well film making is subjective so..

i personally prefer the film making on Villenueve mostly because he has double the time and 35 years of CGI and effects available to him so there are things he can show now that Lynch could not on the other hand Lynch needed to rely much more on storytelling to give us information while Villenueve can just show things and hope we will get it..

Another thing.. Lynch movie came out in the 80s when scifi was still in its infancy, so everything was new and exciting.. By now everything has being done and re-done a bazillion of times.. In the 80s they were still learning how to do things and remembers Lynch's Dune was a failure at the time.. Sure it achieved cult status now but it had its fair share of bad criticism when it was released..

One example, it was unthinkable making a film split in two parts in the 80s while it is common now.. On the other hand having 5min of face talking doing exposition on the start of the movie like it is done in Lynch movie is unthinkable now when you have the CGI to show stuff but it was often a necessity in the 80s.. They are both products of their time and work with were available to then..

But i think that if he will go on to write an essay about the movie, first he should watch the full movie and not only half. And second he should judge the movie on its own merits and defects and not keep comparing it to the Lynch movie at every corner. He think the movie making is not good tell us why instead of saying it is bad because Lynch made it different and he like Lynch more so Villenueve is automatically bad..

like he say that in Lynch film he use voice over to show characters inner voices, and that this make it "vastly texture-enriching and deftly add a haunting dimension of subjectivity", i on the other hand always found lynch's voice over inner voices to be weird and out of place even if it add to the movie, i dislike then not because they are there but how they were done.. The problem is that how they were done is a product of the time the movie was made and resources available at that time, it would never be done the same way today even if one choose to do inner voices..

Same when he talk about the Gom Jabbar test.. Lynch movie has to show the burning hand in the box melting as if it was actually happening to his hand to show the pain that Paul is facing at that moment and has to use his inner voice for the litany of fear.. While Villenueve show us glimpses of visions of a fully carbonized hand in the desert to make it clear what Paul is felling without actually showing what is happening to his hand so we can grasp the level of pain without really knowing it and then he cut to Jessica outside in despair chanting the litany of fear that also add context to show the severity of the test and he does this just because he the time to do it.. He think the Lynch version show the pain better because it was more explicit while i think the Villenueve does a better job exactly for the opposite reason.. totally a matter of personal taste.. Neither Lynch or Villenueve movie are bad because of it, just diferent ways of portraying things each limited by the resources available.. And to go even further, neither does a good job in portraying the fear the reverend mother felt of Paul for a split second that caused her to end the test because the pain level he was enduring was so high..

So it seen unfair to compare both works to each other like he did..

If he want write about why he prefer the Lynch movie over the Villenueve movie it is totally fine, but do not call it a review for Villenueve movie.

Both are good movies and both have their fair share of defects, some will prefer one, some the other and not everyone will agree and again this is fine.. But just because you prefer one over the other first it does not make the other bad and second it is not an excuse to just bash the other because they did not make things the same way..

This is why his review sound dull and elitist to me.