This movie is just huge in every sense of the word. I love a small, personal story but every so often a blockbuster film comes along with such a magnitude to it that it’s impossible not to get swept away in the sheer scale of its achievement.

Leaving this film for the first time felt like I’d just witnessed a seminal moment in blockbuster filmmaking, one that years from now will be looked back on as the blueprint for how to do this type of thing right. In a time where it feels like most of our blockbusters are lazily-put-together, samey, generic superhero fare with flat lifeless visuals (some notable exceptions aside, The Batman, Top Gun: Maverick for example), Villeneuve proves that with genuine care for the story and characters, attention to detail and proper use of budget, films of this ambition and scale can be made to work exceptionally well.

Timothée Chalamet blew me away here. I was already a fan of his (anyone from Little Women (2019) gets a lifetime in my book), but here he really sold me on a side of his as an actor that I wasn’t sure he could pull off. Paul’s turn in the final act of this hugely hinges on Chalamet’s ability to sell it and he did so with aplomb. The performances are excellent across the board, plenty has been made of Austin Butler’s turn, Ferguson, Zendaya, Pugh, Skarsgård all shine, but outside Paul the character my mind keeps going back to is Javier Bardem’s Stilgar. Simultaneously comedic relief, ripping bits straight from The Life of Brian, and the most tragic character in the film, losing all sense of identity as he mutates into little more than a spokesperson and a puppet for his Lisan Al-Gaib.

This is just one of those films where everything worked for me. The visuals were spectacular, the sound was booming, the characters were interesting and the worms were big. What more can you ask for?