Dune review: Denis Villeneuve’s Frank Herbert adaptation is all groundwork

When David Lynch’s Dunewas published in 1984. It received mostly negative reviews. Lynch’s compressed adaptation, which shoved the 400-plus pages of Frank Herbert’s novel 1965 DuneThe video was a visually impressive 137-minute long, but it was difficult to understand. A theory spread: Perhaps Herbert’s iconic sci-fi work was impossible to adapt into movie form. Nearly 40 years later, Denis Villeneuve’s attempt at Dunereceives the same responses. The circle of time is flat. DuneIt is strikingly sharp and intricately conceived.

Where is the sand? It’s everywhere! (Dune Filmed in part in Jordan and Abu Dhabi. Cinematographer Greig Fraser’s angles? The view is amazing! What is the sound design? Challenging! How about the dialog? In the challenging sound design, part of it is lost. The flirting-with-Orientalism vibe of Herbert’s text? Amped all the way up, even as practically all of Herbert’s incorporations of the complex and varied Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) culture and the Muslim religion are either blunted or excised! Jason Momoa This is the only one who seems to have fun in this dark ensemble.

It would be sneeringly easy to ask, “Who is this Dune for?” Certainly one of the most formative sci-fi texts of the 20th century has retained a core fanbase. It’s a recognizable IP with a long history. Big-budget space operas still attract curious viewers. Take a look at Star Wars’ never-ending expanse. To be fair, Villeneuve’s Dune This stunningly beautiful piece was made at a high price. The Arrival Director looks at the juxtaposition between brutist design and nature. The unyielding angles of harsh materials are pushed up against the improbably grown date palm trees’ rough bark, blood-red hands, and boiling viscosity from pitch-black oils. (In case you didn’t grasp what the fought-over natural resource “spice” is standing in for.)

Photo: Chiabella James/Warner Bros.

Fraser has been a regular visitor to this style since he was a part of the original. Rogue OneAnd MandalorianIt makes the most of every inch in every frame. As compelling as the vision of giant, strangely-shaped spaceships traveling through space is of Bene Gesserit witches, dressed head to foot in black and emerging from nighttime fog, are their extraordinary shapes. And a lengthy mid-film battle sequence is well-edited by Joe Walker — the vicious hand-to-hand combat between various factions is blissfully easy to follow.

If you can get lost in the cocoon of production, costume, and art-design opulence, and sink into the Big Event angle of it all — which is why people go to the movies, isn’t it? — the film, styled as Part 1: DuneSometimes, it can seem overwhelmingly powerful. The problem, though, is the film’s pervasive emotional emptiness. Villeneuve (with his co-writers Jon Spaihts) PassengersAnd Prometheus) and Eric Roth, rush through character journeys, and shortchange ostensible hero Paul Atreides (wild-hair-haver Timothée Chalamet). Instead of explaining the complex mythology, they instead condense entire towns into thinly rendered representations of pop-culture icons. The Fremen are now Tusken Raiders, the Bene Gesserit have become more or less Fremen. Macbeth’s witches.) The result is that there is no connective thread connecting all of these different elements to create a coherent whole. The film is a splendid, threadbare tapestry that unravels as you’re watching it.

Dune Part 1It is set in the year10191, where the galaxy is still under Imperial rule. (The Persian word “padishah,” pervasively used throughout Herbert’s novel to describe the emperor, is used only once in the film, and pronounced horribly incorrectly; the same goes for how various actors in the film butcher the Arabic “al-Mahdi.”) A number of ancient, established families rule over planets as fiefdoms, and fight among themselves. Paul (Chalamet), the heir to House Atreides, is a young man whose mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) is the Bene Gesserit concubine Jessica Leto. Leto is training Paul as a leader and military strategist. Jessica, however, is helping Paul learn the Bene Gesserit secrets of mind control, persuasion, and other skills. Paul dreams of Zendaya, a young girl with blue eyes, who will guide him on the desert planet.

Warner Bros.

Paul could be seeing into the future. Maybe, because House Atreides learns that at the emperor’s behest, they’ve been assigned to take over the planet Arrakis. For decades, House Atreides’s enemies, House Harkonnen, have been in charge of Arrakis, and have have mined the planet for spice, a natural resource that powers space travel. By assigning Arrakis to House Atreides, the emperor is knowingly increasing tensions — and maybe even trying to start a war.

So House Atreides goes to Arrakis with Leto, Paul and Rebecca. They also meet Gurney Halleck, a weapons master (Josh Branolin), Duncan Idaho (Momoa) and Mentat Thufir Hawt (Stephen McKinley Henderson). Can they befriend the Fremen, the planet’s original inhabitants, who are led by proud, principled men like Stilgar (Javier Bardem, miscast and underused)? Or will House Harkonnen, led by the Baron (Stellan Skarsgård) and his bloodthirsty nephew Glossu Rabban (Dave Bautista), not let their loss of Arrakis slide? And what role does the young woman from Paul’s dreams have to play?

You have a lot of information to process. Part 1: Dune frontloads on palace intrigue and exposition (including Zendaya’s narrated introduction to Arrakis, with the question “Who will our next oppressors be?”), its first hour drags. There are broad story beats in the script (House Atreides good; House Harkonnen bad) which must be reinterpreted by the ensemble through their performances. Some people are more skilled than others. Isaac plays a strong and honorable Leto while Ferguson portrays a conflicted, protecting Jessica. Momoa is the film’s standout as the loyal, empathetic bro Duncan. A scene of him picking up Chalamet’s Paul and spinning him around will either launch a thousand ships, or an array of gifs. Chalamet’s inconsistencies and the Fremen are the worst, especially considering the centrality of these characters to the movie and the potential for confusion. Part 2 of Dune

Chalamet tries to embody Paul’s fragile strengths, and he looks the part in his all-black space-Goth outfits. His duality of rawness and control makes the “Fear is the mind killer” scene, one of the film’s best, pulse with propulsive anxiety and royal haughtiness. Paul asks pointed questions about outsider meddling in Arrakis, and Chalamet imbues those queries with freshman-poli-sci-major brattiness. However, the bigger problem is that Paul seems to be inwardly looking and the film doesn’t fully address this. Paul’s frantic anxiety about the fate of Arrakis can all be condensed into one movie freakout. Between the muffled line deliveries and the script’s dampening of the religious elements that made this moment so important in the book, this turning point isn’t nearly as defining as it should be.

Photo: Chiabella James/Warner Bros.

For their part, the Fremen exist in an uneasy space as a result of Villeneuve removing many of their defining MENA and Muslim characteristics from Herbert’s novel, perhaps fearing that viewers would see people wearing robes, living in the desert, and saying the word “jihad,” and immediately pigeonhole them as terrorists. That isn’t an entirely baseless worry, given how the novel Dune as the world progresses and Islamophobia so pervades Hollywood. It is not surprising, Part 1: Dune is otherwise appreciably racially and ethnically inclusive, with Sharon Duncan-Brewster’s gender-swapped Dr. Liet Kynes, Momoa’s Duncan, Babs Olusanmokun’s Jamis, and Chang Chen’s Dr. Wellington Yueh speaking Mandarin with Paul.

Overall, however, Fremen characters are in Part 1: DuneThey lack the innerity that is necessary to be perceived as more than just stock characters. Despite the fact that Villeneuve tried to avoid Orientalism, the film still engages in it. The motivations of Stilgar, Zendaya’s Chani, and Golda Rosheuvel’s Shadout Mapes are all murky, and their relationships with Paul aren’t narratively clear because so much of their belief system and identity is left nebulous. They are noble, exoticized others, and it’s unintentionally telling that Hans Zimmer’s score loads up on MENA folk music traditions (so many women ululating!MENA-based actors are not allowed to speak for the Fremen. It is an atmosphere-based culture, which can be approached without deeper curiosity.

This statement could be extended to all ofPart 1: DuneIt is. Villeneuve spent his entire career combining intellectual and philosophical questions with stunning otherworldly imagery. However, Villeneuve’s vision is frustratingly unbalanced. DuneIt is. While the visuals of this film are captivating, their world-building seems flat. While the ensemble shows commitment, it is not able to tell a compelling story. The question is: Part 2 of DuneWill it ever be possible is still a question mark and stands on its own. Part 1: DuneIt is very easy to set up and pay off.

Part 1: DuneOn October 22, 2021, the premieres will be in theaters as well as on HBO Max.