I’m not calling this a review, since I don’t want to get a lot into the film itself, but this is more to say I can’t understand how everyone is so effusive about it. I’m going to call it the Excalibur effect. Excalibur was the 1981 grandiose take on King Arthur. Clearly a result of studios trying to figure out why Star Wars was such a hit, where a lot of other films chased, desperately and without any of the technical finesse or storytelling flare, what George Lucas did, in the genre he did it, Excalibur went in another direction, far into literary history, for another saga involving grand destinies, the sad stories of fathers and sons, and, well, swordplay. And it did it straight, no studio meddling to broaden the audience (which usually means adding in some comedic elements), full fantasy, and it’s been a cult classic ever since.
The Excalibur effect is perhaps better known, today, through Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, filled with the same purposeful earnestness (with some comedic elements), but otherwise embraced with extravagant praise, from the start, by critics and viewers, to a greater extent than Excalibur itself, thanks to its unusual, to this day, strategy of releasing three films in three years, and telling fans they were all shot simultaneously, the MCU before the MCU of getting ahead of the curve and getting to ride it the whole way.
I don’t think any of these movies, with the exception of Fellowship of the Ring, deserves the amount of praise they get. I find them to be highly indulgent, from the entirety Excalibur to how Gollum is depicted in the second and third Rings. When you go grand you have to earn it with truly great filmmaking.
Denis Villeneuve is a great filmmaker, but he’s driving himself to distraction with how long he stays on Arrakis. Here I’m specifically addressing the length of these films. If he were packing them with the kind of gripping drama or subtle intrigue of his best films, that would be one thing. But Dune: Part Two is packed mostly with dithering. Pretty dithering, but mostly an internal battle Paul Atreides fights over a destiny we’re supposed to question. It’s the whole point. But instead we’re led to hero-worship him, like everyone else.
So it’s a movie no one else could have made. I get that. No one else has. But sometimes no one should. Maybe it’s because I’m impatient for Villeneuve to work on some of his own material. People say they love this now, but will they follow him the way they have Christopher Nolan? Nolan had his Batman films, but he always balanced them with other work. I get that Villeneuve was probably happy he got to make a second one at all, and he was rewarded for it. There’s more praise and attention this time than with the first one.
I just wish he could have made his point better, I guess, and not worried so much that it looked good regardless. Sometimes that’s not actually the only thing you need to worry about. Some people just can’t tell the difference. It’s the Excalibur effect. But it’s the substance that really counts. Extremely competent filmmaking still needs excellent storytelling.
