No, you don't need to see the film but it was a way of me trying to put across how much his style really sucks out of the films.
I see No Country For Old Men as one of the top films of the last 20 years, what with its pacing and the atmosphere they create. It's not an original story, based on a book, so therefore any director could have been brought on board.
You might say I am comparing apples to oranges but it was just a way to illustrate what I think the problem is.
There's still a selection problem in adaptation.... Directors are not interchangeable, and that's ok! It means there can be a broader range of styles and flavors in the world.
For example, what if the Coen brothers had directed, say, 'Adaptation'? It would have been a completely different film. Would we ever want to see Christopher Nolan adapt Stefan Zweig? Hardly.
Every once and a while you see an auteur get coaxed out of their genre. Lynch did Dune in '84 right off the back of The Elephant Man. And while he hated the entire experience I know that I'm not the only person that enjoyed the particularly lynchian facets of the story that he brought into the light. His film is much more concerned with exploring the more psychedelic aspects. The divination that comes with being the Kwisatz Haderach, the grotesqueness of the Harkonen house, the psychedelic experience of the spice.. which are all present in the source material. Whereas the Villeneuve take is much more concerned with other aspects colonialism primarily, and those things that Lynch leaned into he certainly acknowledged but spent more time in other places. I love both and I love when we get to see multiple adaptations of the same source material, even if some aren't so great, just because we do get to see these different aspects of the original work.
If Wes made No Country For Old Men in this style it would suck.
The films look incredible but the monotone delivery and lack of soundtrack remove any drama and intrigue.
I say this as someone that loved Rushmore, Tenenbaums, Life Aquatic