Even as someone who writes about movies for a living, I have to admit that I was in no rush to return to a brick-and-mortar theater. It had been 18 months since I’d last seen a film on the big screen. But sometimes exceptions need to be made, which is how I found myself sitting down (rather nervously and double-masked) in the too-packed confines of Alice Tully Hall for the New York Film Festival’s premiere of Dune. Within ten minutes, not only had I completely forgotten about the whole white-knuckle terror of being front-row at a potential super-spreader event; I was completely swept away by Denis Villeneuve’s eye-candy vision, fully convinced that I was watching the best sci-fi movie of the decade. Yes, it’s that good.

Villeneuve is, of course, no stranger to the mind-bending genre of Asimov and Heinlein. Nor is he some cheap Hollywood dilettante. Prior to Dune, he already gave us the one-two sci-fi punch of 2016’s Blade Runner 2049 and 2017’s Arrival—two shoot-the-works epics that wrestled (rather successfully) with grand visual spectacle and Big Ideas. Still, nothing on his resume to this point has hinted at the sheer scale and narrative depth that he brings to Frank Herbert’s notoriously knotty 1965 novel.

Last summer, the French-Canadian auteur tried to make the case that Dune needed to be seen on the big screen (it debuted on HBO Max one day before its October 22 theatrical release). And at the time, his argument sounded more than a little tone-deaf as the Delta variant was spreading like a brushfire across the country. Irresponsible? Perhaps. But here’s the thing: He isn’t wrong. In fact, Dune may be the first movie of the pandemic era that truly begs for the immersive wide-screen treatment. It’s a massive—and massively ambitious—wannabe blockbuster that deserves to be experienced at the grandest scale that your immune system will allow. It swings for the fences…and clears them with ease.

For die-hard fans of Herbert’s beloved novel, the wounds from Tinseltown’s last attempt to adapt Dune will probably still feel somewhat fresh, like a phantom scar that refuses to heal. Directed by David Lynch, this thicket-y 1984 saga about dueling intergalactic clans (or “houses”) vying for control of the desert planet Arrakis and its priceless natural resource (“spice”) was turned into a cartoonishly oblique, phantasmagorical mess. In Lynch’s film, Herbert’s mythology was both overstuffed and undercooked. It was like the director was trying to stuff ten pounds of story into a five-pound bag.

To his credit, Villeneuve (and his deep-pocketed patrons at Warner Bros.) wisely decided that the only way to properly tell this story was to split it into multiple movies, much in the way that Peter Jackson approached The Lord of the Rings and George Lucas envisioned Star Wars. Those two comparisons aren’t idle ones. Like those earlier generation-defining tentpoles, Dune is, deep down, a hero’s journey, albeit one with messianic overtones and rich allegorical layers about fossil fuels, the environment, colonialism, and religion. Does it help to come into Villeneuve’s film with a prior knowledge of the Dune mythos? Sure. Esoteric gobbledygook is tossed around like verbal confetti. But it’s hardly mandatory. I came into it cold and found it easy enough to follow.

Anyway, Villeneuve’s pre-credits introduction does a lot of Dune’s expository heavy lifting—and does so with economy and clarity. The year is 10191, and Duke Leto Atreides (a note-perfect Oscar Isaac), his clairvoyant concubine Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson, ditto), and their son Paul (Timothée Chalamet) have just been given the green light from the bloated, bizarro Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård looking like a manatee under Jabba the Hutt latex) to colonize the harsh desert planet Arrakis and mine its psychedelically shimmery spice (“the most valuable substance in the universe”). To do this, they will have to first make peace with the planet’s native inhabitants, the Fremens—a Bedouin-like tribe of sand people (including Javier Bardem and Zendaya) with Windex-blue eyes and an innate hostility toward outsiders who have a long history of strip-mining their home for its mineral wealth without giving two shits about either their personal welfare or mystical beliefs.

Chalamet’s Paul, who at first comes off as a petulant Luke Skywalker-type hungry for adventure, is quickly revealed to have certain gifts. He has portentous visions of Arrakis before he’s even stepped foot there, and the screenplay from Jon Spaihts, Eric Roth, and Villeneuve hints without hitting you over the head with a cudgel that he could be The One—the Christ-like savior that the Fremen have long been waiting for. The fact that his mother is a member of an ancient, all-female order called the Bene Gessirit Sisterhood seems to pretty much seal the deal. A deliciously creepy Charlotte Rampling, face cloaked by a witchy black lace veil, is a showstopper as the terrifyingly chilly Mother Superior who puts Paul through a test to determine whether he aligns with the prophecy. It’s also during this sequence that any Chalamet skeptics will have to concede once and for all that the young actor is more than just a flavor of the month, fashion-conscious continental waif. In a role that could have made a lot of actors look silly (just ask Kyle MacLachlan), he proves he’s the real deal, with both vulnerability and charisma to burn.

With a film so jam-packed with baroque backstory, Dune’s first hour feels like a necessary bit of world building. But it’s never perfunctory…and what a world it is! Villeneuve refuses to dumb things down, and his fetishistic attention to sci-fi detail is poetic and jaw-dropping, never getting in the way of the story he’s trying to tell. For example, the film’s introduction of Arrakis’ resident beasties, the sandworms, is a masterclass in action, tension, and breathtaking CGI monster mayhem. These massive subterranean predators are several football-fields long and explode out of the sandy landscape like Cronenbergian kaiju replete with razor-toothed, vagina-dentata maws and the unquenchable appetites of slithering Sarlacc Pits. An armada of future-shock helicopters with dragonfly wings produce the same gee-whiz goosebumps you might have felt the first time you saw an Imperial Cruiser in A New Hope or one of the Spinners in Blade Runner. Meanwhile, Hans Zimmer’s haunting score feels as enormous (in a good way) as what you’re soaking in with your eyeballs.

Dune is a film of total sensory grandeur. And if there’s a nit to pick, it’s a minor one. Namely, that even despite its lengthy 155-minute running time, the film ends rather abruptly—and just as the real adventure seems to be beginning. Still, it feels like the right place to pause and catch our breaths. Jackson concluded the first chapter of his Lord of the Rings trilogy in a similar fashion, so it’s hard to get too churlish about it or the long wait we now have ahead of us for part two. That is, if it ever comes. After all, Dune wasn’t a cheap film to make. Its budget is said to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $165 million. So part one will have to make a lot of dough and lure a lot of sci-fi agnostics for Warner Bros. to want to whip out its checkbook and bankroll the sequel. But in an age that’s already lousy with pre-sold Marvel sequels, prequels, and sidequels, it would be a shame to think that a story this smart and vast and told with so much skill might go unfinished. So yes, go watch Dune on a big screen if you can. But more importantly, just watch the damn thing so we can see how this dazzling space odyssey ends. I’m begging you.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io