Venice Film Festival: ‘Dune’ Leaves Us With 3 Big Questions

The spice must flow. But will audiences go?

Denis Villeneuve’s highly anticipated “Dune” premiered Friday at the Venice Film Festival, an unusual place to debut a sci-fi franchise-starter that cost upward of $160 million. Then again, “Dune” is not your typical tentpole.

It’s something dreamier and weirder, a movie that straddles the line between auteurist art-film and studio blockbuster so provocatively that even after watching it, I can’t quite predict how “Dune” will fare when it comes out in theaters (and on HBO Max) on Oct. 22. When I left my screening, the first critic I spoke to was totally besotted. The second fled the theater as if Villeneuve had planted a bomb there.

Still, after a decade of Marvel movies made with high-level craftsmanship but few formal risks, it’s bracing to get a movie of this scale that takes such big artistic swings. Here are three questions that kept swimming around in my head after watching it.

Can ‘Dune’ become a big-screen hit?

Though “Dune” is based on a classic sci-fi novel by Frank Herbert, adaptations of it have hardly set the world on fire. David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation was a famous disaster that the director disavowed, while two mini-series adaptations were more notable for stuffing wonky blue contact lenses into the eyes of a young James McAvoy than for inspiring any significant pop-cultural reaction.

But “Dune” has strong bones, and they’ve been picked over considerably since Herbert’s novel was published in 1965. So many films were inspired by “Dune” that the contours of the story might feel familiar now: A young man (Timothée Chalamet) is sent to an exotic planet that is being mined for a valuable natural resource — in this case, the hallucinogenic “spice” — but he eventually decides to throw in his lot with the Indigenous folk and fight back against their well-militarized oppressors.

Yes, that’s basically the same plot as “Avatar” … and hey, maybe that’s a good thing! After all, “Avatar” was a record-setting blockbuster, and while Chalamet is new to leading this type of movie, Villeneuve has surrounded him with a cast of veterans: Jason Momoa, Dave Bautista and Josh Brolin have all done their time in the superhero salt mines, Oscar Isaac is fresh off a “Star Wars” trilogy, and Rebecca Ferguson has become the leading lady of the “Mission: Impossible” franchise. If so many other tentpole films have stolen from “Dune,” the least “Dune” could do is steal something back.