct, and Zendaya’s smoldering rendering of it, give real life to the drama, and make Dune feel like a real world, not just a sci-fi construct.
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