Villeneuve’s Dune is being launched 37 years after David Lynch’s attempt (a colossal distance in which no other director set his hands on this novel to adapt it) and, despite the technological gap in between them, these two films similarly approach the source material to such a degree that a lot of the uninitiated thought that this year’s feature was a remake of Lynch’s “original”. I wouldn’t be as harsh: I’d say that Villeneuve acts out of sympathy towards Herbert also as a way to find a mellow solution for the fans that would have been offended had he deviated too much from his story. Lynch had instead deviated in terms of visuals and representation, lining his film with a sweetened mosaic of anachronisms (Kyle MacLachlan is enthusiastically Cooperian, which turns him into an ideal white savior; need I mention the fact that he is hugging the Atreides family pug, that the characters’ shields are literally some shameless CGI cubes, that, in a moment of psychedelic delirium, we witness a Malickian Big Bang after Paul and Chiani kiss?). 

Georgiana Mușat

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Journalist and film critic, with a master's degree in film critics. Collaborates with Scena9, Acoperișul de Sticlă, FILM and FILM Menu magazines. For Films in Frame, she brings the monthly top of films and writes the monthly editorial Panorama, published on a Thursday. In her spare time, she retires in the woods where she pictures other possible lives and flying foxes.

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