Film The Trick is Not Minding it Hurts
Right out of the gate, the Dune 2021 wrong foots me. The posters all call this Dune, and it is not until you've paid for admission and the title credits roll onscreen that the movie chooses to adds the subtitle "Part One". Oh gee thanks movie. I didn't know I'd have to be paying out for sequels to get a full story. It's not even the only time the movie tricks its audience. See how Zendaya prominently features in the poster? Well she's not actually in this movie at all, save for some repeated dream sequences and a reveal in the last ten minutes. Zendaya was the one thing my wife was looking forward to with this film!
Dune is a big serious sci fi epic about the fraught attempts of an empire of sexy people to colonize a desert planet, so as to harvest super valuable "spice" at the expense of the natives. I've not read the book or watched any other version, so I can't say how accurate 2021's Dune is to the source material, or how much I can blame the problems of the film on the source material.
What I can say is that Dune is a somewhat good movie that is let down by being drawn out to the point of absurdity. This isn't a particularly complicated or nuanced story; the bad guys are literally monster orc people with black armour and sacrificial blood pyramids. The plot itself feels like an overly extended Avatar/Pocahontas situation in which a bunch of imperialists exploit a native population for their resources, and where the handsome white protagonist is prophesied to be some sort of champion/messiah to a group of credulous, noble savages, bagging a hot local girl in the process. Whilst I can summarize it easily here, the movie takes a painfully long time to go through the motions. It's not like there is even a lot of wit or wisdom to the script to distract you; whenever there is a danger of a character saying something cryptic or thought provoking, there will always be some guy in the room to bluntly paraphrases the point in plain English, for the sake of us idiots in the cheap seats. Subtext is for cowards!
What is eating up all the run time is the World building. The movie goes to great lengths to give us a thorough understanding of at least four vast alien cultures. Sometimes we are shown National Geographic style documentaries to plainly explain how these civilizations work, but for the most part it is done through fabulous vistas, brilliant costumes and exotic wailing music. For the most part, this is the strong point of the movie. I'm easily distracted by all these things. I guess that again, like Avatar it thrives on spectacle and setting at the expense of everything else.
So in summary, Dune a worthwhile movie if you like sci-fi and are prepared for the workmanlike and perhaps problematic story. Like its villain, it is a great bloated thing that gracefully soars; it is an impressive achievement certainly, but a bit sluggish all the same.
Film A brainless spectacle for the senses
Can you call yourself surprised if you were surprised right there where you knew you would be surprised? While you think on that Zensunni koan, I will say the film's visuals, soundtrack and aesthetic choices, while not perfect, were enough to make me enjoy it immensely, just as I had predicted back when I found out Villeneuve was going to helm it. However, I cannot deny that, just as I had also predicted, the film's script is all over the place. I found the same exact situation in Blade Runner 2049, which makes me think Villeneuve is starting to be exposed as a style-over-substance kind of director, only with very good publicity.
Moreover, the film seems awfully indecisive about whether pandering to the old Dune fans or the newbies to the franchise. On one hand, it explains so little that the latter group will be utterly confused about the overarching story other than the typical house war a la Game of Thrones. On the other hand, there are so many changes done to the setting and characters that the former group (where I stand) could easily find it a lost chance. And on a third hand, it's undeniable that this film at times looks more like a remake to the 1984 film than an adaptation of the novel. If you want me to guess, I'd say Villeneuve likely saw the old film and then read the novel's Wikipedia articles before making this film, rather than actually reading the novel.
The sets, costumes and effects are absolutely great, but what they cover is not always nice. While I did like the portrayal of the Sardaukar, the Duke, Paul himself and the people of Arrakis, many of the other changes are just plain boring. The Baron is now a depressed ogre, Chani is now a cookie-cutter aloof rebel heroine, Gurney is a meathead with anger issues, Mohiam is forgettable, Stilgar looks completely uninspired... And the story doesn't get much better, as after the Harkonnen attack happens, there is... simply not much more in the film, as odd as it might sound in a product that tries to adapt the book into two parts.
It hurts me as a Dune fan to say this, but the right way to enjoy this film, regardless of whether you read the novel or not, is unplugging the brain and enjoying exclusively with your eyes and ears. It's excellent that way, I promise, but don't try to dig deeper.
Film Artistically bloated, creatively stunted.
I normally enjoy Denis Villeneuve's films, and I won't ever, ever deny that Lynch's Dune was really clunky and weird.
But I had fun with 1984's cheesy version, and didn't enjoy 2021 at all. Normally Villeneuve's minimalist can be a good aesthetic choice, and his color-oversaturated scenes matched the moody cyberpunk atmosphere of Blade Runner 2049 like a glove, but here? It's cranked up to eleven, making it feel as if Dune went through the "DC Filter", since the scenes with more than three colors in the palette are rare, everyone gained a level in 'moody somber jerk', and every scene was three times longer than necessary. Too many overly long pans, too many long 'precognitive flashes'.
And sadly, this comes with a heavy cost of everything else. There is no time to properly explain the nuances of a scenario where every single detail is crucial and interesting. There is no explanation about the roles of the mentat, or how heavy its the hand of the Bene Gesserit or how Suk doctors are supposed to be fiercely loyal or even how absolutely vital Melange is to make the whole empire work, everything is given in passing. All characters were turned one-dimensional pastiches of their book counterparts, worsened by the fact that Villeneuve denies us the chance to hear what the characters are thinking. For example, Gurney Hallec isn't the troubadour that cheers everyone's up and has witty banter with Paul during training, he is just an angry soldier that recites passages of the Orange Bible (which also isn't explained), which makes his future shift into a fanatical follower of Paul less impactful, and Liet-Kynes never acknowledges his (in this movie her) admiration for the Duke's selfless actions. Jason Mamoa acts like Aquaman, instead of the loved second father of Paul (honestly I thought it would fit much better to just swap Mamoa and Brolin's roles). If JJ Abram's len's flare was the antitesis to the sleek optimistic future of Star Trek, Villeneuve's minimalism absolutely destroys Dune.
Minimalism doesn't fit a narrative full of nuances and details. The sci-fi elements are uninspired and bland, the ships are just basic geometric shapes, giant tubes, a rhombus or ovoids, all grey. The only difference between a room in Caladan or a room in Arrakis is the color tone, because both just look like dug in raw rock. No different aesthetics or architecture, devoid of pictures or banners, without a single reference to the Atreide's eagle. There is no finesse, most characters just wear dull black clothes and both armor and the stillsuits look uninspired, if not downright generic (whereas Lynch's version depicted something closer in the book with the stillsuits mimicking musculature), and the strategic fights turned into awkward 'cinematic' sequences with bad camera angles, spins and twirls. There are some interesting bits here and there, like the scene where Paul is leaving Caladan or the planet of the Sadaukar, but other than that, it feels like a brainless blockbuster movie pretending to be deep because of the source material.
Film A Dull, Utilitarian Synopsis
Denis Villeneuve brings his signature style to Dune: Arrakis is a place of imposing megastructures, sweeping deserts, and enormous otherworldly spaceships. It is also a place largely devoid of life or color, perhaps moreso than the director intended it to be.
Dune has always been a terribly daunting thing to adapt. There have been two attempts prior to Villeneuve's: the delirious decadence of David Lynch's 1984 film, and the high-effort, low-budget Sy Fy miniseries (the latter of which I have yet to actually watch).
The novel itself is sprawling, immediately dropping readers into the web of intrigue woven by the setting's various factions as they vie for control of the titular planet. Internal monologues abound, giving us rich insights into characters' values and mindsets. The setting itself is alien and bizarre like few others, and the novel devotes a great many pages exploring its intricacies.
In his attempt to grapple with such a sprawling work, Villeneuve opted for a very concise, straightforward depiction of the events of the novel. The broad strokes plot is all there, and it is largely intelligible despite its many, many omissions. But while the overall sequence of events have been well-preserved, the actors involved have been reduced to two-dimensional stand-ins of their literary counterparts.
Whereas Lynch opted for including characters' thoughts, albeit in brief, Villeneuve forwent exploring their inner worlds almost entirely. Some characters, like Jessica, suffered terribly for it. The incredibly subtle cues Paul shares with us in the book are replaced with scenes where she loses her composure entirely, breaking down to the point where she practically begins to sob.
Further, the Harkonnen plot to frame her as the traitor (and, indeed, the plot to expose the traitor in the first place) is cut. We do not see her spar with Hawat, nor do we see Duke Leto's own gambit to protect her. Her Bene Gesserit training, even, remains an informed attribute for most of the film.
This is part of a broader trend: the many, many scenes that would've let us better understand the cast were left on the cutting room floor. The dinner, Yueh's conversation with Lady Jessica about his wife, Gurney's nearly everything involving Mapes, and a great many other scenes were axed in favor of more dream sequences featuring Zendaya (who barely even appears outside of them).
As a consequence, we're left knowing almost nothing about the cast. They are little more than vehicles for exposition as the plot races from scene to scene, never giving them space to breathe or play off of one another.
Ultimately, we're never given a reason to care about what's happening to them. The tension evaporates like everything else on Arrakis does, and we are left with sweeping desert vistas and imposing brutalist metropolises, both of them lifeless and inhuman. Without any spark of life or flicker of personality to contrast the planet's inhospitality against, Dune becomes little more than a bleak, barren dustball.
Film A Defense Of Dune
I was interested seeing Dune since I heard about the latest film adaptation, but a combination of the COVID-19 pandemic and the mostly negative reviews on this site caused me to forgo seeing it in theaters. Now, having rented the movie on YouTube, I found myself enjoying it more than I expected.
The film covers the first two thirds of the first Dune novel, stopping just after Paul wins his duel with Jamis and joins the Fremen(spoiler tags for those who haven't read the 50+ year old book). Initially, I was somewhat disappointed that the film was broken into parts, which often is little more than a ploy to milk multiple films out of a single book, but after seeing it, I realized that it would be difficult to adapt the book in a single film.
The movie generally adapts Dune well, as the creators realize that exposition must often be delivered differently in a movie than in a book, since without a narrator to explain things, Show, Don't Tell is a better tool for exposition. As someone who read the original Dune roughly 20 years ago, and found it a bit hard to follow at times, I found that the movie does a good job of explaining things to the viewers while neither being too obtuse nor overwhelming the viewer with information.
The characters are generally utilized well and the actors playing them give great performances. A few of them, such as Paul's eventual Love Interest Chani and Baron Harkonnen, don't get much screentime, albeit largely due to where the cutoff point is- Paul only just meets Chani at the end of the movie. One thing I found strange was Liet Kynes' Gender Flip, but the change, like many of the other small tweaks to character personalities, generally worked well in the context of the movie. For example, Jessica's more emotional reaction to Paul being subjected to the gom jabbar test- in which he must endure excruciating pain or die- helps humanize her.
The film benefits from breathtaking visual effects and set design, from the future technology bases to the planet of Arrakis. The sandworms, which are some of the most iconic creatures of the series, are portrayed quite well, and the Atreides' first encounter with one is a memorable and terrifying experience.
In short, I recommend seeing the movie to anyone who liked the books or science fiction fans in general. I personally enjoyed Dune, and look forward to seeing the second part, as well as any other Dune books Denis Villeneuve plans on adapting.