A week having passed since I went to see Dune: Part 2, I am still trying to piece together my overall opinion of the movie.
Mostly, I continue to feel like it was a lot and I wish that I could watch it on my own TV instead of in the theater. I saw it at the local(ish) Cinemark, in one of their XD theaters—not IMAX, but still quite a large screen and an impressive sound system.
It is not an experience I care to repeat. While I am generally a fan of seeing movies on a big screen, this was too much and it was too loud. I came out of the theater feeling beat-up and exhausted.
I also felt like it was too long. That is not necessarily a knock on this movie in particular (although I will admit I did find myself checking my watch during the Giedi Prime sequence, which seemed largely unnecessary and could have been cut by at least half). Rather, sitting in a theater for a nearly three-hour movie just seems like too much.
Part of me wonders if a three-part adaptation might be better than two parts. I think that worked pretty well for Peter Jackson’s Lord Of the Rings films; I could see getting both parts of Dune on blu-ray and then figuring out the right places in them to stop to make it a trilogy.
One thought that has stuck with me is that while I really appreciate Denis Villeneuve as a director, I wonder if his style is maybe a little too languorous for the source material here. His long takes and willingness to linger on small details and quiet moments is a perfect fit for the more esoteric aspects of the story, but it means either sacrificing large sections of the narrative or ending up with a really long movie.
Villeneuve clearly picked door number two. That was probably the right decision, but I am still just not sure that it makes for a good movie-going experience.