Like everything else, such movies will probably find their largest and certainly most lasting audience via the internet (well, maybe not Memoria, which at the moment has no announced plans for a streaming or home video release). (This is a movie with explosions and sword fights and people riding giant worms like surfboards-but also a sprawling world involving warring dynasties and religious sects whose complexity has eluded filmmakers for decades.) The same dynamics are also at play for movies like Julia Ducournau’s 2021 Palme d’Or winner Titane, whose phantasmagorical assault on received wisdom about gender and trauma requires the immersion of a theater to work its will on you, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, a wry, meditative story whose distributor has opted to open it in one city at a time like a traveling art installation, rather than tossing it into the gaping maw of streaming. In order to be streamed, those movies first have to exist, and without theaters, they might well not.īut consider that what’s at stake is not just blockbusters, even of Dune’s relatively fragile variety. But without movie theaters, we don’t get movies like Dune. (I can also say, having been in several full-to-capacity theaters recently, that it’s not as scary as it might seem, and a lot of people do not seem concerned in the slightest.) The moviegoing experience isn’t perfect, and it certainly isn’t something you can control the way you can your own home. Because multiplex chains have basically given up on maintaining the atmosphere inside their theaters, seeing a movie has become a roll of the dice, and worrying about whether the people down the row are still “actively eating” or just nursing a jumbo Coke for three hours so they can keep their masks off the whole time has raised the stakes considerably. Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Great New Comedy Is the Kind You Don’t See Anymoreįive Theories for How Succession Will Endīut the decision about where to see Dune isn’t just about that, either. HBO Max Launched Its Rebrand in Just About the Grossest Way Possible Dune is a hard enough movie to follow without having to worry that there’s some piece of vital information lodged in some far-off corner. As with Dunkirk, what you lose in brute force is offset by the ability to see the entire frame at a glance. Having seen Dune in both its widest and tallest forms, I prefer the regular theatrical version to the towering onslaught of IMAX. Factor in the differences between 2K and 4K resolutions, and there are as many as seven different ways to see Dune, not counting the one where you’re sitting on your couch. hasn’t gone out of its way to announce the fact, some of the screenings that turned up this week are apparently in post-converted 3D-although I’m not sure even Denis Villeneuve wants you to see his speedboat in that many dimensions. There is also an intermediate IMAX version whose 1.90:1 aspect ratio is close to that of a widescreen TV, although you’ll only be able to see it in theaters the streaming version will have the same wide, narrow 2.4:1 aspect ratio as most theaters. There are also a variety of ways to see Dune in a theater, from standard widescreen to dual laser-projected IMAX, where at times the image almost doubles in height for added impact. There are people who will respond “DURING A PANDEMIC?!?” the moment you suggest there might be value to seeing a movie in a theater, but a) I am going to assume you are a grown-up who can make your own informed choices about what to do with your life, and b) those people are no fun at all. But that’s the same calculation you make now before doing anything outside your house, from grocery shopping to eating at a restaurant. To be clear, the key factor in deciding whether to see Dune in a movie theater has less to do with the ideal cinematic experience than it does with a complicated, highly personal calculus of case rates and vaccination status, mask mandates and immune health, all weighed against your general tolerance for risk. With the movie’s debut in theaters and on HBO Max, movie watchers are choosing sides as well, and the decision about where (or whether) to see Dune is feeding into a larger debate, not just about the future of theaters, or even movies, but about the value of public spaces, and what it’s worth to preserve them.
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