DUNE

 Firstly, let's be clear; Denis Villeneuve's "Dune" is really only part one of what Villeneuve hopes will be a two-part film. I say 'hopes' as part two now seems to depend on just how commercially successful this one is. Unlike other two-part films, the cameras don't appear to have even started rolling on the second film yet. It is, of course, a remake of David Lynch's film and an adaptation of Frank Herbert's cult novel but listening to the opening narration this could just as easily be the next episode in the 'Star Wars' saga.

Now there's something else I want to get clear; I hated the Lynch version which seemed to cram huge swathes of plot, and impenetrable plot at that, into its opening scenes. This is much more clean cut, almost overly simplistic in fact, with none of the so-called 'depth' that "Dune" aficionados claim of it and it's all the better for it.

From the beginning Villeneuve's "Dune" is a visually stunning sci-fi epic and just as dumb as sci-fi epics often are which is fine by me. When I go to a movie like "Dune" I'm not looking for "Hamlet" but to be transported to another world, (literally, as in another planet or universe), where good guys and bad guys fight each other over something they want, in this case 'the spice', (yes, it is that simplistic), and very much to Villeneuve's credit I was certainly transported. As sci-fi epics go, "Dune" is at the very top of the pile.

Of course, all attempts at profundity fall flat. We have a Messiah character in the form of Paul Atreides, (a wan-looking Timothee Chalamet), who is to learn he is a saviour and not just some boy wonder and a saviour with a mother who also seems to have been chosen, (you can see where this is going), but so long as you don't take any of it too seriously there is a great deal here to enjoy.

The special effects are out of this world, so to speak and Greig Fraser's cinematographjy is often breathtaking. The pseudo-significant screenplay may err on the daft side and it hardly affords the starry cast the kind of roles that will win them Oscars, though Stellan Skarsgard, doing his best Marlon Brando as Colonel Kurtz impersonation, is good fun, but smart dialogue and great acting isn't what we go to movies like "Dune" for as I've said. There's no more depth here than there was in "Forbidden Planet" but taken on its own terms, "Dune" is really quite extraordinary. Part One, at least, knocks Lynch's version for six and will figure very high indeed in my films of the year.