Here’s a review roundup of Denis Villeneuve’s ‘Dune’ following its Venice Film Festival premiere.
The first reviews for Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” are in, and the reactions are split. Ravenous sci-fi fanatics waited with bated breath as cast members Timothée Chalamet, Oscar Isaac, Zendaya, Josh Brolin, Rebecca Ferguson and Javier Bardem walked down the Venice Film Festival red carpet before the first-ever screening on Friday. After being delayed for more than a year, the Frank Herbert adaptation was finally unleashed to a small crowd of festival-goers, journalists and critics. What did the first critics to lay eyes on the latest version of the sandworm have to say? Does the spice flow for “Dune”? So far, critics are excited about the scope and scale of the feature, but don’t seem convinced that Villeneuve stuck the landing story-wise. Glieberman wrote that “Dune” is “spectacular and engrossing… until it isn’t.” “Here’s one useful definition of a great sci-fi fantasy film. It’s one in which the world-building is awesome but not more essential than the storytelling. In the first two ‘Star Wars’ films, those dynamics were in perfect sync; they were, as well, in ‘The Dark Knight’ and the ‘Mad Max’ films. ‘Blade Runner,’ in its way, is an amazing movie, but its world-building packs more punch than its transcendental neo-noir noodlings.
