Back from it, I do not see the distinction Villeneuve tried to draw between Marvel and his movie, to me both are the same:
A lot of rich people spending their time talking, a chosen one, 30 explosions per shots because VFX factories offers fixed bid and are paid per shot, not the amount of creatures or explosion they put in it which is why you always see a billions things going on per shot, everything is overly synthetic and there are no risk taken anywhere (the editing, story, acting, colors, cinematography, VFX are all but very conservative).
It looked much like a very old movie made with a mind from someone of the previous centuries, oh look the desert people are arabic, the traitor are asians, the bad guys dress in black, the messiah is young and innocent and goes to an exotic place...
Mute the sound, there's no tension, nothing surprising, everything (not story wise, cos I know Dune is old) visually has been shot a billion time the same way ESPECIALLY in the last couple of years (Wadi Rum in Prometheus, and Star Wars, both got a real love for Lawrence of Arabia, at least Prometheus tried to put make up on it by having bigger mountains in the background and transform the place into a very humid and cold environment).
The sand dune are the same in Star Wars VII, IDK what I was looking at, I'm pretty sure you can cross cut Dune shots with The Force Awakens very easily.
Brutalism is so over-rated these days, yet everything feels dysfunctional and doesn't mean much beside very rich people trying to look modest in their grandiose empty castle.
Music everywhere and when it's muted they really push the useless soundFX (I mean it's sand moving... no need to put thunder sound there or woooosh
)
This movie is in my opinion the pinacle of everything I find symptomatic with the industry, it's a disney in disguise or should I say a "long commercial sold as a TV series only for the large screen where the point isn't to make a great movie but to make sure enough people will come back for a sequel not everyone is sure they really want but that please the shareholder.
Would have been at least partially okay if the material was original but even that is so old and consumed and I'm pretty sure they didn't try to go too much off road cos it doesn't look like a Blade Runner attempt compared to do Android dream of electric sheep or close to anything Jodorowsky tried to inject.
