I watched Dune last night. I'm still getting to grips with what I think of it but just focusing on the sound elements, the soundtrack seemed to be unusually subservient to the sound design and I'm not sure what I think about that. I will have to listen to the soundtrack on Spotify to try to figure it out.
Visually, it was a movie that is under-described by calling it epic. The sense of scale was tremendous and I googled to see whose work it reminded me of, to discover that it was, er, Chris Foss, who, I now know, did the original artwork for the novels and worked on an abandoned version that I've never heard of. But covers of all the epic SF novels of the 70s and 80s that I do know seem to have been influenced by Foss, and they did a cracking job of creating a sense of the enormousness of space, that you don't really get in the same way from the Star Trek/Star Wars stuff.
Because almost everything about the movie was about size - not just space, but the huge deserts and seascapes, the gigantic buildings, the enormous ranks of uniformed soldiers - the sounds had to be huge as well. This was not a space movie like 2001, so you couldn't use silence and orchestral precision, and it wasn't a space opera like ST/SW so it couldn't sustain the lightness of a John Williams. The world of Dune is quite fascistic (look up the Colossus of Prora for an example of what I mean) so it required a sonic fist in the face, which is why it made sense to me that the line between sound design and sound track would be so blurry. The problem with that was that it felt like the movie was either at 1 or 11, so I didn't feel very emotionally engaged, and it's probably no coincidence that my mildly autistic son, who has not been able to sit through a whole TV show or movie for several years, did not stir from his seat - there were no challenging emotions that he needed to deal with (think what it's like to watch Fawlty Towers, and then imagine feeling that every time you watch something that creates anticipation).
But the other side of that coin is that the whole movie is to a great extent about free will. Things on a huge scale have the effect of diminishing the individual too. So can you do a movie about whether a character is really in control of their destiny, and show their apparent insignificance compared to the huge worlds they live in, without sacrificing some emotional investment? I suspect not. I do also wonder if the scale will become more intimate as the series goes on (since I remember bits of the plot from the first movie).
All of which is probably more for my benefit than anyone else's but what the hell, I'll post it anyway.
