Maximum Cinema

“Less is more” does not apply to film, has not for two decades, and it never has.

Almost six months have passed since Dune: Part Two was released and it remains one of this year’s most misunderstood films. Lots of nonsense has been written about it. Film critics and cultural commentators have compared the Fremen, the film’s desert-dwelling resistance fighters, to the Palestinians, likened the giant sand worms the Fremen ride to penises, and devoted whole articles to how the fictional Fremen language has been shorn of its Arab influences in Frank Herbert’s original novel. If it has, would anyone really know the difference? Most of us can’t even understand the language without subtitles.

A more interesting speck of nonsense is a comment in The Australian that Dune: Part Two marks an aesthetic shift in filmmaking from “less is more” to “more is more.”

“Less is more” is one of those writer’s axioms like “Show don’t tell” and “Write what you know” that you’ll hear repeated in arts courses like the Ten Commandments at Sunday school. Denis Villeneuve has, allegedly, smashed the “less is more” commandment and left its remains to be buried under Dune’s shifting sands.

It is an exciting piece of nonsense that this film marks the dawn of a new era in cinematic history where a canonical literary law no longer applies, but it’s nonsensical nonetheless. It cannot stand when reality knocks against it.

For a law to be abolished it must first be in force. “Less is more” does not apply to film, has not for two decades, and it never has.