Film Shapes

Dune: Part Two picks up very close to the end of the first film - Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and his mother, Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) are embedded with the Fremen following the attack on house Atreides from Dune: Part One . The first scene of some Harkonnen foot soldiers getting dealt with is neatly done but not quite the opener that I was expecting. This ties into my major issue with the film - it takes an awfully long time to get going. I'd say the whole first hour is spent developing Paul's relationship with Chani (Zendaya) and Jessica's rise to Reverend Mother of the Fremen, blue worm juice ingesting and all. There's also an extended 'rites of passage' angle where Paul must show his mettle to be accepted by the tribes. All important stuff, granted, but I'd have preferred a bit more back and forth with the other camps - Harkonnen, Emperor & Bene Gesserit. When this does eventually happen, the film really finds its groove. Christopher Nolan s...

Denis Villeneuve's long-awaited  Dune  finally arrives in Australian cinemas and it's a technical marvel.  To start with, there's the amazing production design by Patrice Vermette. A lot of the sets and machinery have been physically created, to add weight to the visual effects. A highlight is the appearance of the 'ornithopter', a clunky, dragonfly of metal, that flaps its wings to fly. The scale of the buildings and cities is mammoth, many of them made on a studio lot in Budapest (see this  Architectural Digest article  for more). The cinematography, by Melburnian, Greig Fraser, is suitably magic, in keeping with Villeneuve's stylistic requirements, For example, desert scenes have a tendency to go all wind-whipped and blurry, but even when a dragonfly enters a storm, acuity is admirably maintained.  The visuals are just a part of Villeneuve's signature language - the almost ethereal long shots across vast rooms and landscapes; the measured, even slow paci...