Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
We’ve said in the past that nothing’s unadaptable, but it’s also fair to say some works resist it more than others. Hence Dune, Frank Herbert’s seminal science fiction work, beloved by many, including me, is a rare instance where the best piece of movie or TV it’s associated with is a documentary about a failed effort to adapt it, Jodorowski’s Dune. I could talk for hours about where David Lynch’s Dune valiantly tried, but ultimately failed, although I couldn’t say the same about the TV mini-series, which may well hew closer to the text of the book but somehow miss out on all of the life. However, the question I suppose we’re here to answer today is can Denis “The Menii” Villeneuve get closer to the mark?
And, we can’t really answer, because one of the first things you’ll see onscreen is that this is Dune: Part One. So, see you in October 2023.
Oh, alright. Firstly, for the uninitiated, Dune takes place in the very far future, where humanity has spread across the galaxy under the rule of an Emperor, with planets ruled by the Great Houses, such as Oscar Isaac’s Duke Leto Atreides, much respected by the other houses and thus seen as a threat by the Emperor. Suspicious, then, that the Atreides are given the lucrative exclusive franchise to mine the precious drug Spice from the planet Arrakis, displacing their mortal enemies the Harkonnens, headed by Stellan Skarsgård’s Baron Vladimir Harkonnen and Dave Bautista’s Glossu Rabban.
To no-one’s surprise, it’s a trap. Well, a series of traps and difficulties, some of which the Atriedes staff can deal with, such as their human-computer mentat, Stephen McKinley Henderson’s Thufir Hawat, Josh Brolin’s Army head Gurney Halleck, and Jason Momoa’s Duncan Idaho, tasked with scouting ahead and making contact with Arrakis’ natives, the Fremen, in equal parts feared and oppressed by the Harkonnens, whom Leto hopes to form an alliance with. Against all this upheaval, Leto tries to bring his somewhat reluctant son, Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atreides, closer into the family business of politicking and planning, as someday all this will be his.
While it initially seems like the plan might be just to let the Atriedes fail by providing only garbage-tier harvesters, which would be a disaster given that the Spice must flow, as it’s the only thing that enables safe interstellar travel, before long a rather less subtle plan of all out war is unfolded, the Empire and Harkonnens joining forces to batter them, with Paul and his mother, Rebecca Ferguson’s Jessica only just managing to escape into the desert with only their wits, and Bene Gesserit training that enhances control over their bodies and a power to control the weaker of mind with the voice.
As it happens, they don’t get much further than meeting a tribe of the Fremen, headed by Javier Bardem’s Stilgar, and containing Zendaya’s Chani, the woman of Paul increasingly prescient dreams as his latent powers awaken, before the credits role, which maybe doesn’t sound like a lot of plot to cover two and a half hours, even accounting for my simplifications and omissions.
And, well, while I have to first disclaim that I am not the person to come to for unbiased opinions about Dune – had this been a crayon scribble with Villeneuve making pew-pew noises for two hours I’d probably still have liked it – the thing that makes Dune difficult to translate is that even in the novel, no-one loved it for the basic core of the hero’s journey that’s been done many times over, or even really for the characters, which with only a few exceptions aren’t a lot more than job descriptions, if that, even if they are likably written, and in this film, likably performed.
What people, or at least me-flavoured people, loved about the book was the scale of the universe that Herbert’s concocted, some of which is detailed, some of which is vague enough to provoke wonder, and the hints of what’s happened in their distant past, and our distant future, like why the seemingly singular religion is still around, a mash up of Zen Buddhism, Catholicism, Islam and apparently all others, and quite how space travel and technology in general is supposed to work without mechanical computers, amongst others,
Lynch, arguably, mostly ignored this and focused on providing visual awe, the mini-series tended towards lots of characters expositioning at each other and sent us to sleep. Villeneuve, I think, does a pretty admirable job of threading these needles and giving enough detail to provoke that wonder with words, as well as some jaw-dropping effects work and cinematography that continues Villeneuve’s hot streak from Blade Runner 2049.
Where his hands are a bit more tied, even if by himself, is the film’s structure, as it struggles to reach a natural end point after struggling to be beaten into something approximating a three act structure, and, well, it’s wound up feeling like it’s skipped the Star Wars and went straight to Empire, although maybe that’s good thing.
I do want to open this up to the floor as I could waffle on about this and the wider Duneiverse for hours, so I’ll let you know that, unsurprisingly, I really enjoyed Dune, and while for reasons aforementioned – character depth and structure, primarily – it’s not a perfect film, it might be the perfect Dune film. Or half of it, at least.