I think the most damning thing I can say about Dune is that even now that I’ve started typing I kind of want to bail on the idea of writing a review.

I am more of a Dune fan than most people but not very much of a Dune fan, if that makes any sense. I have read (and, to be clear, enjoyed) the original novel four or five times, maybe, most recently within the last couple of years, but have never picked up any of the sequels, a fact I consider rectifying every year and never do. Over the last few days I’ve seen lots of people pretending the novel is terribly complex and difficult to read and I don’t know what they’re talking about. It’s long, yeah, but it’s perfectly readable. I have not seen the 1980s original film, either, although my wife keeps threatening to make me watch it, and is probably going to ramp up her campaign now that we’ve watched this one. Frankly, were she not interested in seeing the new film, I wouldn’t have watched it.

It’s … meh.

It’s pretty. It’s got an awesome sense of scale; anytime you’re looking at something that’s supposed to be real real big there’s always something in frame to make it clear just how colossal whatever you’re looking at is. And if I stop typing right now, I can move on with the process of forgetting that I saw it, which I suspect will take all of a day or two. Even complaining about it for a few more paragraphs will give my dislike of the movie more weight than it deserves; I barely have the energy right now to point out the bits that I didn’t like. I mean … bullet points? And not worrying about complete sentences? Sure, let’s try that.

• The casting is terrible. Every actor is either bad, distracting, or Timothée Challawhatever, who is not remotely heroic. Why is Drax in this?
• Jessica always, always, always crying
• Slooooooow-mooooooooo. If they’d cut half of the slow-motion they could have included some, like, context for this nonsense
• This movie is very serious
• The phrase “my boy!” is 50% of Jason Momoa’s dialogue and he somehow isn’t even pretty in this movie
• Terrible pacing. At one point they cut away from a plane crash so we can have a brief scene of a fat man taking a bath.
• The fat man isn’t even fat enough. I’m fatter than this guy. I want my levitation belt.
• brown
• The Gom Jabbar scene is the best part of the book and Chalamet looks like he’s struggling to hold off an orgasm for half of it
• half the film is inappropriately-timed dream sequences
• The Harkonnens are, like, cartoonishly evil on a level with Cobra Commander and Skeletor
• bleh

I mean, see it if you want to, I suppose, it’s not going to, like, hurt or anything, unless you see it in a theater and get Covid-19, and man, dying because you went to see Dune has to be the worst way to go ever.