Dune (2021) - Review Thread

It's fine.

Well, spoil it for me. Did they sit there for two and a half hours without taking a piss or did they just wait it out?

IMAX’d this bitch.

Hell of an experience. Doesn’t quite hit the visual highs of Blade Runner 2049, but it gets close from time to time. Like BR2049 though, you can’t help but get swept up in the whole affair. I need to give the score more time to resonate. I like what Zimmers doing, but could afford to listen to it again.

Though, I do suspect a lot of the ultimate success of this depends on waiting for the other shoe to drop with Part 2.

Just got back. I haven't been this impressed with the production design of a movie for a long time.

My initial thoughts: this movie was great...if, y'know, you're really curious about the intricacies of the harvesting of a fictional substance and interested in not having a single emotion about anything that happens over the course of 2 1/2 hours.

I wonder if this will be to you what Joker was to me, at least in terms of taking shit around these parts.

I'm already considering giving it another shot, but yeah...I honestly wasn't crazy about this film.  It's a technical marvel, to be sure, but I found it so emotionally cold and distant and I couldn't get invested in anything.  I don't think a second shot is going to fix that issue.

Dune 2 baby.

Just had a 2nd viewing this afternoon. It rules.

Dune(10/26/2021)
The world of “Dune” is the brainchild of a science fiction writer named Frank Herbert beginning with one 1965 novel but since extended into a true multi-media empire by him and his heirs which includes movies, TV programing, video games, board games, and comic books and has long walked an interesting line between being just accessible enough to gain mainstream interest while also being some deeply nerdy shit that requires a level of dedication from its consumers than is really practical. Personally my engagement with the franchise has been a bit rocky. I didn’t come to it from the book, which I tried reading in high school but gave up on about half way through, nor did it come from the 1984 David Lynch directed film which I’m not sure I’ve ever seen in its entirety either. Instead the main thing that got me into the world of Dune was the three-part Sci-Fi channel miniseries that ran around the year 2000. I don’t think I’ve watched that adaptation since then and I have a strong hunch that it doesn’t hold up at all either technologically or in terms of basic filmmaking but it did have the kind of running time that allowed it to breath in a way that Lynch’s exposition-fest did not and it also didn’t have Sting in a speedo. So, I know the basic story of the first Dune book and I’m aware of some of its more iconic elements like Spice, Sandworms, and Hunter-Seekers but the elaborate side details like the “Spacer’s guild” and the “Bene Gesserit” are hazy to me. However I think I and the culture caught up with Dune a bit; the central story is not unlike Avatar and “Game of Thrones” has trained us all in the ways of keeping track of fictional dynasties and “houses” and the time seems right for someone to finally make a definitive film version and that is what Denis Villeneuve has set out to do with his new adaptation of Dune.

This film adaptation only covers the first half of Herbert’s “Dune” with the rest intended to be covered by a sequel we’ll hopefully see in the next couple of years. At the film’s center is Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), the heir to a space dynasty and begins the story right as the House Atreides has been asked to take over the desert planet Arrakis from the House Harkonnen, who had been ruling there for a long time. Arrakis is the home of a substance called the spice melange which is necessary for interstellar travel and basically makes the galaxy run. Paul’s father Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac) has accepted this position but realizes that the transition of power on this planet will be an astoundingly difficult undertaking. The turn of events has also sparked in Paul a series of “visions,” partly as a result of him having received semi-mystical training from his mother Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), who is a member of the Bene Gesserit, which is a quasi-religious order that seeks to influence the course of events in the galaxy. Indeed it quickly becomes clear to the viewer that the Atreides are walking into a trap set up by the (off screen) Galactic Emperor and the House Harkonnen head Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård) and his nephew Glossu Rabban (Dave Bautista).

Herbert’s “Dune” is in many ways something of a hybrid between old pulpy notions of science fiction and more complex notions of global realpolitik. On one hand this galaxy is a world of extremes: the Harkonnens are evil on levels that would make Darth Vader blush, Arrakis’ flora and fauna are off the charts in their deadliness, and heroes like Duncan Idaho (played here by Jason Momoa) are made to be these legendarily competent warriors. So on one level we’re given a world of good and evil and derring-do, but on the other hand we have this complex universe with outlandishly complex schemes that seemingly complicate all of this. On top of that it really doesn’t take a lot of squinting to see this all as an allegory for highly prescient ideas of colonialism and energy shortages: Arrakis is clearly a stand in for the Middle East, Spice Melange is basically oil, and as the story goes on Paul Atreides is not unlike T.E. Lawrence. It’s kind of a mix of ideas that’s certainly indebted to some familiar “hero’s journey” tropes but often presents them in slightly different ways even if they’ll still ultimately seem kind of familiar to people raised on later works like Star Wars and Avatar.

So there’s definitely some interesting stuff to work with here but does Villeneuve do the material justice? Well, that’s a little hard to tell at this point. Previous attempts to adapt this material have generally suffered less from misunderstanding the source material and more from technical limitations and aesthetic choices that did not really age gracefully. I think this adaptation might be a bit more future-proofed simply from having a huge budget to work with but that doesn’t necessarily mean I loved everything here. For one thing I found Greig Fraser’s cinematography to be a bit too dark throughout, especially considering that much of the film is supposed to be set on a planet with a raging hot sun. A central battle scene in particular struck me as suffering from this and I often found myself having trouble telling who was on which side in that sequence. The film’s production design and world-building did impress me more but perhaps not to the point of being absolutely blown away by its creativity, of course that’s in part because this material has been adapted before in various mediums and this isn’t exactly veering radically away from what we’ve seen before. I also can’t say that the film’s occasional action scenes were really much more than functional and weren’t exactly what you’d call “next level shit.”

All that having been said, I do think the film’s screenplay by Villeneuve, Jon Spaihts, and Eric Roth does do a pretty good job of streamlining this story and not getting too distracted by factions and universe elements that aren’t immediately impactful on this first half of the first book while also offering enough hints of the greater world to not make the whole thing feel dumbed down. I would also say that the actors here do a lot to define these characters in a way that many previous adaptations didn’t. The presence of people like Josh Brolin, Jason Momoa, and Stephen Henderson help make side characters who could have blended together feel more distinct while people like Stellan Skarsgård and Dave Bautista are given some real space to ham it up in a good way as villains. That said I have slightly more mixed feelings about some of the primary actors. Timothée Chalamet finally makes Paul Atreides seem youthful… perhaps not youthful enough to still have a mother as young as Rebecca Ferguson, but still he seems more like a pampered prince than previous attempts at the character which cast him more with his future as a resistance leader in mind than where he starts, but I’m also not sure I ever quite found myself attached to his character and found him to be a bit too moody for my tastes. I got even less out of Ferguson and felt her character kind of got lost in the story despite her being fairly central to the movie in terms of screen time.

Which brings me back to whether or not this is a good movie and the answer is “of course it is” but the bigger question is whether it’s a great or truly noteworthy film and that is in many ways a question I don’t entirely feel ready to answer because in many ways this is only half of a movie. The stopping point Villeneuve choses to end this on feels less like a climactic point for a single movie and more like the spot you’d put an intermission at if making a single five hour epic movie and in many ways the movie we have feels like a setup to a payoff we won’t be getting for two years. Warner Brothers opted for a similar tactic with their adaptation of Stephen King’s It a few years ago but that first movie had more of a natural ending point than this, a movie that in its basic structural bones feels incomplete. As of this writing it sounds like the studio has indeed greenlit Dune: Part 2, but imagine if they hadn’t, it would have completely wrecked this movie’s legacy right out of the gate. So we’ll see in two years if Villeneuve sticks the landing and the payoff makes all the setup worth it. I’m excited for that but at the same time there are shortcomings to this first part beyond its structure. I’ve been a bit of a Villeneuve skeptic in general having straight up disliked Prisoners and Enemy and having strong reservations about Sicario and while I liked Arrival and Blade Runner 2049 I probably liked both of them something like 20% less than the consensus and I think that pattern holds here. I might even view it as a bit of a step down from that Blade Runner sequel, which in many ways had the harder task (making a follow-up to a movie people actually like) and in many ways what he did with that movie surprised me more with its ingenuity. But that’s enough looking this gift horse in the mouth, there’s a lot to like here, it’s definitely worth seeing, and I look forward to its second half.
***1/2 out of Five (pending Part 2)

Trust me, I feel kind of dirty myself just putting in my rating here.