Dune

I'm not a fan of the source material, so I'm more interested in how Villeneuve manages to compress that giant load of lore with the exhausted tale of the Chosen One, empires, and brave natives into some kind of coherent shape. And so, first and foremost, I'll preface this by saying right up front that I stared at this for two and a half hours with my mouth agape and can't remember the last time I explicitly begged the screen not to let it end yet. The new Dune is all about bravura work with scale. It manages to depict the weight and importance of certain situations in a clean visual way, as well as the essential role of certain artifacts or elements. He can maintain an intimate atmosphere in large units when he wants to, and he can still create an epic scene from just a shot of shifting sand. Of course, the completely off-the-leash Zimmer helps, but it's not the music itself that's behind it, but its layout and especially its frequent overflowing from scene to scene, which gives the film a surprising compactness. Next, watch the shot order, the angles, and the editing in the scenes with equipment. That initial reluctance to immediately reveal the scale of the scene and the gradual revelation of the monumentality of the entire sequence. Yet there are several such sequences in the film. When this approach culminates in the first encounter with Shai-Hulud, you're faced with one of the greatest scenes you've ever seen. This is something that Disney and Netflix professionals combined simply can't pull off in essence. I sometimes think of POM's remark on Children of Men when he writes in 2006 "I think that just as Spielberg, Coppola et al. got a dying Hollywood on its feet in the seventies, Cuarón, Greengrass et al. will take it to another level now, in the age of calculated digital crap", which is still perfectly apt 15 years later, except we can update the names to Villeneuve, Nolan, or Miller. It's absolutely incumbent on everyone involved to finish the series and then allow us to get together with our buddies on the weekend and do the whole thing as a marathon, just like we still do with LOTR. A cinematic event and the second best adaptation of the source. ______________________ The accumulating boo! reviews from interchangeable morons seem to come primarily from the couch comfort of HBO Max, where the film is unfortunately airing in parallel with the theatrical release. I infer this from the recurring remarks about switching off halfway through or clicking through. It's further evidence of the importance of dusting off the importance of cinemas as cultural centers and distributors of a collective experience that accentuates the power of film, if only because the viewer actually has to do something for it too (pay for a ticket, physically get there, defend their opinion to others after the film, etc). This creates an unrepeatable conjunction between humanity and space, which among other things helps engender greater sensitivity to the work and cannot be simulated elsewhere. So television still remains television and is intended for the same television people as it has always been. And having your choice of programming doesn't change that. People didn’t get smarter when they opened libraries, either. (22/10/2021) (moins) (plus)