It’s not controversial to say that Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movies look great. But the awe-inspiring imagery of Dune: Part Two, from stunning black-and-white duels to epic sandworm rides, feels particularly remarkable at a time when unconvincing visual effects special effects have become increasingly common in some major blockbuster movies. So in a world where even Marvel Studios is struggling to produce top-notch VFX, why does Dune look so damn good? According to visual generalist supervisor Luisa Abuchaibe, who worked on Part 2, the answer is simple: focus on the art.
“I enjoyed having a taste of looking at the complexity of Dune’s world recreated by a talented and extensive team of artists,” Abuchaibe tells Inverse.
Dune’s VFX, including the design of its massive, gravity-defying spaceships, requires a mix of human artistry and computer-generated images, but what sets Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi epic apart isn’t just how the special effects are created, but how they’re used — often with a surprising amount of restraint.
The sandworms are magnificent, but often obfuscated, lending to the realism.
Blockbusters often present their attention-grabbing, effects-heavy shots in a visually straightforward way. Whether it's Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning's runaway train, Barbie's Barbieland, or Marvel’s superhero fights, sequences with major practical or computer-generated effects are often filmed in well-lit wide shots where we clearly see what's happening.
But while both Dune films have their share of crowd-pleasing shots, Villeneuve and cinematographer Greig Fraser often keep these grand images hidden. This minimalistic visual style is a crucial element of why Dune’s use of CGI is as compelling as it is.
Realism and restraint
The sense of scale in Dune: Part One and Part Two is like few other blockbusters today.
Dune begins with a fight scene half-shrouded in dust clouds as the heroic Fremen launch an attack against their colonialist oppressors. Whirling sand, harsh desert light, and dark shadows all hide the movies striking production design. Dune: Part Two opens with a similar fight scene and expands on this approach with battles kept deliberately brief and a recurring motif of characters peering into landscapes hidden by weather and shadow, unsure of what they’re seeing.
Paul’s prophetic visions display this approach most clearly. They’re full of shallow-focus shots blurred with heat haze. Like Paul, we have to work to understand what these ambiguous images show. Even Dune’s color palette is restricted to sepias and grays, which makes the flashes of color — a bloodstained hand, a blue bandana — especially emotionally resonant.
One advantage of this visual style is increased realism. In an interview with Befores and Afters, visual effects supervisor Paul Lambert stated that “the goal for the visual effects was to try and keep everything as grounded and as photoreal as possible.” If scenes from Dune occurred in reality, they wouldn’t be clearly visible in the conventional Hollywood manner, but would be partly obscured by environmental elements.
“It’s like living in a virtual reality!”
This realism is enhanced by how VFX is combined with practical production design. Abuchaibe says the effects team worked to further visualize what existed on set, adding VFX in a targeted way to “scenarios that need CGI solutions in order to be executed.”
“Combining these types of solutions is specially designed to recreate a believable visual experience when the actors are interacting with fictional characters, in environments far from what we call our reality,” she says. “It’s like living in a virtual reality!”
Paul’s visions are almost always obscured in Dune: Part One and Part Two.
The emphasis on combining practical and CGI solutions is key to other films like Barbie and the Mission: Impossible series. While they’re rightly praised for using practical sets and stunts, both movies extensively integrate CG elements to augment the realism of their imagined worlds.
But this deliberate application of CGI has another, more important, effect. It engages the audience in interpreting what’s on screen. Like characters in disorienting battle scenes, we’re actively figuring out what we see, increasing our emotional investment and making the moments of screen-filling spectacle all the more cathartic. Rather than taking the typical route of just using VFX to present images to the viewer, Dune uses this technology to increase our curiosity by limiting what’s shown on screen.
“We tried to simplify the frames as much as we could,” Greig Fraser told IndieWire. “By doing that, we’ve been able to give the viewers that absorption of story and experience.”
Villeneuve’s visual style has always been built around restraint, from creating unbearably quiet suspense sequences in Sicario to hiding Arrival’s aliens in eerie white mist. But the Dune series proves that, even in an expensive and effects-heavy movie, these images can still be deployed in an artfully minimalist way.
Visual effects with a human touch
Denis Villeneuve’s restrained visuals on Dune: Part Two help maintain the layers of realism.
By emphasizing realism and keeping the audience in suspense through a deliberately restrictive visual style, Dune proves the best visual effects engage with us on a human level. Just as Greig Fraser used a human presence to highlight the scale of Dune’s images, the movies rely on the audience’s curiosity to make the images on screen feel spectacular.
As Abuchaibe points out, this element of human attention and creativity is what distinguishes good visual effects from competing forms of image generation such as AI. “It means it still needs the human touch and someone with the expertise and experience to work with content that is needed,” she says.
“It means it still needs the human touch and someone with the expertise and experience to work with content that is needed.”
This human touch is what makes Dune so powerful. From the human artistry employed behind the scenes to how the series’ ambiguous imagery recruits the audience’s creativity in unraveling its mysteries, these movies keep their out-of-this-world spectacle grounded in the human imagination.
Technological developments may make it cheaper to generate impressive visuals, but money or processing power can’t replicate human artistry. The success of Dune: Part Two proves that blockbusters thrive when they’re made with restraint and attention to how viewers will respond to what’s on screen.
In our age of effects-heavy blockbusters, Hollywood has rarely been more reliant on VFX artists. It therefore seems fitting that Dune: Part Two shows how much great visual effects depend on people, from the audiences watching to the creators working behind the scenes.
Dune: Part Two is playing in theaters now.
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