“DUNE” MOVIE REVIEW

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ART & LIFE

Dec. 9, 2021

Dune: Pretty and Empty

Denis Villeneuve’s take on the 1965 novel is stunning, but not quite perfect.

GENEVA LEE NEWS EDITOR

Denis Villeneuve’s M.O. stood strong in his film Dune (2021), a film of vast and clear beauty, meticulous acting, technological awe, and no emotion. I loved this film, and thoroughly enjoyed it, but its strengths made its shortcomings all the more apparent, exacerbating the itch, as Villeneuve’s films make me think, “this was so good...but it could be so much better.”

Dune centers around protagonist Paul Atredies of House Atreides, son of Gene Besserit concubine Lady Jessica and her husband, Leto Atreides, ruler of boreal, ocean world Caladan and a popular leader that The Emperor sees as a political threat. The Emperor reassigns Leto to oversee the desert planet Arrakis, which the Old Empire has colonized, displacing the indigenous population of Fremen. Arrakis is valued because it is the only source of spice, the wonderdrug that enhances mental agility, lengthens lifespan, improves health, and makes interstellar travel possible. The antagonistic Harkonnens, the previous overseers, are incredibly rich from mining spice, and their removal pits the Harkonnens against Atreides. The film follows Paul as he becomes the prophesied messiah for those the Old Empire has oppressed amidst the conflict between House Atreides and House Harkonnen.

This film is a tricky adaptation, as author Frank Hebert built a culturally-rich world with esoteric religious rituals, neologisms, and classic sci-fi technology that can be unpalatable to a mass audience and awkward when translated from the written word to the visual.

Yet equilibrist Villeneuve succeeds in balancing faithfulness and familiarity, including the important facets of Old Empire cultures and explaining them clearly, while eschewing its less important, more confusing components. He even helped me grasp a better understanding of the book that I prefer over my original mental imagery.

Dune’s cinematography is one of the reasons we still go to theaters to watch films: a laptop in bed is blasphemous to this film. The total, thrilling, and awe-inspiring imagery eclipses the viewer’s world. Villeneuve makes the cold, metallic Giedi Prime and desert Arrakis lush in their own right: verdant black buildings and sifting seas of sand. I felt my chest fall into my stomach as the camera panned over landscapes and when spaceships spilled out of the beluga mouth of a catastrophically larger ship. Villeneuve too creatively cleaned the book’s visuals: instead of the corpulent Baron Harkonnen awkwardly hanging from ropes, a spinal device levitates his body draped in funereal gowns to soar above the room. The actors were cast perfectly for their parts, even considering just appearance alone, with Rebecca Ferguson looking more Lady Jessica than the lady I envisioned while reading, Oscar Isaac born Leto, and Timothee Chalamet and Zendaya completely Paul and Chani.

The acting itself too was technically impeccable. Yet their performances failed to inspire emotion. I blame not the actors but Villeneuve, who has a history of failing to facilitate connection. Blade Runner 2049 (2017), for example, had surprisingly flat, mannequin characters, and he flagrantly violated the human themes and messages of the first film. Blade Runner director Ridley Scott and Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Blade Runner’s source text) predicate that empathy is the key to humanity and our exceptionalism. In 2049, Villeneuve reduces the beauty, uniqueness, and exceptionalism of humanity and life to reproductive capability. This makes us who we are, he says, not our experiences, our emotions, Roy Batty’s precious moments on the shoulder of Orion and near the Tannhäuser Gate: Villeneuve cannot discriminate tears from rain. His other films, like Enemy (2013) and Prisoners (2013), while full of wonderful imagery, acting, and plots, also lack character connection and fill audiences with beige. Puppets are too human a metaphor: Villeneuve’s characters are checker pieces.

This is his greatest flaw as a

filmmaker, his failure to understand humans and emotions, and he makes us unable to feel the devastation of the fall of the Atreides family and its rebirth. Paul seems like a dryly erudite adult, cheerful teen only once when greeting a returning friend, and his relationship with his mother lacks any familiarity and nurturing intimacy—he could be a ward of the state, and she, a random acquaintance. I only felt a connection when Paul sees a vision of his future and breaks down in horror. I wish desperately that Villeneuve had fleshed that scene even deeper and had made the entire film that rich with emotion. Instead, he spends maybe ten whole minutes of the film just staring the camera at his amazingly big spaceships: great for three minutes, then self-indulgent.

The other main issue is the white savior trope. I appreciate the line, “who will our next oppressors be?” evoking the white patriarchal, colonialist, and imperialist themes, yet the plot of the film is that a white, non-indignous man, the result of a eugenics breeding scheme that relies upon women and culminates in a male, aided by a false religion spread by a shadow organization of missionary Empire elites (whose female practices are called, “weirding ways,” to boot), comes and saves the indigenous folks who can’t free themselves without his help. And no matter how strong they make Chani, she is not the main character but Paul’s romantic interest: any agency and wisdom she holds is diminished by Paul’s relative god-given, born greatness. Paul’s preordained, unearned privilege is now cheap and dated. Simple plot and casting fixes could have helped partially dismantle this trope while retaining the character of the source text. Paul could have been Paula, portrayed by a female BIPOC actor. The breeding scheme could have been male-only, with Lady Jessica choosing to buck against patriarchal eugenics with a female child. Lady Jessica’s parentage is not known, and her parents could be revealed to be indigenous Fremen, and there could have been emphasis on Paul needing immersion and understanding of Fremen culture before they determine if he is the Kwisatz Haderach (messiah). The director chose not to unravel the ethnocentric narrative. Instead, Zendaya supports the main. Though these are fairly devastating criticisms that severely undermine the strength of the movie, overall, I really did love Dune. It is a visually stunning work that pulls off a nearlyimpossible science fiction book, and the day after I saw it in theaters, I bought an HBO subscription so I could watch it again and go through my favorite scenes.

I give it 4 out of 5 stars and so badly wish I could give it a perfect score. It is too late for Villeneuve to implement some of the fixes I suggest for the white savior problem, but at the very least, in the sequel, he can make the characters emotionally compelling. I love Planet Earth, but for other films, why create beautiful worlds if not to populate them with characters for whom we cry?