That’s the case with Dune, where Villeneuve uses his considerable skill as a director to build a visually striking fictional world of alternatively lush and barren planets, interstellar feudal armies with dragonfly-like aircraft, and, of course, enormous sand worms but ultimately gives audiences little reason to care about the people that inhabit it. It’s certainly a valid and often laudable artistic objective, but one that always carries with it the risk that a film’s aesthetic and conceptual ambitions overwhelm its human elements. But it also makes it hard for audiences to connect with these characters in real or meaningful ways Villeneuve makes impressive films about abstract ideas and high concepts, not individual people with their own hopes, fears, and aspirations. In many ways, that’s the point: Villeneuve aims to cultivate in the viewer the same alienation felt by his protagonists.
If this detached style works on an aesthetic level, however, it often falls short on visceral and emotional ones. Villeneuve’s dissociated directorial approach mirrors the growing alienation felt by Blunt’s character as she’s drawn deeper and deeper into the shadows and faces moral compromises with increasing frequency. Where his subsequent movies dwell on first contact with alien lifeforms, artificial intelligence (and artificial humanity), and now a complex story involving interstellar feudalism and messianism, Sicario focuses on the brutality of America’s war against Mexican drug cartels as seen through the eyes of a young FBI agent played by Emily Blunt. It’s an aesthetic approach that, oddly enough, works best for me in Sicario, his first and most grounded major film. They also conjure up feelings of alienation and detachment in viewers, core themes Villeneuve clearly wishes to pursue with relentless determination in his films. His movies – from Sicario in 2015 through Arrival and Blade Runner 2049 to the just-released Dune – are technically proficient and visually exquisite. There’s something about Dune director Denis Villeneuve’s style of filmmaking that leaves me cold.
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