As the previous attempts to film Frank Herbert’s iconic, immeasurably influential novel have shown, the task is not exactly easy.
It’s a novel full of such internality — of prose that luxuriates in dense mythology and unspoken conflicts, often showing characters’ perspectives and evolutions via internal monologues and fantastical visions. Like The Lord of the Rings, the characters are often less three-dimensional people and more archetypical figures that represent specific points of view in the larger political machinery Herbert is interested in. None of these elements translate particularly well to film, and though Dune has gone on to influence/be ripped off by an entire half-century of science fiction/space opera that followed in its wake,1 the actual attempts to adapt it have yielded… mixed results to say the least, from the aborted mythical ten-hour version by Alejandro Jodorowsky to David Lynch’s beautiful and demented but confounding and compromised 1984 version, to a TV miniseries version in the early 2000s that I have not seen but is by all accounts drained of much atmosphere and oomph that would be needed to properly take on the material.
Naturally, in an era where every IP needs to be mined into oblivion, it was only a matter of time before Dune got another shot, and miraculously, it managed to fall into the hands of a director that always seemed like a natural fit for the material: Quebecois filmmaker Denis Villeneuve. While there are certainly merits and drawbacks to his catalog of films,2 his films are defined to me by one thing: an absolute, overwhelming command and emotional/psychological exploration of existential dread. From the Cronenbergian Toronto arthouse mindfuck Enemy, to Sicario’s grim McCarthy-esque fatalism in its journey through drug operations on the US-Mexico border, to Arrival’s soulful sci-fi exploration of connection, communication and the true meaning of making choices in a random, often cruel existence, he’s often been absolutely consumed by what it means to be stuck in something bigger than you can understand, and how much power one really has in those larger constructs. Enemy concludes that if given any degree of power we will stomp on those around us. Sicario resigns itself to the futility of a single person’s idealism in a conflict where no one plays by any rules. Arrival ascribes itself to the slightly more hopeful tack that even if we knew how all our decisions would lead us down the road to heartbreak and tragedy, we would still make them because it’s still better than not making those choices at all. Even Blade Runner 2049 manages to work in these ideas despite his fidelity in part to preserving Ridley Scott’s original vision, with Ryan Gosling’s K’s journey examining disappointing realities and how one can still find emotional truth when things don’t turn out the way you hoped. All of his protagonists end up unmoored from the systems and surroundings they find themselves in, and then they have to ultimately decide how to react to that.
It is these thematic obsessions and recurring themes that he brings into Dune, his first film in over a decade for which he has a writing credit (shared with Jon Spaihts and Eric Roth, anyway). They to my mind lend themselves naturally to the true spine — under all the politicking, subterfuge and worldbuilding — of Herbert’s original text: the anti-Hero’s Journey of its protagonist, Paul Atreides. And if there’s a reason that I think, in spite of its limitations, this new 2021 version of Dune works is because it completely, totally zeroes in on that journey, and the existential paranoia and dread that comes with it. Bolstered by Timotheé Chalamet’s fully committed performance, the emotional/spiritual journey of Paul is the spine of the film, and as daunting, vast and intensely dense as it can sometimes get, it always comes back to that central foundation to find its footing.
About twenty minutes into Dune is when it started to click for me. The opening chunk of the movie is a bit of a bumpy ride, full of attempts to tame Herbert’s impossibly dense mythology into something that can be remotely palatable to a general audience. It all feels a bit dry, stuffy and overwhelmed with the task at hand. But then it arrives at the actual opening sequence from the novel: Paul’s first meeting with the Reverend Mother (played by a severe Charlotte Rampling, all cold, distant regality), and the film begins to find its footing in its main character. It cannot be understated how critical Chalamet is to this, imbuing Paul with both the sort of bratty arrogance that would befit the son of royalty, but also a constant uncertainty.
Paul is an outsider on Arrakis, growing up in a sheltered life on Caladan, far from the larger political machinations that make up this world, and although his parents have done their best to prepare him to understand that larger world, he remains at a remove, only bolstered by dreams and visions and eventually, power he cannot even begin to understand. He’s a perfect vessel for Villeneuve’s pet themes of purpose, paranoia and existential dread.
If the central emotional journey of Paul is the key here, the rest of the film is more or less a marvel of ruthless engineering, Frank Herbert’s dense mythology hammered down into a remotely comprehensible form. There are plenty of characters and most of them get at least a little bit of a showing, from Rebecca Ferguson’s Lady Jessica (perfectly cast as expected) to Oscar Isaac’s well-meaning, honorable but naïve Duke Leto to Josh Brolin’s reworked hardened warrior version of Gurney Halleck (probably the character that worked least for me here honestly, he’s got the hard portion of the character but not the joviality). The three big standouts in the cast, though, besides Chalamet, have to be Sharon Duncan-Brewster as Imperial ecologist Liet-Kynes (genderswapped from the book but perfectly capturing the book character’s ambiguous motivations and loyalties), Jason Momoa’s delightfully brash and Errol Flynn-esque warrior Duncan Idaho (adding much needed levity and warmth to the proceedings) and Javier Bardem as the Fremen leader Stilgar, imbuing him with a sort of eccentric combination of irreverence and authority that really makes him stand out from the more stuffy, regal House Atreides characters. Then of course, there’s the villainous Harkonnens, with Stellan Skarsgård basically essaying a villain performance as the Baron straight out of a German Expressionist film, all grand gestures and sinister body language shining through the prosthetics. Dave Bautista plays the Baron’s nephew Rabban with a brutish intensity befitting his book counterpart, though like in the book, he only has a few brief appearances. Zendaya appears briefly as Chani, the mysterious omen in Paul’s visions and his young Fremen counterpart in reality, but her story is clearly to be left untold for a prospective Part Two.
There’s additionally so many impressive choices in pure design and tactility. Greig Fraser’s cinematography, if a bit muted, truly makes you feel the cavernous, brutalist atmosphere, making the interiors on Arrakis feel as claustrophobic as the exteriors feel endless, desolate and unforgiving. The costumes and technology make a bold choice in not simply going for Fancy Science Fantasy Tech, but instead suggesting “what would our technology and world really look like ten thousand years hence?” Remnants of our time abound, from the flight control instruments on the ornithopter that resemble modern airplanes to the very 21st century Earthly headsets they wear for communication. The vernacular has been modernized as well, and though House Atreides speaks with a very Victorian-era regality, they also just as often sound very 2021.
It’s honestly sort of difficult to write this review for a few reasons. First off, it’s because at the end of the day, as much as they try and even slightly achieve a sort of narrative roundness to this picture, it’s ultimately only half a story. Without a Part Two (and the film itself makes this intent clear, styling itself as Dune: Part One over the opening titles), it feels incomplete, and like the character and thematic threads have only been half-realized. The movie does gesture at the inherently imperialistic nature of the Houses’ presence on Arrakis, and of course some of the Middle Eastern origin from the book carries over (albeit briefly), but any real developments that could come to a boil with those thematically would need the second part to hammer them home. To the uninitiated, this Dune might play initially as a far more simplistic story than the one it’s really endeavoring to tell, simply because that final act is what really brings the grander themes and ultimate fatalism to a head.
And of course, the film has its fair share of flaws, as nearly anything this ambitious in scope must. The largeness of the thing and the intricacy of its construction is honestly a lot to take in in and of itself.
It can occasionally feel stifling, especially early in the film. Additionally, there are a few moments where it feels like Villeneuve feels he really needs to hammer the point home emotionally, and this leads to the occasional histrionic that doesn’t quite gel with the severe reservation of the rest of the piece. People expecting the fullest weirdness of Herbert’s text may indeed walk away disappointed, as most of the language has been filed down so as to best fit into Villeneuve’s very ornate box and the most overt psychedelia and internal politicking has largely been expunged. It will make an interesting comparison with the Lynch film, as though it is far more successful as a narrative feature, it also lacks the feverish, reaching idiosyncrasy of that take, its commitment to viscerally horrifying imagery and outlandish performances and design. Some people will likely prefer that approach, and I can’t fault them for it.
But nevertheless, the ways this Dune does succeed are hard to not be impressed with. Half a story told on the largest scale, based on an impossibly dense mythology, the fact that it even works in the moment at all is astonishing, and that it brings so much grandeur, psychological portent and creeping existential dread with it almost feels like a bonus. It’s a testament to how there’s only SO MUCH you can streamline and sand down this material, because even with all the tweaks and revisions to make this slightly more palatable to a mainstream audience, it’s still so ruthlessly anti-modern blockbuster in its rhythms, pacing and action quotient (there are like three setpieces here and two of them are pretty small in scale), not to mention the dizzy psychedelia straight from the text sprinkled in on top of that.
Again, it’s that central emotional journey of its hero (or villain?
) that all holds it together. The key of its climax, smaller in scale from the images the film had conjured previously, is that it revolves around Paul making a choice. Tormented by visions that tell of a momentous and potentially exceedingly grim future, he nonetheless makes a decision that may in fact lead him down that path, because like all Villeneuve protagonists who came before him, he has to make the choice because, even if it’s a no-win one, it’s still better than not making one at all.
- Everything from Star Wars to Avatar to the works of Hayao Miyazaki, as well as to more obscure genre curios like Jupiter Ascending or The Chronicles of Riddick, owe a debt to Dune in some form or another
- He is a very self-serious, maybe sometimes a little too self-serious boi, as in his overlong, morbid and overwrought Prisoners.
