In the Flesh: Dune (2021)

About five minutes into Denis Villeneuve’s sprawling adaptation of the first half of Dune, author Frank Herbert’s seminal sci-fi classic, it becomes abundantly clear that the high water mark of the film’s visual imagination is roughly equivalent to a 2000s-era HALO game. Boxy neutral-tone spaceships and body armor for the good guys, organic lines and a black and purple palette for the villains. Spacefaring vessels are big, uncomplicated geometric shapes — an oblong, a hyperrectangle — and swords and knives are oddly chunky and squared. Every room is a brutalist expanse of empty concrete, every parade ground and landing pad an endless sweep of hard-packed blandness. Even the lush homeworld of the Atreides looks like a level from the original 2001 Bungie video game, underexposed colors corrected down to muddy grays and greens, everything big and clean and bland. On the rare occasion visual detail enters a frame it’s so arresting as to appear actually alien.

In short, Dune looks more or less like every single major American sci-fi production of the past few decades, re-filtering the brackish water first reprocessed from Halo to the Mass Effect series into yet another militaristic, sludge-colored expanse of pauldrons and slab-sided gunships. There’s some fun costume design under this film of mediocrity — reverend mother Gaius Helen Mohiam (Charlotte Rampling) looks appropriately eldritch and clerical in her first appearance, and if the costumes for the Spacing Guild and the Emperor’s representatives aren’t groundbreaking, at least they’re competently executed. Ditto for Lady Jessica Atreides’s (Rebecca Ferguson, giving one of the film’s few compelling performances) wardrobe, which melds harem shlock with sorcerous mystique to surprisingly cool effect. Beyond that, though, the rest is just differently colored boxes in different configurations.

Even when the film tries to be horrific, its essential visual timidity holds it back. The baron (Stellan Skarsgård) more closely resembles a hybrid of potato and human than a gluttonous grotesque, his dreadful prosthetic fat suit and mumbled line readings making him about as dynamic and repulsive as a Kuchi Kopi latex night light. His bizarre surgically-modified “pet” is likewise far too clean to inspire fear or revulsion, and the film opts to skip right over one of Dune’s most unsettling inventions: the heavily mutated Guild Navigators, fishlike seers who guide vast heighliners between the stars. No, there’s nothing in Villeneuve’s vision of Dune to inspire much beyond mild entertainment. Even the iconic worms themselves are rather lifeless, big dark tubes with stiff, unmoving mouths like a monstrous baleen whale’s. Whatever drew Villeneuve to Herbert’s work, his interpretation of the famous novel is a murky, tedious mess.