DIEU_ET_MAITRE

Villeneuve started out by making mediocre to bad films, then he made three good ones, now he's regressed to his old quality, only the budgets are bigger.

Expositional dialogues to the max in the first hour or so (doesn't get much better later on either though), extremely unsubtle tries at emotional manipulation by the music/sound design soap opera style (sometimes adding unwanted humour to scenes which are supposed to be sad/serious/whatever), way too short shot length killing any atmosphere to build up, generic editing and filmmaking overall.

Especially sad is the lack of atmosphere part, because the set and production design in general is in parts quite interesting (I'm thinking rooms/spaces, the aircrafts/space ships).

Also the film served merely as a prologue and I'm sorry but two and a half hour of prologue only works when you have atmosphere, some compelling form of storytelling ability or when you have characters with actual depth - just not the absolute generic "archetypal" ones you have here that seem to primarily rely on the big name actors behind them. Normally everytime you see a familiar face in a movie it pulls you out of it - one of the reason why I'm not a fan of the "star system" - but since "Dune" is the absolute polar opposite of what one might call "immersive", this aspect of it doesn't really matter here I guess...

All the characters speak in a ridiculous overdramatized way - it's filmed theatre - and often times one cannot even understand what is being said because of how it is said and the weird sound mixing (half the words being unfamiliar terms specific to the Dune universe doesn't help either).

World building isn't randomly lumping together "new" concepts and terms, but actually having a cohesive vision of what you want to portray.

Even Lynch's Dune was better than this.

Describing something as "art" nowadays of course is somewhat redundant and meaningless, but this in my opinion is one of the greatest art pieces of the 21st century so far.

Everything is "in the field"-footage all around the different sets and filming locations. You'll see NBC directing actors, how long takes are being blocked and filmed etc...

For around ten Euros (probably like fifteen Dollars) it's definitely worth it (you can rent and rip).