Dune review round-up: Timothée Chalamet sci-fi film is 'dazzling and frustrating'

Director Denis Villeneuve’s epic science fiction saga _Dune_ premiered on Friday, 3 September at the ongoing 78th  Venice International Film Festival . The movie received an eight-minute standing ovation at its premiere, taking the excitement a notch up for one of the most awaited movies of the year. The film, which is based on Frank Herbert’s classic science fiction novel, follows young Paul Atreides (played by Timothée Chalamet), as he arrives with his family on the inhospitable planet of Arrakis. The planet is home to a valuable spice that drives space travel and can even extend life. However, the Atreides family is unaware of the dangers that lurk on Arrakis. Dune features a multi-talented cast including Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Josh Brolin, Zendaya, Oscar Isaac, Jason Mamoa Dave Bautista, Stellan Skarsgård, Stephen McKinley Henderson and Chang Chen. The movie releases worldwide on 22 October. Here are the early reviews: The Guardian: “Dune is dense, moody and quite often sublime – the missing link bridging the multiplex and the arthouse.” The publication also added that the movie “tells us that big-budget spectaculars don’t have to be dumb or hyperactive, that it’s possible to allow the odd quiet passage amid the explosions.” Variety: The publication called the film “a majestically sombre and grand-scale sci-fi trance-out,” adding that it “is out to wow us, and sometimes succeeds, but it also wants to get under your skin like a hypnotically toxic mosquito. It does…until it doesn’t.” Entertainment Weekly: “The sheer awesomeness of Villeneuve’s execution — there might not be another film this year, or ever, that turns one character asking another for a glass of water into a kind of walloping psychedelic performance art — often obscures the fact that the plot is mostly prologue: a sprawling origin story with no fixed beginning or end.” Time Out: Calling the film “sprawling, spectacular and politically resonant in its critique of colonialism and exploitation”, the review added that not everyone might have the patience that the director demands for this movie, but those who do “will be rewarded with precise storytelling, visual fireworks and some god-level world-building.” The Wrap: “Villeneuve’s Dune is both dazzling and frustrating, often spectacular and often slow. It’s huge and loud and impressive but it can also be humourless and bleak – though on the whole, it tries valiantly to address the problems of taking on Herbert’s complex epic, which requires a director to spend lots of time setting things up and explaining the world before they can even get the damn thing off the ground.”