Dune
Dune Part One

So much science fiction of the past half-century has roots in Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune. Most notably, it was one of the major inspirations for George Lucas’s Star Wars, which in turn influenced decades of sci-fi/fantasy films that followed. Chilean cult filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky was the first to attempt bringing Dune to the big screen and, while his 1970s production never got past its lengthy stages of development, many of the talented artists he assembled went on to work on Ridley Scott’s Alien—which in turn influenced decades of sci-fi/horror films that followed it. David Lynch and Dino De Laurentis were the first to actually bring the book to the big screen in 1984, but their Dune was a notorious critical and commercial bomb. The failure of these two attempts to adapt the sprawling, cerebral novel caused many to consider Dune an unfilmable book, though a successful Sci-Fi Channel TV miniseries was made in 2000. Now we get Denis Villeneuve’s epic $300+ million two-part adaptation, which will certainly become the definitive version of this story for many generations. Too bad it’s such an inert, pretentious, and empty film.

Set in a distant future in which most technology has been abandoned, Dune is a story of palace intrigue in which various noble houses control planetary fiefdoms.  This feudal interstellar society gave its creator, Herbert, a compelling way to explore enduring religious and ecological themes. In the new film, Timothée Chalamet stars as the novel’s young hero Paul Atreides, whose family accepts the stewardship of the planet Arrakis—the only source of the valuable commodity mélange.  Also known as “spice,” mélange is a drug that enhances mental abilities and enables space navigation. Since the spice can only be found and mined on Arrakis, control of the inhospitable desert planet is a coveted but dangerous honor.

That’s about as far as the story goes, as this 156-minute movie is only the first half of the novel’s tale. It’s hard to call what unfolds on screen in this Dune a “story.” What Villeneuve puts on screen is much more world-building than narrative. This is not to say that the director of Prisoners, Arrival, and Blade Runner 2049 and his co-screenwriters Jon Spaihts (Prometheus, Doctor Strange, Passengers) and Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, The Insider, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) get bogged down in exposition the way Lynch did in his adaptation. The Lynch movie features a comically long introduction by the character Princess Irulan and constant voiceover interruptions in which we hear the inner expository thoughts of many characters. Instead, this Dune is full of slow flat scenes in which characters discuss important matters of state in hushed tones and sternly remind each other of how their cultural and religious customs work.

Villeneuve’s Dune is chock full of terrific actors, used to little effect other than the fact that they seem like ideal casting if you’re familiar with the book. But great casting does not mean great performances. More than any blockbuster I can recall, the experience of watching this film is similar to the experience of staring at the film’s poster. Lots of recognizable movie star faces are made up with interesting facial hair and dressed in cool uniforms, but hardly any of this film’s actors get to act in this film While many do their best to find nuance in the scenes they perform, only Rebecca Ferguson—as Paul's mother Lady Jessica—gets to play anything resembling a character with any kind of narrative arc. Even Chalamet, who would seem an ideal choice for Paul, never comes across as anything more than an actor posing in a costume.

Charlotte Rampling plays the leader of a religious sisterhood called the Bene Gesserit, whose superhuman powers influence the direction of politics and society. In her single scene, she provides a sufficiently spooky gravitas from under the obscuring veil of her dark garments. And a heavily made-up Stellan Skarsgård has a blast channeling Marlon Brando in what amounts to the main villain of this film—Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Kenneth McMillan played this role to far greater effect in the Lynch version). Here, in this first half of the story, the Barron’s part is so small it renders the forces opposing the protagonists as a conceptual threat—often discussed but little seen.

The rest of the cast members spend most of their time standing in rooms and on platforms, staring forward and speaking stilted dialogue. Chief amongst these “highbrow extras” is Stephen McKinley Henderson, the great Broadway veteran of many August Wilson plays. I honestly can’t recall who his Dune character is or what function he serves, apart from the aforementioned standing in rooms and on platforms and looking into the camera, but I think adding a prestige “that guy” to this film’s impressive cast may be his only function. McKinley Henderson is a distinctive screen presence despite the small roles he’s played in movies, and the image of this big, kind-faced man marching sternly on an alien planet with a little white parasol to shade him from the sun provides one of the only moments of levity in this otherwise humorless and ponderous picture.

Like nearly every modern blockbuster, Dune Part One is concerned, first and foremost, with being a slavishly faithful adaptation of a preexisting property rather than a creative adaptation of that source material. If you are well versed in Herbert’s story, you can fill in every detail not present in this movie. The flat characterizations assume that you will make them multi-dimensional with your pre-existing understanding of Dune and each individual’s role within the story. The filmmakers are extra careful not to make any alterations to the narrative that might make for a more exciting or intriguing motion picture; that’s not the goal here. Villeneuve delivers an impressively illustrated picture book condensation of Herbert’s novel—or rather, half of his novel.

I’m sure the fact that this movie just covers the beginning and middle of the beloved story will delight fans who want a faithful adaptation above all else, even if this first half is just an unresolved set-up. But those of us who go to the movies for cinematic storytelling will find this film frustrating. The more the movie-going experience becomes like episodic television, the more I question why people go out to the movies in the first place. Villeneuve is one of the many directors this year who has forcefully proclaimed that if you haven’t seen his movie in a theater, then you haven’t really seen it. Yet he has produced a story that can’t be fully experienced until the second half is made and the two pictures are screened back-to-back, which will almost always happen at home. 

That is if the second film actually gets made. This Part One was made without a studio guarantee that Part Two would be greenlit. And while it seems unlikely that Warner Bros. won’t pony up for the second half, the fact remains that it will be well over a year before this story picks up where it leaves off. Just imagine if Part One was all we got. Would anyone consider this an acceptable movie on its own? The seemingly forgone concession that this story is “too big” to tell in one movie undercuts all that could be relevant for a film version of Dune made for contemporary times. The novel’s themes of colonialism, environmental plunder and protection, and the white savior trope are ripe for exploration in 2021. But in order to do that cinematically, the filmmakers would need to deviate from the specific flow of the novel’s narrative structure and actually adapt it into films that stand with their own beginnings, middles, and ends.  As it is, this film is much more about spectacle than ideas. 

Yet, for all the claims about how this movie must be seen on the big screen, there isn’t a single memorable image in the entire picture, apart from that unexpected shot of McKinley Henderson walking with his white parasol. The Lynch version of Dune may have been a colossal narrative mess, but it contained many striking scenes and haunting images that have stayed with me for decades. Nothing in Villeneuve’s picture stirs the imagination or the emotions at all. The visuals are much like the bombastic Hans Zimmer score, which packs a punch but its ominous tones are devoid of any melody, so little of it lingers after the film is over.  In terms of the fantastic worlds, cool spaceships, menacing sandworms, and complex intergalactic societies, this Dune comes across as little more than a less colorful, less crowded, and less silly entry in the Star Wars series. Of course, we can’t discount the fact that many aspects of the original Star Wars were inspired by Dune, but we also can’t ignore how much this movie, like so many space fantasy adventures, looks and feels utterly derivative of that almost fifty-year-old picture.

Yet despite the fact that the characters lack dimension, the CGI visuals are uninspired, the story arc is all unresolved set-up, the music has no melodies, Greig Fraser’s slick cinematography offers nothing we haven’t seen before in countless sci-fi films, and the overall vibe of this work of entertainment is flat, stiff, and joyless, Dune Part One will probably not bore or irritate most viewers. In our current times, there is clearly great comfort to be found in competent, big-budget screen-craft that delivers exactly what we expect to see.