Dune
New adaptation of Frank Herbert's science-fiction novel Dune, which has had a few of them already. Famously, one of the first people attached to it was Hollywood's very own witch doctor Alejandro Jodorowsky, with a rather overambitious take on it. An actually finished version was directed by David Lynch and stands as one of histories biggest studio hackjobs. There was a miniseries, at some point, I think, and now quebecois wunderkind Denis Villeneuve got to release his take on the material.
Villeneuve made a name for himself as a SciFi director with Arrival and Blade Runner 2049. You know, I rewatched BR49 very recently and came to the conclusion that it doesn't hold up as well as I remember it. While the production values are excellent, it seems like a much colder, much more sterile and emotionally empty movie than Ridley Scott's original. I mention this because I have some of the same problems with Dune. So, what it's about? There is a desert planet named Arakis on which a material named Spice can be found. Spice is both a drug and a material necessary for interstellar travel . Arakis belongs to the powerful Harkonnen dynasty, but, in a political move by the galactic emperor, is given to the Atreides dynasty, its youngest son Paul being our viewpoint character, a melancholy aristocratic prettyboy.
Dune deals with the escalating conflict between the Atreides and Harkonnens and Paul eventually having to flee the capital to live with the planets natives, a nomadic people called the Fremen, eventually becoming something a bit like a futuristic Lawrence of Arabia, though the movies doesn't get that far.
Here's something you might not have been aware of: Dune (2021) doesn't actually cover the entire book. While the movie itself gets the fact that it's a Part 1 out of the way fairly quickly, the marketing seems to deliberately omit that fact, which left me rather dissapointed right away. The movie gets just about to the novels halfway point before rolling its credits, but overall adapts it fairly well. It glosses over a lot of backstory but trying to fit it in past the point it's necessary to follow the plot would have been excessive, considering it has quite a lot of exposition as it is.
Somewhere inside Dune, the novel, there's a relatively straight forward Heroes Journey, that you'd think would lend itself to a movie adaptation, but it's decorated with generous helpings of spirituality and space opera weirdness that are by nature a bit of a hard sell. With Lynch's version from the 80s I always got the impression that Lynch didn't take the material especially seriously. Villeneuve does. Boy, does he ever. He adapts Dune with the leaden self importance of a war drama. The colors are muted, the score is heavy and pounding, practically every actor plays their role with stone faced seriousness and almost every aspect of its visual design appears to go out of its way to avoid anything that could be considered too whimsical. While the film follows the books plot just fine, I'm not sure it really captures its spirit. Mind you, I haven't read it since I was a teenager but this adaptation struck me as weirdly sterile.
While Dune is certainly a visually impressive work, a lot of it felt a bit sterile to me. Almost all of its locations feel very sparse and empty, even those that are supposed to express wealth and power. Most of Dune is set in mostly empty rooms with murky lighting. Even a lot of the spaceships look like brutalist architecture that somehow learned to fly. Dune is at its most impressive in its depiction of futuristic warfare, its what its gritty visual style actually seems to be best suited for. The violence is intense and feels grounded, even when the technology on display is rather fantastical. It expands on what Star Wars: Rogue One only managed to hint at.
Dune has quite the all star cast, though it's a movie that feels a lot more concerned with places and events than characters which means that hardly any of them manage to really stick out. My personal favorite was probably Stellan Skarsgard as Baron Harkonnen. Skarsgard brings a very menacing aura to a character whose defining personality traits are gluttony and cruelty and reminded me rather of an old Marlon Brando.
Dune is an impressive piece of film making on a technical level, but a lot of it fell a bit flat for me. Most of it for the same reasons Blade Runner 2049 fell a bit flat for me and considering that is a widely beloved movie I imagine Dune will end up that way too. It does its best to turn a classic novel into a work of shakespearian drama and by god, does Villeneuve want you to know that he's taking this story seriously. It pays off in some regards but hurt the movie for me in others. It lacked a sense of wonder for me, it didn't draw me into this world because, frankly it made that world look lifeless and dreary, even past the point that it made sense for the setting.
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