Rewatching the Villeneuve Dune Part One, it finally hit me. For a lot of it, they're just bad actors. Just bad actors being directed by someone who should be a cinematographer. The film looks amazing and sounds even better, but I can't believe the lack of emoting. This isn't method acting, where you can see the actor has an inner life, something going on behind the eyes; this is that new thing where every dumb ass puts his down and looks up to try to look intense and intelligent, but they just look like a poser.
Huge exception: Stellan Skarsgard. He's great in it.
Oscar Isaac tries to have some feel, character, personality, but it's like he was too stiff to be able to emote enough. He was wasted by that director.
Rebecca Ferguson is normally very good, and I loved her in the fight scene when she and the son are kidnapped, but I think she was told mainly to get into as much shaking upset as possible, and I couldn't decipher anything greater than that. For every reaction, she played it like a person having a nervous breakdown, but instead of that being compelling, it was tiring immediately. It just felt like she didn't know how to approach the role, and the director sure as shit wasn't going to help her in the slightest, so she just went for full intensity, weirdly misplaced and missing the mark, the entire time.
Momoa and Brolin are the respites for those who act more realistic, but the former is at very best a charismatic sitcom actor, and the latter just played his character, who's written to be a robust warrior poet, like a marine who's never opened a book and doesn't care for music.
I know the reviews for Part Two are good across the board, so we're going to see it today. Hopefully some of what turned me off in the Part One gets better in Part Two.
Too Dumb For Dune
