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Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Two,” much like the first film, is loaded with ambitious sequences. But one of the stark visual standouts is this battle scene in the Harkonnen arena, where Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler), for his birthday celebration, is pitted against a group of enslaved men.
The sequence is rendered in heightened black andwhite. Narrating the scene, Villeneuve said he wanted to create a specific kind of atmosphere for the planet Giedi Prime, in which the Harkonnen have destroyed a lot of their natural resources. He said, “As my cinematographer, Greig Fraser, and I were brainstorming together how to bring an alien sunlight that would be black and white to the screen, Greig had the idea to test infrared.”
The filmmaker said that infrared is usually blocked from cameras because it is considered noise. But in this case, they “modified the cameras to let only that wavelength come through.” The result is the atmosphere Villeneuve said he was dreaming of, one in which “we see almost through skin. The eyes become piercing like insects.”
Read the “Dune: Part Two” review.
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