Frank Herbert's seminal science fiction book Dune is an almost sacred text in the genre and attempts to film it before have been fascinating, but flawed failures. David Lynch's 1984 version was epic in scope and vision, visually stunning, but muddled and overly simplified. The television effort by the Sci Fi Channel also tried to be epic, but was hampered by the constraints of its television budget and some truly awful special effects. Alejandro Jodorowsky's struggles to bring the story to the screen eventually resulted in a documentary about how he failed, rather than the story itself. Taking on the task of doing justice to Frank Herbert's sweeping saga is not to be taken on lightly.

The fact that it is Denis Villeneuve who has done what Jodorowsky could not is, in hindsight, not surprising. Though a relative newcomer to the genre with only the coldly cerebral ARRIVAL in the back catalogue, he had already shown he had the bravery to make a sequel to the equally revered BLADE RUNNER. In both those films, he showed he could craft intelligent stories with stunning visuals and yet be respectful to the source works from which they were adapted. Could he do the same for a tale of giant worms and desert drugs?

The answer is a resounding yes. DUNE - PART ONE is almost all that could be asked of a screen adaptation of Herbert's epic story. The first half of it, anyway. Wisely, the film uses its two and a half hour running time to cover only part of the story, rather than trying to condense it all down into one sitting as Lynch did. This allows Villeneuve to linger over epic visual sweeps of his many vistas, be it the industrial hell of Geidi Prime, the windswept shores of Caladan, the incessant rain of the Sardaukar planet or the dry desert sands of Arrakis. These visuals are epic in every sense. The sense of scale created by visions of Heighliners in planetary orbit, spaceships that dwarf the armies they have transported, great halls and wide open seas of sandy dunes running to the horizon. It also allows for the plot to be allowed to breathe, for characters to be established clearly and to make the fates that befall them meaningful.

To that latter point, Villeneuve has gathered a luminous cast of big names. Perhaps not necessarily the biggest stars, but actors who fit their roles perfectly right down to the smaller parts. Rebecca Ferguson's Lady Jessica may be surprisingly fearful for much of the time, considering her training and supposed wilfulness, but Oscar Isaacs provides just the right amount of practical honour as Duke Leto, Stellan Skarsgard is delightfully slimy as the perverted Baron Harkonnen, Jason Mamoa is irrepressible as the heroic adventurer Duncan Idaho and Dave Bautista in unrepressed anger and brutality as the brutal Harkonnen enforcer Rabban. Above all of them, though, stands Timothee Chalamet as Paul Atreides, the central figure of the story and the role that makes or breaks the film. He captures the boy's contradictions; his youthful impetuosity, his chafing at being constrained by age and duty, his wonder at the new things he is seeing, his confusion at the changes being wrought in him by the Spice, his bravery and his inexperience. These are all merged into a believable character whose coming growth is hinted at in the film's later sequences.

For some, the film will be slow. Villeneuve showed in both ARRIVAL and BLADE RUNNER 2049 that he is willing to let the story play out at a leisurely pace with long periods between significant action. In fact, the only significant action sequence in ARRIVAL takes place off-screen. Villeneuve's interest is in the plot and the characters. With DUNE-PART ONE, however, he is able to let rip when war comes to Arrakis. Things get explosive and the explosions are big. The battle sequences leave nothing to be desired. The personal shield generators that make swordfighting the order of the day are inconsistently used, but whether it is the hand to hand fighting on the ground or the ornithopters racing through the skies being chased by destrutive lasers, the results are exciting.

The production design and special effects are immaculate. The ornithopters with their dragonfly design are a particular high-point. The giant worms that are so central to the saga going forward are given the JAWS treatment by being kept beneath the surface of the sand and glimpsed only as a toothed mouth devouring spice harvesters whole.

The plot has been oversimplified for an audience familiar with the source material. The intricate layers of plotting that lie behind the events on Arrakis have been reduced to a vendetta between the houses of Harkonnen and Atreides. The Bene Gesserit order and their search for a supreme human being have been sidelined, the Spacing Guild are barely mentioned and the Emperor (whose plot this is in the book version) is name-checked a couple of times only. We don't get to see the people of Arrakis in any detail until very late on and the Atreides attempts to change the way the planet is run for the better than endears them to the people are barely glimpsed. This is not an issue for anyone coming new to the material, they have enough to think about with what is presented, but the omissions could become problems later in any Part Two. Lynch suffered the same when introduced characters such as Irulan and Feyd late on in his version, preventing them from being anything but gimmicks (Sting in his pants) or confusions. It will be interesting to see how Villeneuve and his fellow writers get around those issues.

In its own right, though, DUNE-PART ONE is a triumph. The long running time whizzes by despite the apparent lack of action and the balance between the needs of the newcomer and the hardened fan of the books has been nicely handled. We can only hope that there is a part two forthcoming and we are not left with a half-told masterwork.