Movie Review : Dune (2021)
The world doesn’t love Denis Villeneuve enough. It’s not that he’s disliked or controversial in any way, but the man’s been playing (and winning) a game that’s rigged against him for close to ten years now. It’s a small miracle that he’s out there doing cool shit and not directing a Marvel movie that’s exactly like all the other Marvel movies. It’s another miracle that he was able to make his own adaptation of Dune and guess what? It’s pretty great for what it is.
Denis Villeneuve’s done it again.
For the uninitiated, Dune tells the story of Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), the weirdo loner son of ruler Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac). When House Atreides is mandated to replace House Harkonnen on planet Arrakis, they are basically granted access to the harvesting and production of the most valuable substance in the universe: the Spice. Long story short: when a gift is too good to be true, it’s because it IS too good to be true.
Not your fun loving space opera
The first critics for Dune were predictably polarized. When a movie is meant to please the largest amount of people possible, critics will be laudatory and the movie will be fine at best. When a movie’s really trying, it’s going to piss a lot of people off. I fail to understand why people called Dune cold and difficult, though. I’ve read Frank Herbert’s novel a decade ago or so and to my knowledge, this is as close to the original experience as cinema can get.
I don’t know what people expected, but Dune isn’t like Star Wars or Guardians of the Galaxy, it’s not a moral space opera where good ultimately triumphs over evil. It’s more complicated than that. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you need to be highly intelligent to understand the story, but there’s a lot of moving pieces and it has a moral relativism that makes it more challenging. It also has powerful themes of mysticism and myth creation.
In occultism and gnosticism, there’s this idea that you can turn an idea into a reality by speaking it out. Paul Arteides is haunted by dreams and visions, but they always manifest in reality through his own will. It doesn’t look like something supernatural is happening to other people, but Paul and his Bene Gesserit mom know. His challenge is to make sense of his visions and follow them towards his destiny. Meaning is created as the visions unfold in reality.
Villeneuve’s Dune is quite adept at creating scenes of chaos and death swirling around Paul. Sometimes he unravels the mysteries and makes order out of chaos in thoroughly unspectacular ways, but I thought it fostered the doubts about his destiny quite well. Paul doesn’t know if he’s the Kwisatz Haderach (don’t ask) and the movie doesn’t provide him (or us) with straight answers. It can be frustrating, confusing for some, but I liked the discomfort.
The limits of art
If you’ll allow me into Splitting Hair City for a minute, there are things Dune doesn’t do well. It feels like everyone expected an exquisite, paradigm shifting narrative but it’s a difficult novel to adapt. There are so many characters and so many layers and nuance that you have to leave some of it out Television would be a much better medium to exploit the richness and the complexity of Dune’s universe it it wasn’t so cheap and self-contained with budgets.
The movie lost a lot of time it could’ve used to enrich its universe to create 3D friendly scenes. I know it must’ve been a compromise with Warner Brothers, but this film will live on 2D screens for a long, long time and I really don’t get the point of seeing Paul’s ship twirl for eight minutes in a sandstorm before crashing. There are so many of these scenes clearly made to sucker you into seeing the 3D version of the movie, it’s infuriating.
Another thing that bugged me is that Dune looks like a two hours teaser for a steampunk high fashion runway. Everyone is so well-dressed and good looking in this movie. Even lost in the Arrakis desert, there is not a hair out of place on either Timothée Chalamet or Rebecca Ferguson. They are always sexy and well-dressed an hover between various degrees of looking tired. Their clothes don’t even look dirty even after surviving a sand storm.
*
Is Dune good? Hell yeah it is. It’s as good as I can see an adaptation from Frank Herbert’s novel going. It doesn’t share much dramatic vocabulary and cultural shorthand with other big budget Hollywood movies, but this is a good thing. There is another variable the entertainment industrial complex can use now. A smart filmmaker has turned a smart and kind of idiosyncratic film into a financial success. Do you understand how big a win this is?
Because of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, it might get cool to trust and empower fun filmmakers with ideas. It might become profitable to get out of their fucking way. Dune isn’t like groundbreaking cinema like turn-of-the-century Wong Kar-Wai or Takashi Miike were, but it’s as good as blockbusters are going to get. Is it a good adaptation? As good as the medium allows. Is it an emotional and philosophical journey? Depends on who you ask. I loved it.
