Dune: The Good, The Bad, and The Contradictory
Villeneuve’s 2021 Dune and Big Budget Sci-Fi Cinema
“The film is both a lavish and lovingly-realized adaptation of the classic novel and a somewhat hollow blockbuster that still can’t capture all the nuance of the book.”
I first read Dune when I was eleven years old. I remember it distinctly, not for the epic scale of the book or the highly detailed universe Frank Herbert had created, but because of the word ‘sensuousness’. Used to describe some of the female guests at a dinner party, I had to ask my mum what the word meant and — perhaps checking the tome her son was reading wasn’t too adult for the youngest member of our Christian family — she quickly read the passage before giving me an explanation.
The aforementioned dinner party is one of the few noteworthy scenes from the first half of Herbert’s 1965 novel that is entirely excised from Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 film Dune (also known as Dune, Part One). I mention its absence only because the film is both a lavish and lovingly-realized adaptation of the classic novel and a somewhat hollow blockbuster that still can’t capture all the nuance of the book, even with its long run time and slow-and-steady pace. After finally seeing Dune, it seems like everything I read about the movie is true — the good and the bad, even the contradictory bits.
For anyone who is reading this review with no idea of what Dune is about, a summary. The planet Arrakis is the sole source of spice, a substance that is extremely valuable for its use in enabling navigators of the spacing guild to plot safe routes throughout the stars — it forms the bedrock that the entire galactic imperium is built upon. The movie opens with the Emperor taking authority over Arrakis away from House Harkonnen and handing it over to House Atreides. Arrakis has made the Harkonnen extremely wealthy, and they don’t plan to make the handover easy for their greatest rivals in the Landsraad Council. Not only that, but the Emperor himself grows wary of Duke Leto Atreides’ growing influence, and together, the imperial house and the Harkonnen plan to destroy the Atreides as they take over Arrakis. (That’s not a spoiler — it’s all revealed in the first twenty minutes of the film.)
But the Emperor and the Great Houses are not the only powerful forces at work. The secretive Bene Gesserit have spent millennia selectively cross-breeding amongst the great houses in their efforts to create a male messianic figure for their otherwise matriarchal order. Their plans were put at risk when Lady Jessica (played here by Rebecca Ferguson) failed to give birth to a daughter — she loved her Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac) so much she instead provided him a male heir. When the movie begins this male heir, Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), is already seeing visions of Arrakis; visions of death and carnage that he wants to avoid even as he feels fate pushing him toward them.
It is Paul and his grand fate that drives the narrative of Dune the novel, and so the movie is duly focused on Paul, with Timothée Chalamet perfectly cast in the role. It’s not that I am particularly fond of Chalamet, in fact, this might be the first time I’ve seen him on screen, but with his stick-thin build, floppy hair, and big wet eyes, he perfectly captures the essence of uncertainty and self-doubt that define the young Atreides at the start of his journey. Sure, there is strength, training, privilege, and a strong drive behind him, but these qualities must be coaxed out from beneath the uncertainty.
I found the casting of the film exceptional, but it’s still worth noting that in their portrayal of the Fremen there is a distinct lack of MENA representation. Frank Herbert was upfront about the influence he took from MENA cultures in creating the Fremen, so it’s disappointing (but perhaps not surprising considering the anti-Muslim bigotry propagated by Western governments in their failed “War on Terror”) that more than sixty years later those influences are still being downplayed and erased.
Jason Momoa’s Duncan Idaho and Josh Brolin’s Gurney Halleck in particular made me hope we get a long, multi-part franchise covering at least the first three Dune novels if only to see what happens to those characters. Zendaya’s Chani haunts this film, and Javier Bardem embodies Stilgar so well that it’s a shame the film ends when Paul’s journey with the Fremen is only just beginning. We need far more of the Fremen, but we’ll have to wait for Part Two before we see that.
Stellan Skarsgård and Dave Bautista as the pale goth Harkonnen’s are suitably unsettling, with production design on the Harkonnen planet and their equipment falling somewhere between H.R. Geiger and the Empire from Star Wars. It might not be inspired, but it is effective.
Uninspired but effective is probably the best way to describe the production design of the film, and if you’ve played any of the canonical sci-fi video franchises of the past decade or so (I’m mostly thinking of Mass Effect and Halo), you’ll find plenty that is familiar on screen here.
It’s incredibly well-realized, highly detailed, and often beautiful, with first-class CGI, effects (and only one shot that looked like it came out of a Dune RTS game), and actual physical and sometimes gorgeous sets (no cheap Disneyfication happening here), but all in service of design work that is never truly unique or particularly interesting. It looks like an empire under austerity.
The ship designs look as though the artists were attempting to make something recognizable to generations raised on Star Wars, but lacking any color or flourishes that might make the movie appear anything less than a mature and staid affair. Heaven forbid they used color and cause anyone to think this is a movie for children . . . (I’m being facetious — with a PG-13 rating, they’re obviously hoping this appeals to a broad audience.)
The film looks both beautiful and boring at the same time, but I’m holding out hope that these decisions were made deliberately with an eye toward the full story being told here. If Dune (Part One) is often dominated by a color palette of flat grays and browns, it could be to serve to make the second part of the story more vibrant and alive. I won’t spoil anything, but there is reason to hope they might present us with a brighter and more varied design in the sequel (though admittedly, I won’t hold my breath).
It’s a shame that I could never have the experience of seeing this film without the foreknowledge of the book resting in the back of my head. As impressed as I am by what made it on screen, I can’t help but worry that viewers are missing, if not important elements of the book, then details that bring the universe of Dune to life. Rather than being a replacement for the book, the movie feels like a big-budget, cross-media experience designed to be supported by the book. Just about the entire story is there on screen, but for the viewer who wants more — more detail, more context, more intrigue — the book is waiting, better than any IMDB trivia page, better than any fan wiki. We’ve seen film adaptations that can stand in place of the book (American Psycho, Trainspotting, and Fight Club come to mind), and film adaptations that are barely a pale shadow of the book and everything that made it a compelling story in the first place. But this is a film that is both an accurate enough adaptation to please fans (not all, but some), and compelling enough on its own to bring readers to the books . . . Though let’s just hope they know they can stop after the original three books, and that they certainly don’t need to bother with Junior’s additions to the canon.
Dune is the first science-fiction film in a long time that feels truly epic in scope, supported by a fantastic cast, and featuring some of the best quality work in effects and production (but sadly not design) to come out of Hollywood in recent years. It is, however, only part of the story — just the beginning of what could be a long and interesting journey through the universe that Frank Herbert created decades ago.
Interstellar Flight Magazine publishes essays on what’s new in the world of speculative genres. In the words of Ursula K. Le Guin, we need “writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.” Visit our Patreon to help pay our writers. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
