Dune

Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 2 hours, 35 minutes
Director: Denis Villeneuve

Quick Impressions:
When I first heard that Denis Villeneuve was making Dune with Timothée Chalamet as Paul Atreides, I was beside myself with joy.  (Villeneuve seemed like the ideal director to do justice to Dune.  And Chalamet is so perfectly cast as Paul that if I were to find out the Bene Gesserit somehow manipulated his birth and arranged his entire career up to this point just so he would get the part, I would believe it with no questions asked.)  Honestly, Chalamet playing Paul Atreides in a Villeneuve Dune seems so perfect that as soon as I heard of it, a vague feeling came over me that the film had (somehow) always existed in this form.  Maybe we just hadn’t discovered it yet.  Dying to see it, I thought, “This couldn’t get better.”

But I was wrong because Hans Zimmer’s score is now my favorite aspect of the entire project, and I hope he wins an Oscar.  

Chalamet is perfect as Paul, but I expected that.  I did not expect to like the score as much as I did.  From trailers and production stills alone, anyone can see the film’s visuals are outstanding.  So going in, I was excited about Greig Fraser’s cinematography and more interested than usual in Dune’s art direction and costume design. 

But I hadn’t thought about the score at all, and I loved it so much.  So, so, so, so much!  (So much that I feel compelled to write a string of “so”s instead of thinking of more erudite words of praise.  I wouldn’t want to pull focus by showing off my skill as a writer.  What I want you to focus on is that the score is good.)  The last time I felt so strongly compelled to say, “This score should and will win an Oscar,” was when I saw Atonement (another difficult novel to adapt for the screen), and Dario Marianelli did win that year.  (My husband and I still relive the glory of the moment we confidently predicted this before the film was even over.)

I hope Hans Zimmer wins Best Original Score.  I love a haunting melody or a catchy theme, but what I’m praising here is something else entirely.   The music in this film contributes to Villeneuve’s world building and helps to create the eerie and unusual vibe that a successful adaptation of Dune must have.

The Good:
Villeneuve’s Dune is a success on every level.  It offers us the eerie vibe of David Lynch’s 1984 film and the narrative coherence of the later mini-series. I’m glad that I didn’t give into my darker impulses and watch it on the TV in my bedroom.  This is worth risking a crowded movie theater for.  If you feel any fraction of the excitement that I did to see this film, please see it in the theater.  (You’re only hurting yourself if you don’t.)  (Well, that’s probably not true.  Movie theaters need your business as they re-open.)  (They certainly won’t stay afloat from our business!  We had three free tickets at this theater.  We got free popcorn at another theater.  And we now have free passes at the theater where we saw The Last Duel because the power went out, interrupting our experience. At this rate, the movie theaters are keeping us afloat!)

I wish my mother could have seen this film.  She would love it.  She was a huge fan of Dune.  (I remember her fighting with my aunt about it once.  Well, it was less a fight than my aunt yelling, “I can’t believe my baby sister would be watching blasphemy!” Mom wasn’t fighting back.  She was busy watching the blasphemy (i.e. the David Lynch version of Dune that was on network TV in my aunt’s living room).  (I don’t know that my aunt was actually offended by Dune so much as trying to pick a fight with my mother.  But it was a memorable moment for me.  My aunt was very dramatic, and (from my nine-year-old point of view) Paul’s little sister was so creepy (yet compelling).  Riveting stuff!

Later that night, my mother told me, “Dune isn’t blasphemy.  It’s just fiction.  Just because it uses the word ‘messiah’ doesn’t make it blasphemy.”  I hope not because the book I’m writing involves some degree of apotheosis.  (Usually, if people are offended by that kind of thing, then any degree is too much.) 

Now normally, I get anxious and distressed if a popular book or movie has too many similarities to whatever I’m writing at the moment.  (My family teases me about this relentlessly because I always worry that just about everything is like my book.  They never see it.)  Dune, however, doesn’t stress me out in that way because I know it shares some elements in common with my book.  I’ve been aware of that from the start and deliberately thought of Dune when attempting to create the proper mood for the portions of my story that take place on another planet.

I usually enjoy (reading and writing) fiction involving prophecy, secret societies of women, and children with creepy powers.  (I just now discovered that Villeneuve is also making a new TV show focused on the Bene Gesserit.  When is that coming out?  And when will he ever have time to make that Cleopatra movie I keep hearing about?)  (You know what’s really good, too, and kind of blurs the line between fictional messiahs and the one at the center of my own religion?  Anne Rice’s book Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. Divine mystery should feel a little eerie, I think.  If you’re a human, it is not at all commonplace to be God.  Numbed by the familiarity of religious routine, people forget that.  It’s very weird to be God, very Other.  Most people are not God (a bit of an understatement).  I mention Rice’s book because it has an eerie vibe that reminds me of Dune, though it focuses on a different messiah (one infinitely more appealing to my aunt). 

Dune’s deliciously eerie vibe is a large part of what makes it special. The story is compelling, too, and Villeneuve begins that story well here.  He takes his time.  (That’s the biggest problem with the Lynch version.  It tries to cram too much material into two hours.)  This movie is not of inordinate length, but its story building (and world building) is done so efficiently and pragmatically that it familiarizes us with a complex situation fairly quickly.  And then, when he’s built a complete movie, Villeneuve stops.  And now we all have to wait for Part 2.

Around here (I mean in my house), Timothée Chalamet is an enduringly popular figure.  We jokingly call him my daughter’s Oscar crush.  She finds him quite charming (unlike 99 percent of leading men, as I’m discovering through our Best Picture project).  I always like it when Chalamet’s nominated for Oscars, too, because then he does a bunch of press. He’s entertaining in interviews (especially those Variety Actors on Actors ones for which he does such earnest preparation).  Chalamet is exactly how I expected him to be as Paul Atreides.  (That doesn’t always happen.  Daniel Day-Lewis played Lincoln differently than I expected!) Will he get an Oscar nomination for his work here? That would surprise me. The visuals in this movie overshadow the actors.

Still, the whole cast is quite good.  I was expecting most of them, but I hadn’t heard Stephen Henderson, Javier Bardem, Stellan Skarsgård, and Charlotte Rampling were in the film, so I had the fun of discovering them as I watched.  (My husband was actually the one who first spotted Bardem, but he already knew to be on the lookout for him.  I’ve been deliberately doing my best to ignore movies since March 2020 because I knew I wouldn’t be able to go to any for what seemed like an eternity as it loomed uncertainly before me.)

Oscar Isaac is a natural fit for Duke Leto.  But as Paul’s mother, Jessica, Rebecca Ferguson gets a larger and more prominent role than I anticipated.  This adaptation really showcases Jessica, who endeared herself to me by so often saying, “Fear is the mind killer,” which is, among other things, something I kept thinking to myself when I was on Jeopardy!. (I say it to myself a lot, actually.  Thinking, “Fear is the mind killer,” makes being afraid more fun.  Since you’re already afraid, you might as well reflect on it as if you’re a key player in a drama that requires such ominous asides.) Aside from Chalamet himself, Ferguson made more of an impression on me than any other actor in this film. 

I don’t have much to say about the performances overall.  I never thought much about the actors.  They seemed as much a part of the mechanics of the finished product as the elaborate sets and eye-catching costumes.  (In that sense, I suppose, there’s something a bit cold about parts of Dune.)  Instead of thinking about the actors’ choices, I usually reflected on character design and the way the film was using the characters.  (I was fascinated by Skarsgård’s Baron Harkonnen, but that’s because that character is often presented in such an unusual way.  I wanted to see how this movie would show him to us.  Of course, it’s also true that a bad performance from Skarsgård, or anyone else, would have been distracting. So it is a compliment to the entire cast to say that nothing ever goes so drastically wrong that I think about them as actors.)  Frankly, I’d need to see the film again before I could comment very usefully on the acting because I was so drawn into the methodical story building and how well the film was working as a whole.  I lost myself in the story (and thought it was impressive that the narrative advanced so effectively through the film’s visuals and score).

Dune does have a stellar cast, though, and it makes good use of all that star power.  I never expected to see Jason Momoa, Dave Bautista, Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem, and Zendaya together in the same movie and all there simply to serve the story.  What I like best about this film is that its story builds so slowly and methodically, and everything we see on screen appears there in the service of that story.  (Nothing distracts.) Watching this Dune is like spending two and half hours trapped inside a picture book.  We’re so immersed in the vivid (carefully created) atmosphere (as meticulously cultivated as those sacred palms).  And there’s nothing we see, hear, or experience that doesn’t help move the story forward.  Plus, the architecture is spellbinding.  The sandworms look great.  And I love that we keep seeing that desert mouse.

One thought I couldn’t seem to escape was, “I need to watch this movie again.”  (I kept thinking that, over and over and over as I was watching the movie the first time.  Just one scene had been on, and already, I was thinking, “I’ll need to watch this again.”)  I also need to read the book again.  To be brutally honest, I’m not sure I ever finished reading the book the first time. When I first tried to read the Frank Herbert novel as a child, it took me several tries (over a period of years) to get into it.  As a result, I have read the beginning of the book about 70,000 times.  During that same period, I sometimes also skipped ahead and read random parts of the story out of order.  (Why would I do such a thing?  I don’t know.  It’s the way I always read nonfiction as a child.  It makes history very confusing.  Thankfully, when I became a teenager, I outgrew that habit.  I’m pretty sure that eventually I did finish reading Dune.  But it’s been a while, so when I first heard this new movie was coming out, I decided to reread the novel.  And I did reread the beginning (about 70,000 more times).  I don’t know what my problem is now! As soon as I finish writing this, I am definitely reading the entire book in order, not just the beginning this time!)

Best Scene:
The scene that jumped out at me most featured the Reverend Mother (Charlotte Rampling) and her box of pain.  If there’s one thing I remember about the novel Dune, it’s the very beginning of the book.  So I was waiting for this scene, and when it didn’t happen right away, I worried Villeneuve might skip it.

More than any isolated scene, though, I liked the way this version of Dune presents Paul’s visions.  Yes, they’re confusing for Paul to experience, and yes, they also don’t reveal a clear future to the audience. Still, while I watched these visions, I felt mildly disoriented in a good way, not truly confused or lost.  What works so well is that we get the eerie feeling, but it is not accompanied by any serious confusion about what is happening in the present moment.

The moment when Duke Leto stumbles out of bed and wanders down the hall is also quite compelling. His expression while wandering out of his room is the way I felt while watching the movie.  The film projects an eeriness that requires investigation and draws the viewer in.

Best Scene Visually:
Paul first notices the hunter-seeker in such a captivating way.

I also like the look of the narrated opening sequence when the ships suddenly leave Arrakis.  As soon as I saw this happen, I knew that the film had captured the right mood and that the rest of the movie would be good.

Another visually striking moment comes at the end of the final scene of Dr. Kynes (Sharon Duncan-Brewster). That exit is just cool.

Best Action Sequence:
All of the film’s best action comes near the end, and most of it involves the late adventures of Jessica and Paul (guiding the ship through the storm, wandering across the desert, and, my personal favorite, the removal of the gag).

Good, too, is the moment when Paul first wanders out into the spice, and Jason Momoa has a memorable final scene.

The Negatives:
Based on what I’ve read, Villeneuve made this movie without knowing for sure that Part 2 would be greenlit.  That was a bold choice since he only tells half the story (at most).  Maybe he was thinking that if he just didn’t finish the story, the necessity of a second film would become obvious to everyone?

I remember vividly back in 2001 when The Fellowship of the Ring came out, and everyone complained about the film’s lack of an ending.  (I mainly remember this because my mother was so incensed about the criticism.  “Of course, there’s not an ending,” she kept saying.  “It’s not the end yet!  It’s only the first part.”)  But Peter Jackson shot The Lord of the Rings all at once.  The second and third movies (while they hadn’t been edited yet) already existed in some form for sure.

It seems awfully risky to me to decide, “Well, it will take more than one movie to tell this story.  Who cares if I only have one movie to work with!  I’m just going to make that film as if I have another movie to work with, too!”  This strategy seems to have turned out okay for Villeneuve, but he’s braver than I am.  What a risk! Without a Part 2, Paul has basically been looking for Zendaya all this time just so that he could meet up with her five minutes before the end credits.

My only other small complaint is that I don’t really understand how the energy shields work.  Well, what I mean is, it seems to me that they don’t work.  They look cool, but so many things can penetrate them.  Slow movements can break through, but quick movements…can also break through.  What can’t break through?  It doesn’t seem like these shields offer that much protection. I guess they’re better than nothing.

Overall:
Dune was everything I expected it to be, and Hans Zimmer’s score surpassed my expectations.  If you plan to see this movie, see it on the big screen.  You won’t be disappointed (unless you’re hoping to see the ending of Paul’s story). For that, we will all have to wait until Part 2.