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Originally Posted by Hack&Lube
I am sad to say this but I really despise Villeneuve's style. He's a great auteur and I can see that but his style simply does not fit with my personal tastes.
All his movies look exactly the same with the same cold and sterile blandness. I would almost say he was inspired by the brutalism of 1970s Montreal architecture. Whether it's Arrival or BR2049 or Dune, everything is sanitized, simplified, brutalist, clean. Nothing looks lived in. It just looks like stone washed concrete. The ships are the simplified round pods of arrival turned on the side. The Atreidies Starships look like concrete sandcrawlers. He managed to even make mentats and Harkonen look clean when they should be mutated by chemicals, spice, and the industrial pollution of their worlds. Everybody just wears grey. There's very little flourish.
Dune is a story of great houses with thousands of years of history and pomp and extravagance. The 1984 Lynch film actually captured some of this Rococo in the Imperial court and in the spacecraft. For example, the docking port of the Guild Heighliner with it's architectural flourish. I'm not saying everything should look like Warhammer 40K but there should be some feeling of millenia of decadence and decay to things.
Giedi Prime and the Harkonen lack the industrial, polluted, grotesque look to them. Arrakis is just more barren concrete that looked just the same as the port on Caledon. In fact there was nothing unique about Caledonian architecture at all aside from looking like it was in the Scottish Highlands. Everything there was just brutalist concrete as well. There isn't the desert mosaic HR Giger uniqueness to the alien world or stillsuits.
The costumes were all boring, everybody is just wearing your standard modern day superhero armor in various shades of grey. The one future dream of the Jihad had everybody in gold Ironman armor. There are hardly any touches of military tradition or decoration. The Sardaukar just look like astronauts (why are they even in this anyway? they shouldn't show up at this point or the Landstraat would learn of Imperial meddling).
Everything is just clean and desolate and I would be ok if this was a stylistic choice but the fact that every one of his movies looks like this just makes me unhappy with his films as they are not compatible with my perspective on these universes. I came away from BR2049 incredibly disappointed that it didn't feel lived in like the first one and felt just as cold and sterile as does Dune and Arrival.
I still enjoyed the film but his style is just not for me. Everything looks like the Montreal Metro and the 1976 Olympics.
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Personally I really like Villeneuve's visual style, but I have to say Dune, while I thought it looked and sounded really really good, was also in many ways disappointingly safe. So many recycled visual ideas from either the Lynch movie or BR2049, with a soundtrack that's really heavily reminiscent of the latter.
The way the story was told was also, to me, disappointingly safe. All the themes that are so integral to Dune were really tossed aside to just tell the very basic plot points of the story.
Overall this first Dune story which always gets filmed and repeated would really benefit if it already integrated the themes which are the central thesis of basically the rest of the series.
The one saving grace was that at least there was a small attempt to code the Atreides as just the friendlier face of the essentially the same military occupation.