REVIEW: Dune (2021)

Denis Villeneuve succeeds in bringing Frank Herbert’s sci-fi epic back to the screen, but at the cost of some of its strangeness.

by Kurt Schiller

In one sense, I have seen Dune twice. In another, I have seen it dozens of times.

I saw it when I first watched Star Wars, with its sand worms, inscrutable space monks, distant galaxy-spanning Empire, and implacable stormtroopers. I saw it again in Warhammer 40,000‘s dark and dysfunctional baroque future, with its genetically engineered space marines, ancient robot genocide, space-folding telepaths, and fascistic God Emperor. And again in Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaa, where desert-dwelling nomads eke out a tenuous living surrounded by vast creatures that react with incredible hostility to ecological damage. In Blade Runner, in Alien, in a half dozen other films that repurposed concept art from Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unrealized mid-70s adaptation, in short stories and comics and video games and heavy metal, Dune has reared its head again and again—to say nothing of David Lynch’s much-maligned 1984 adaptation.

But despite being foundational to vast swaths of modern sci-fi, Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi epic has always seemed to lurk puzzlingly on the edge of pop cultural awareness. Even as it has inspired generation after generation of writers, directors, artists, and game designers, its (largely undeserved) reputation as a confusing morass has led more people to seek out Dune’s derivatives than the genuine article.

This presents a challenge for any modern adaptation of the book. How do you translate Herbert’s story—with all its familiar trappings and ur-sci-fi themes—without it feeling like a rip-off of the very things it inspired?

For director Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 film Dune: Part One (styled Dune in its marketing materials), the answer is to worry less about conveying the complex particulars of the text than in trying to create a spectacle that viscerally recaptures their texture and experience. The result is a strange, but largely successful evolution of the modern sci-fi blockbuster—one that feels more like a mood board or tone poem than a straight adaptation, more subtext than text, even as it crams as many details and references to Herbert’s original novel as it can around the edges of the frame.

Dune at times feels more like a mood board or tone poem than a straight adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel.

Much like the original 1965 novel, Dune tells the story of Paul Atreides (a surprisingly well-cast Timothee Chalamet), a precocious child of space aristocracy who is thrust into colonial warfare on the desert planet of Arrakis thanks to the twin machinations of murderous astro-politics and a secret millennia-long breeding project intended to create a religio-scientific messiah figure called the Kwisatz Haderach. Along the way, he grapples with the legacy of his aristocratic parents (Oscar Isaac and Rebecca Ferguson), the expectations of his martial trainers (Josh Brolin and Jason Momoa, the latter cementing his position as one of the most charming action-stars of the modern era), and the cunning manipulations of both his family’s sinister political enemies (Stellan Skarsgard and Dave Bautista, equally well- but under-underutilized) and the secretive ancient order of the Bene Gesserit (represented here by Charlotte Rampling as the suitably ominous Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam).

But if you come into Dune looking for Chalamet or Ferguson to explain the precise nature of the Kwisatz Haderach, the Bene Gesserit, the Mentats, the Golden Path, the Weirding Way, or any of a dozen other weird sci-fi concepts that make the novel so alienating and uncanny, you’re likely to leave disappointed. Because this is a film that shades more than it colors, that implies more than it states outright, one which largely abandons the novel’s textual specificity in favor of massive, booming audio and monumental visuals. We are made to feel out of place and alienated not by immersing ourselves in the details of a fictional setting, but by finding ourselves awash in the spectacle of it.

And so there is no mention of the Butlerian Jihad or its subsequent prohibition on artificial intelligence—instead, Villeneuve has packed the background of every scene with dusty old books and other archaic technology, evoking the spectacle of a galaxy in self-imposed technological stasis without ever actually saying it. The film may not explain that the emperor’s deadly Sardaukar troops are mentally conditioned, genetically perfect killing machines purified by a life of suffering, but the scenes of their bleak and fascistic homeworld (replete with mass blood-letting and eerie throat-singing) conspire to achieve a similar effect. Despite its 160-minute runtime, we leave the theater having learned almost nothing about the world of Dune—less even than Lynch’s heavily-abridged 1984 film—but nevertheless with a sense for what it might be like to briefly inhabit that world, with all its scale and majesty and overwhelming grandeur.

It would be easy to dismiss all this as mere cutting for the sake of convenience, were it not for Villeneuve’s very public and verifiable Dune-obsession. This is a man who wrote a lengthy and thoughtful preface for the recent French re-release of Herbert’s novel, and who can wax poetic for 20 minutes about the various ways he translated his love of the book into the specific production touches and set dressing of the infamous Gom Jabbar scene. Given the director’s singular obsession with the text, the film sometimes feels like a cunning but still somewhat painful concession to Hollywood’s overwrought fear of audience alienation—a sort of cinematic rear-guard action that leans heavily on the very Chosen One imagery it simultaneously seeks to subvert, even as the spectacle cries out in unbridled strangeness and the director packs every spare inch of the film with sotto voce reassurances to the book’s adoring fans. Don’t worry, the film seems to say, Villeneuve didn’t forget that the Bene Gesserit have perfect self-control of all their biological functions, or about Gurney Halleck’s beloved baliset. You just need to look for them! (Fans of the book may notice that the stillsuits’ reclamation of urine and feces and the galaxy-wide aversion to laser weapons do seem to have been left out, however.)

That this subtext-over-text effect mostly succeeds can be credited primarily to truly masterful sound design that packs every second of the film with subsonic moans, deafening skull-rattling roars, and the aforementioned throat singing (used repeatedly throughout the film to indicate the imminent arrival of the Emperor’s troops). It’s rare that a line of dialogue goes by without barely audible hums, wails, and drumbeats that animate the film’s sparse and workmanlike dialogue, giving Herbert’s straightforward language an at-times-unearned sense of gravitas.

The film sometimes feels like a cunning but still somewhat painful concession to Hollywood’s overwrought fear of audience alienation.

The same can be said of the film’s visuals, which feel highly dependent on the theater experience to elevate a series of colorless, spartan designs to something that feels weighty and massive. Villeneuve’s Dune is far from artless, but it has little of the visceral strangeness of David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation, a film that brought us Mentats with soaring Eraserhead hair, enormous foetal Guild Navigators, and Bene Gesserit sisters whose shaved heads and swept-back cornettes resemble nothing so much as H.R. Giger creations. Villeneuve, by comparison, gives us Mentats who are little more than bald men with small lower-lip tattoos, Bene Gesserit in sparse black veils, and Navigators who, well, aren’t anywhere to be seen. It all works splendidly on the big screen, but the lack of visual strangeness still feels like a missed opportunity.

The film is also lessened somewhat by the same washed-out color scheme that has plagued blockbuster films since the early 2010s. Villeneuve is nothing if not conscientious, and so perhaps this decision was meant to make some specific point—but given that it has become the dominant mode of blockbuster visuals, the main effect is to make you wish for a splash of color here or there. Dune’s deserts feel of epic size, but they also look flat and gray and unimposing—a strange decision for a planetary feature that is as central to the book as any Great House or ancient eugenic prophecy. The Harkonnen homeworld and its villainous inhabitants are likewise rendered in drab black and white, while the fearsome Sardaukar are almost indistinguishable from every other warrior in the film, all of whom wear jumpsuits and helmets in various shades of gray, olive, and black. (A night time firefight between two massed armies, all searing red heat and reverberation as flaming starships fall from the sky, is a welcome and unexpected reprieve.)

* * * * *

I mentioned earlier that I had seen Dune twice; for the sake of completion, I watched it once at home and once in the theater. It’s this second, theatrical viewing that forms the basis of much of this review, and it came almost solely at the urging of a great many friends who insisted to me that the film simply needed to be seen in theaters.

Well, they were right. In its current home-streaming release, Dune is a pale imitation of its vibrant theatrical presentation, and after watching it that way I was fully ready to dismiss it. But seen in theaters, with a proper sound system and the massive scale of modern theatrical projection, it becomes another film entirely. You can argue the merits of this particular style of filmmaking and whether it’s a cheap trick to rely on having a huge projected image and massive speakers to make a film “work,” but—for good or ill, fairly or unfairly—Dune is quite good in theaters, and quite bad anywhere else.

Without the benefit of a proper theatrical presentation, the film’s massive spacegoing vessels become the same CGI whatevers that we have seen a thousand times before in other films. The desert becomes B-roll footage. The sprawling city of Arrakeen, a bunch of unadorned miniatures.

The same is true of the film’s massive rumbling bass sound, much of which becomes completely inaudible on home speakers, robbing many scenes of emotion while bringing what was no doubt intended as muttered, frantic, barely audible dialogue to the fore in all its corny glory. Even Paul Atreides’ skull-rattling Voice of command becomes basic, petulant whining without an expensive sound-system to lend it some much-needed otherworldly heft. This downgrade transforms the film into everything a fan of the book might dread: a wooden story of an uninteresting Chosen One who stands around listening to clunky exposition until the plot comes and gets him.

In its current home-streaming release, Dune is a pale imitation of its vibrant theatrical presentation.

There are also a few things in Dune, it must be said, that simply don’t work in either presentation. A de rigeur introductory narration by Zendaya’s Fremen love interest Chani is no less execrable when seen on the big screen, serving only to prime the audience for a much worse film than the one it actually precedes. Some scenes also feel conspicuously exposition heavy, as if the characters had been asked to read to Paul from a short child’s primer on what Spice does. (That much of this dialogue comes almost directly from the book is a fair point, but, alas, we tend to be less forgiving with the spoken word than the written one.) Worse, Hans Zimmer turns in a forgettable soundtrack that could have been pulled from a dozen other post-Inception blockbusters, albeit with the added innovation that every scene featuring the Fremen is scored with generic “foreign” wailing vocals that would be more at home in a Call Of Duty game or mid-2000’s geopolitical thriller. (Granted, Villeneuve has said that Zimmer was also deeply involved in the film’s masterful sound design—if this is the case, he deserves considerable credit, whatever his other harmonic crimes.)

Similarly, for all Villeneuve’s endearing attention to detail, the film mostly elides the grotesque edge that Herbert’s novel occasionally manifests. The Gom Jabbar sequence, for instance, feels lacking compared to Lynch’s version, which brought an unexpected aspect of body horror to a scene that here feels more like a stereotypical step on the hero’s journey, its later subversion of that very narrative notwithstanding. (Villeneuve does give us brief glimpses of mass human sacrifice and corpses sealed within walls, but these images are as fleeting as they are impactful.)

Ultimately, though, Dune succeeds where it might easily have failed—at least, if the viewing environment is right. Watching it in the theater, it’s possible to feel transported millennia into the future to Herbert’s strange universe, which is no mean feat.

But the fact that this was done by avoiding the novel’s sharper edges and stranger sequences, and instead opting to relegate the actual text of that universe to the background, has troubling implications for the way we view science fiction and fantasy. Almost any story can feel big and weighty with the right presentation and production, and Dune at times feels more like a very good and emotionally invested theme-park ride than a work of drama. This sort of audiovisual trickery can be very effective, but it can also quickly become tedious and repetitive, as evidenced by the dearth of worthwhile follow-ups to previous “must-be-seen-in- theaters” films like Interstellar and Avatar.

Ultimately, Villeneuve’s approach to the material is deeply impressive, even daring. Still, it would be nice to have a film that functioned as elegantly in the realms of plot and setting as it does in presentation and production—one that could truly embrace the weirdness of the setting and its uncanny particulars. Here’s hoping the just-confirmed sequel gives him the opportunity to bring more of the novel’s off-putting strangeness to the fore, rather than leaving it to lurk forever just off the edge of the screen.,

Perhaps there’s a way to chart a course—a Golden Path, if you will—between Hollywood’s risk-averse financiers and the artistic visions of would-be sci-fi auteurs. It just remains to be seen if Villeneuve’s unique approach will be the project that actually guides us there.