Dune: The Flight Simulator

Do you know the feeling? You’re watching a movie, you get hung up on a specific aspect of its style or a small detail of its storytelling, and you grow increasingly frustrated with it. This is exactly what happened to film student Lukas Martens when he first saw Dune (2021, Denis Villeneuve) in a movie theater.

 

Strangely enough, his irritation was provoked by a staple of the science fiction genre. Martens was exasperated by the many shots of spaceships taking off or landing, and by the (to his feeling) excessive amount of screen time devoted to those shots. So when he had to make a critical supercut about a movie of his choosing, he decided to whittle down Villeneuve’s 155 minute long space epic. His first edit, exhaustively combining all of Dune‘s shots of spaceships in transit, was over twenty minutes long, proving that yes, maybe Villeneuve did go a bit overboard. That first version had two problems: it was too long for even the most avid interplanetary plane spotter to sit through, and it lacked a critical stance.

 

This second iteration of his spacecraft supercut adds a homemade soundtrack that is both hilarious and functions as a (tongue-in-cheek) critique. Martens’ sound design consists entirely of self-made vocalizations. He beatboxes and breathes, he hums and mumbles, he croons and coughs his way through the edit. These low-rent sound effects are in stark contrast with Dune‘s expensive state-of-the-art visuals and effectively make a mockery of Villeneuve’s fetish for spaceflight. It is a nice example of the use of humor as a critical tool (without resorting to language even).