Dune: Part One (2021)

Scale is the operative word here, the big kind. Massive, colossal, huge and gigantic. Three or four Empire Strikes Back could fit into this movie. And it is not even done yet! It is to-be-continued (the worst kind of movie) and its second half is yet to be greenlit; we do not yet know if we will be alive to watch the conclusion of this huge film. Timothée Chalamet returns in the role of Prince Hal (The King, 2019) and so we are given fair warning that this film’s savior is Christian (in the Donald Trump “I alone can fix it” sense of the word). But Chalamet knows just how heavy lies the crown: “you turned me into a freak!” he yells at his mom, the super canny Rebecca Ferguson, engineer of messiahs (A fun fact: the name of the messiah, Kwisatz Haderach, is an ancient Hebrew word kefitzat haderech, translated “the shortening of the way;” or what we would now call teleportation). The witchy aspects here are nice; I’ve always loved the Bene Gesserit; the mind control, the 10,000 year genealogical manipulation, the gom jabar and the put-your-hand-in-this-box bit. And yet the weirding women are perhaps more sinister and not as weird as they have been before. This Dune is not awkward in the way that David Lynch’s Dune is, but it is also not amazing in the ways that Lynch’s Dune is either. It is merely exceedingly epic, a movie made for a dying cineplex; skip the HBO version if you can help it.