Dune 2 Thoughts
Few of my absolute favorite movies are Drive and Blade Runner 2049. And strangely whenever I try to explain to someone as to why I love them, I almost never think of the story or the dialogues. I only think of the feeling I had the first time I watched those movies.
Dennis Villeneuve recently said in an interview that he thinks TV has corrupted movies, that he remembers the movies for the visuals and how they made him feel and not for their dialogues. At first I did not think much of it but after watching Dune 2 yesterday in the biggest IMAX screen I could find, I get it now.
And it is even more interesting because that is exactly the reason I love Drive and Blade Runner 2049. The visuals of those movies make me truly believe that the movie is placed in some alien world. The absolute obsession of Nicolas Winding Refn and Dennis Villeneuve to say the minimum amount of words and let the world be the main character is what draws me to these kind of movies.
I did not feel like this after watching Dune 1 or at least not to the same magnitude. And I was really confused as to why not. It had all the elements I love, surrealism, behemoth machines, music which compels you to pay attention and style. I understood why not after watching Dune 2. The common thing amongst all of these movies is the emotion which blends itself with the world and that is what brings out the most honest feeling out from you.
I feel like the best movies are those which you can’t explain because those feelings you feel are so personal that you feel insecure that putting them into words might diminish them. But lets do it anyway :)
I’ve never seen anything like Dune 2. Dennis Villeneuve has managed to realize the Dune world in such a way that it seems like he was on a mission to change how we perceive movies. While watching this in IMAX it felt like I could almost touch the gargantuan machines or the formidable Shai-Hulud if I reached out my hand. I don’t know what trickery Greg Fraser (the cinematographer) and Villeneuve did but I could not believe what I was watching. One particular scene I remember is the scene in which we see the first crab like machine, a machine so huge that you would not be able to tell what it is if you stood close to it. As the scene progresses, you see Timothéet (Paul/Muad’Dib) and Zendaya(Chani) hide behind the stationary crab’s legs and try to take down the Thopter. As they’re fighting I almost forgot that it’s a moving machine, it felt like a fixture which has always been there and I would get surprised whenever it would move its legs and they had to run to take cover. That is what I love about these movies - visuals so foreign that your brain cannot understand how to frame it.
Dune 2 almost feels like a movie made by some advanced race than ours. However, what propels Dune 2 to heights way above Dune 1 are the relationships and the life we see people of that universe living. The reason the scene where Paul first rides the grandfather Shai-Hulud feels so magnificent and exciting is because I’d seen how Paul feels and how he thinks, how much he wants to be part of the Fremen and you automatically join Stilgar(Javier Bardem) in hoping that he truly is the Lisan al Gaib.