This film delivers everything that you would expect from a Villeneuve take on his dream project Dune - an intelligent, ambitious and largely faithful adaptation that is visually stunning, technically flawless and delivers superbly on both spectacle and story, and it is a clear culmination of the director's films and experience so far. The main difficulty of adapting Herbert's sprawling saga - like with Arthur C. Clarke's novels - is taming the author's huge-scale imagination and world-building to fit a cinema screen and run-time. Unlike the 1984 version that tried to shoehorn too much into a single film, Villeneuve made the sensible decision to approach the project as two films (the second thankfully greenlit), and whilst this film is very clearly Part 1 of a pair, it does a good job with the story and character arcs so far (and with Chalamet giving easily and thankfully his best and most truthful performance since Call Me By Your Name in the key central role - indeed, casting in general is spot-on and performances terrific). If you know the books, this is a terrific visualisation of all the fan-pleasing elements and both the location shooting and effects work look ravishing. It is a clear culmination of the director's films and experience so far. The film will seem too slow and ponderous to the casual mainstream viewer, but this is no popcorn-action movie, making it a bold and spectacular hard-sci-fi experience.
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