'Dune': with a vocation for a great show, but with a hollow result

I notice on the cover of the Sunday supplement of this newspaper, a headline with a lyrical aroma.

It goes like this: "The excitement of going back to movie theaters."

I have not done without that supposedly exciting act after three months of confinement.

And I can swear that, except in minimal cases, that feeling that floods my soul has not assailed me.

The narrative or poetic quality, the suspense or fear, the emotional identification, the sensations that being a witness to stories, characters, situations and dialogues endowed with art gives you, would be an excellent reason to practice the ritual of returning to the cinema, but if what I see and hear makes me disinterested, bored or irritated, I don't care to suffer it on a big screen and accompanied or on a small one and alone.

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I understand the appeal that will gather for many people that after a year and a half desert a film like

is commercially released

, which aims to represent the great show. Hollywood has known for a long time that it has a clientele as numerous as it is loyal, responding to its invariable formulas. It happened with the galactic saga (I liked the first ones, the rest seems to me as mechanical as predictable) and Marvel cinema, inhabited exclusively by superheroes and supervillains, a genre full of noise, packed with fast and clonic images, incessant music, empty . I speak as always of my tastes. The permanent box office success of these types of films confirms that the clientele is massive. Your reasons will have. But the great adventure cinema that has made me happy since I was a child, I think I remember or verify in joyous reviews that it was otherwise. Well, for tastes there are the colors, which condemns popular wisdom.

I approach the

press pass

to the Kinépolis cinemas in Madrid, which guarantee an overwhelming vision and sound. It is directed by Denis Villeneuve, someone with a vocation as an author who has made films that disturbed or fascinated me. Like

and

Along with others that I found tedious, irrelevant, pretentious, including the unnecessary continuation of the justifiably legendary

Here he re-adapts the literary saga invented by novelist Frank Herbert to the cinema. I have not read it. Science fiction fans revere her. They will have their reasons. It is a literary genre that I have not frequented, although I am passionate about the work of Ray Bradbury. Perhaps this one made science fiction, but above all I have always considered him an earthly poet. And I know that his chronicles were Martian. The first film adaptation of

bore the signature of the hallowed David Lynch. It seemed to me a horror, a chaos without the slightest grace.

I screw myself into the chair, hoping to be entertained or in awe during the very long

footage

. But from the beginning I get a bit lost with his argument. It places him in a desert galaxy, in which the most coveted thing is the exploitation of a spice called

The emperor must negotiate between the power he bestows on the epic and civilized members of the Atreides family and the response from the villainous, dark and bloodthirsty members of the Harkonnen family. All this surrounded by a halo of esotericism, incessant galactic battles and the elegiac prominence of a young Atreides destined to become the symbol of good. In other words, the usual roll, the confrontation between light and darkness.

The images are spectacular and gloomy, the music never rests, the tone of the story pretends to be epic and philosophical.

None of this prevents my indifference towards the characters or what the stylist director tries to tell me.

No emotion, of course, but a remarkable tedium.

And I hope that

well

, if this serves for the return of the general public, I imagine that it is mostly youthful.

But it does not cause me any of the sensations that make me continue to love cinema.

What cinema?

The one I like, the one I consider good.

At this point, abandoning dogmatism seems like an undesirable chimera to me.

Dune

Direction: Denis Villeneuve.

Performers: Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Zendaya, Oscar Isaac, Javier Bardem.

Genre: science fiction. USA, 2021.

Duration: 155 minutes.