Villeneuve's 'Dune' made for lifelong fans, newcomers

Dune is 'a heartbreakingly beautiful dystopia'

Kirk Boxleitner | Oct 28, 20210

They finally got it right.

As a nearly lifelong fan of Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi novel “Dune,” I can’t pretend to be coming to director Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 movie adaptation of “Dune” ⁠— or, more accurately, of the first half of the novel ⁠— as an impartial or disinterested viewer.

However, I hope I can persuade my fellow “Dune” fans, and those who might otherwise be intimidated by the story’s length or complexity, that it is very much worth your time.

Yes, this film runs more than two and a half hours. And no, this is not the first time onscreen media have attempted to adapt this material.

Director David Lynch released a lavish, well-cast 1984 film version of “Dune” that, in spite of his best intentions, he deemed a “failure.”

Likewise, before the Sci-Fi Channel rebranded itself as Syfy, it produced two television miniseries⁠ — adapting the original novel trilogy of “Dune,” “Dune Messiah” and “Children of Dune” ⁠— whose scripts were better, but whose ambitions vastly exceeded their budgets.

But that’s not what “Dune” is about. Herbert, a native Pacific Northwesterner, was inspired by the sand dunes of Florence, Oregon, to write a novel that considered not only humanity’s relationships to its environments, but also how our political structures and attendant societies are affected by over-reliance on limited natural resources.

Like J.R.R. Tolkien, Herbert did so much fictional world-building that entire writing careers and genres of fiction have been based on “borrowing” his homework, but there are only really two plotlines you need to understand in order to follow “Dune” as an outsider:

1. In a future that’s twice as distant from us as we are from the dawn of human civilization, humanity spans the stars and is governed by various royal families jockeying for power, like the Starks and the Lannisters in “Game of Thrones.” Since all interstellar travel relies upon a rare element known as “the spice,” found only on the desert planet Arrakis, nicknamed “Dune,” it becomes the football between the already feuding House Atreides and House Harkonnen.

2. Duke Leto, head of House Atreides, has a son, Paul, whose mother, Jessica, belongs to an age-old all-female order known as the Bene Gesserit, whose goal is to breed the ultimate super-being. Although the rest of the Bene Gesserit dismiss the possibility, Jessica begins to believe she’s succeeded in achieving that goal with Paul, whose powers frighten even her.

Herbert wrote entire encyclopedias about the technology, societies, customs and methods of communication within this future civilization, and previous onscreen adaptations of “Dune” have wallowed in the novel’s jargon and exposition.

Herbert had the mind of an engineer and a sociologist, and “Dune” fans like me are nerds who are the equivalent of J.R.R. Tolkien fans who masochistically read interminably scholarly texts like “The Silmarillion” for fun.

But rest assured, Denis Villeneuve made “Dune” as a film to be experienced, rather than as an info-dense text to be studied up on.

I empathize with my fellow “Dune” fans who wish Villeneuve could have retained more of the novel’s subplots and terminology, but neither does this film deny their existence within the world(s) it depicts.

Instead, the film simply focuses on the novel’s most essential elements, by showing rather than telling, allowing atmospheric visuals and subtle cues to substitute for extended explanations that could derail the momentum of the narrative.

Again, this film runs more than two and a half hours, but its environments and relationships are portrayed so immersively, and with such a minimum of potentially show-stopping data-dumps, that I felt like almost no time at all had passed while I was watching.

The paradox of the future envisioned by “Dune” is that its intentionally antiquated-looking details only serve to emphasize how many millennia removed it is from the modern day, that even its advances over the present appear ancient.

The degree to which water is the most precious resource on the arid planet Arrakis is underscored by scenes showing the planet’s natives recycling their own moisture, including using their own spit to make shared servings of coffee, while the relative moral qualities of House Atreides and House Harkonnen are made clear by their actions, and how they react.

When Paul (Timothée Chalamet) questions whether House Atreides taking over the planet Arrakis for spice production would simply lead to more colonial exploitation of its native people, the Fremen, Leto (Oscar Isaac) explains his plans to elevate the Fremen to partners with House Atreides, rather than mere subjects to be ruled.

Likewise, while plenty of literary critics in recent years have questioned whether “Dune” qualifies as a “white savior” narrative, the characters themselves acknowledge how the Bene Gesserit planted the seeds of a “Chosen One” legend among the Fremen, to afford Paul some safety on Arrakis, even as Paul himself laments the manipulation of the Fremen culture, thereby making this tale a critique of that very same trope.

On the flip side, while Lynch arguably rendered the evil Baron Harkonnen excessively grotesque, and the Sci-Fi Channel admittedly could have reined in some of actor Ian McNeice’s overly fey flourishes (although McNeice’s Baron remains awesomely watchable), Villeneuve exercises pitch-perfect restraint in weaponizing both Stellan Skarsgård as the morbidly obese Baron and Dave Bautista as his perpetually enraged nephew Rabban.

While Duke Leto demonstrates empathy for others, regardless of social standing, Baron Harkonnen can barely summon the energy or interest to carry on a conversation. He’s a lifelong sadist who no longer gets any thrill out of oppressing others, but he’s too tired and set in his ways to do anything other than keep consuming more wealth, resources and human lives.

This cast is littered with standout performances, especially since the film improves upon the novel’s roles for Jason Momoa as the Wolverine-esque House Atreides warrior Duncan Idaho, and Sharon Duncan-Brewster as Dr. Liet-Kynes, an imperial ecologist who’s covertly gone native with the Fremen.

But special notice is due to Rebecca Ferguson as Jessica, who balances the character’s fortitude and canny ability to read any room with her moments of vulnerability, resulting from the succession of traumas she’s subjected to, including the realization that her son has become her equal partner, rather than a child she can protect.

Villeneuve renders “Dune” a heartbreakingly beautiful dystopia (with an astonishingly evocative score by Hans Zimmer), whose conflicts and moral quandaries speak to contemporary real-life society as much now as they did when Herbert first wrote the novel, and I can’t wait for “Part Two.”