Thoughts on Dune

Another week, another review of a movie that's premiering simultaneously in theaters and on HBO. However, in marked contrast to the Many Saints of Newark (aka Sopranos Babies), I've managed to watch Denis Villeneuve's Dune (Part One) in its entirety before writing my thoughts on it.

This isn't a proper review, just some scattered thoughts (as the title implies), but the main questions to answer are: is it a good movie (yes) and should you watch it (yes)

To start off, it's worth noting that I'm one of those who read Frank Herbert's novel way back in their teen years, and whose view of science fiction has been shaped as a result. I read the rest of the main novels in the last year or so of college, though the series didn't improve as it went on, and I gave up on the prequel books written by Frank's son Brian with Kevin J Anderson, whose work I knew from various Star Wars tie-in novels. Every once in a while I'd look at the Wikipedia page for the Brian-Kevin books, and see that they'd mined some aspect of the history, but I've never felt the need to revisit.

I also saw David Lynch's movie version after I'd read the first novel. Oddly enough, I had Kyle MacLachlan in my head as Paul the whole time I was reading the book, so in a lot of ways I think that was the best casting of the character. Sting was pretty bonkers as Feyd-Rautha, and the entire thing was weird and, if not entirely successful, at least memorable. Less successful (for me) was the Sci-Fi channel miniseries, which I didn't ever manage to finish.

So where does Denis Villeneuve's version fit into this timeline? Despite the fact that it's probably been twenty years or more since I last read Dune, so much of the movie was immediately recognizable to me. I remembered many of the scenes from the book, and the ones that I didn't seemed to be improvements.

Just as crucially, the design is suitably epic. The book evokes images of gigantic starships and monumental architecture, and this movie brings both of those, with overtones of mind-bending French comics like the Metabarons - which was written by Alejandro Jodorowsky, who was heavily influenced by Dune in making the Metabarons, and who spent part of 1973 trying to film his own version of Dune. There are a lot of flowing imperial robes, impressively bonkers head-dresses, and vehicle design that's reminiscent of animals.

Incidentally, there were similar overtones to the design of David Lynch's version, which makes it interesting to think that such epic, far-future SF should inspire such bonkers and dream-like costumes, ships and architecture.

I mentioned improvements, and a key one has to be that Baron Harkonnen is no longer portrayed as an Evil Gay Dude. This aspect of the character was problematic when I read the book in 1997 (especially because his corpulence and disgusting skin condition were implicitly linked to his proclivity for young boys), and only slightly fixed when the Brian-Kevin prequels revealed that his conditions were actually the result of Bene Gesserit poisoning. On the other hand, I'm glad to see that aspect is not touched on in this version - though who knows what Part 2 will bring?

They also recast Liet-Kynes as a Black woman, which strikes me as a reasonable choice to make - though how much more daring would it have been if the Atreides clan had been recast as non-white? At least then you wouldn't have accusations of the White Savior Trope, which Dune contains in spades. In Dune's defense, Paul is the White Savior not because he's white, but because of Bene Gesserit scheming over millennia - though, yeah, the White Savior thing is still prominent.

But turning to the director, this is now the third film I've seen by him, after Arrival and Blade Runner 2049. I'm not sure I can point to any real commonalities among the three movies, apart from the sense of scale in all of them. That's not to say that Villeneuve's a generic director, because they're each unlike any other science fiction film around today. But comparing Villeneuve with Christopher Nolan's SF movies (Interstellar, Inception and Tenet), Nolan's appear to be more grounded in reality, with the trappings of Hollywood action films, while Villeneuve's atmospheres are more dreamlike and harder to fit into the Hollywood template.

I also think the two directors stand up to close comparisons, as they've made the best science fiction movies of the last decade (specifically Interstellar and Arrival, in that order). As a result, it's clear that Villeneuve was the right person to make a new Dune, since it fits with his aesthetic and his sense of what makes a good SF film. Meanwhile, Nolan would probably have made a good remake of 2001 (you could argue that Interstellar is just that).

Overall, as I've said, Denis Villeneuve's Dune is a good movie, fantastic-looking and well worth the two hours and change that it lasts, which feels quite slim compared with some other recent epics, or indeed compared with Blade Runner 2049. It helps that this film contains only about the first half of the story from the novel - it allows him to be expansive and really build out his world, without worrying about hitting the final beats in times that are reasonable for a Hollywood film. And if the movie ends abruptly, at least the ending comes at a point where you're looking forward to seeing more - similar to how a TV episode might end, while pointing to the next.

From what I've read on the internet, Part 2 isn't even written yet, let alone ready for theaters. However, I'll be interested to see how it turns out, and whether Villeneuve will follow the arc that the novels took if he gets to Dune Messiah or beyond. I'll also be interested to see if this film, or series, manages to turn Dune into a household name, the way Star Wars is... especially since Star Wars was so heavily influenced by Dune.