Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” Points the Way forward for Big Budget Sci-Fi
The Age of Spectacle is Dead, Long Live the Age of Spectacle.
Frank Herbert’s Dune, one of the best (and best-selling) science fiction novels of all time, was always something of a white whale in Hollywood. Coveted by studios and filmmakers alike almost from the moment of its 1965 release, it also proved impressively hard to bring to the screen, with the film laboring in development hell for a decade.
In that time, it caught the fleeting attentions of some illustrious names, and indeed these alternate-history incarnations of Dune have themselves passed into film legend. There was the David Lean version, set for the early 70’s (scuppered when studio head Arthur P. Jacobs died) then the bonkers Alejandro Jodorowsky take (perhaps the most influential non-existent film in movie history) and finally the version that Ridley Scott might have made but David Lynch did, the very real — and very disappointing — film that finally saw the light of day in 1984.
Lynch’s Dune has always been considered something of a failure, most tellingly by Lynch himself, who felt that the studio had wrested away creative control of the project, claiming that producers Raffaella and Dino De Laurentiis had “restrained” his more, ahem, Lynchian impulses in an effort to produce the sort of movie they wanted to see. In the decades since, Lynch has openly disavowed (when he can be cajoled into mentioning it at all) his first and last foray into the world of tentpole blockbusters, calling the making of Dune “a huge gigantic sadness in my life.”
Lynch’s opinions aside, his Dune certainly has its critical defenders (most notably Frank Herbert) but let’s be honest: the film is — charitably — a high-minded mess. This is likely due to the creative clash behind the scenes, one that sought to stifle Lynch’s weirder ideas in favor of more palatable popcorn fare. Lynch himself admits that many of his directorial decisions were made with the movie’s producers in mind, and that he fell into a sad “middle world” where his only authorial imprints ended up being “things I felt I could get away with within their (the producers) framework.”
The end result is a film that certainly isn’t Star Wars, isn’t really Dune, and is only occasionally — in strange, quizzical bursts — something that bears the signature of one of America’s truly original filmmakers. You can sense a bit of Lynch’s touch now and again — in the gross body horror of Kenneth McMillan’s boil-covered Baron Harkonnen, or the freakishly mutated guild navigators, for instance — but when it does appear it feels hopelessly out of place, like Lynch is poking his head above the water before having it shoved back down, attempting (and failing) to inject something of himself into a film that feels like it was made by no one — too rushed and too truncated to truly honor its source material, and too dull to function even as casually interesting sci-fi schlock.
The critical and commercial failure of Lynch’s Dune meant no one in the industry would touch the property for thirty-seven long years (aside from some low-budget, quickly forgotten television adaptations) and film rights again passed from studio to studio. For a while, it seemed that Dune had recovered its place in the pantheon of those would-be movies considered “un-filmable” — an especially damning case in this instance, where filming was actually attempted.
All that changed, of course, in 2017, when Brian Herbert, Frank’s son (and Dune’s literary heir) announced that French-Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve would be the latest to try his hand at adapting his father’s now half-a-century-year-old masterwork. Villeneuve certainly appeared to be an inspired choice, as recent history had proven him to be a capable steward of existing science fiction properties, from his elegant 2016 adaptation of a Ted Chiang short story, Arrival, to his appropriately moody Blade Runner sequel, Blade Runner 2049, the following year. Villeneuve, too, had a passion for Herbert’s book, calling his work on the project the fulfillment of a “longstanding dream.”
Add to that a $165 million budget, an all-star cast, and a mature computer effects industry that might finally be able to realize some of the book’s more fantastic elements, and all the pieces would seem to be in place for a cinematic triumph. At long last, a good version of Dune has made its way to the big screen (and, thanks to the pandemic, HBO Max). Right?
Well, for the most part, yes. Villeneuve’s Dune is a polished, occasionally sublime, adaptation of the first half of Herbert’s book. It’s light-years beyond Lynch’s ill-fated version, and Villeneuve, always reverent of his source material — a trait which can occasionally push him toward a kind of polite blandness — here carefully distills the essence of what makes the novel work without becoming lost in Herbert’s baroque prose or labyrinthine plotting. Villeneuve’s narrative elisions exist (how could they not?) but they are also carefully considered — he uses the strengths of film as an able surrogate for the novel’s explanatory power. We get as much backstory as we need (largely by being privy to a few Arrakis Wikipedia entries — a bit of a ham-handed, if necessary, plot device) and not much more.
That’s a strength. Villeneuve, a patient filmmaker, is content to let the story unfold slowly, in symbols and signs — in knowing glances and pregnant pauses, in bursts of horror and wonder, and in gorgeous, poetic images. Whatever else can be said about it, Dune looks and sounds beautiful, evoking a sense of place as well as any fantasy film since The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
But most important of all, perhaps, is that Villeneuve also manages to capture some of the strangeness of Herbert’s novel in a way that Lynch might have done if he’d been allowed free rein back in 1984. Long after I’d put my copy of Dune down, and the details of its narrative began to fade away, what stuck with me was the overwhelming “otherness” of the book, the feeling that I had been truly immersed in an alien world. It seems strange to say that, because Dune is certainly constructed from common materials — it is essentially a historical epic set thousands of years in the future — and it also touches on relevant, and very human, issues (postcolonialism, environmentalism, spirituality) but the sense of the uncanny is something that suffuses Herbert’s book.
That feeling of weirdness is hard to quantify, but it may be down to Herbert’s careful melding of history, fantasy, and science fiction in such a way that none of those elements ever dominates the story. Dune’s characters are human, yet they no longer exist within any readily identifiable human milieu. They are living in an advanced future, yet it is not one which is populated by the sorts of entities that science fiction (or the sweep of history) has primed us to expect, like intelligent aliens, robots, or grand technologies. They are us, yet they are distant from us, and somewhat cold — they are able to traverse light-years, and yet their world is oddly provincial.
Thus, Dune is an epic that feels insular, an outré morality tale that explores fate and the dangers of (un)earthly power, and a warning against charismatic leaders (it may also bear mentioning here that Dune is not a “white savior” story — a fundamental misreading that many recent commentators, perhaps unfamiliar with the book and its sequels, seem eager to declaim). Villeneuve seems to understand that although Dune the novel revels in its byzantine structure, wrapping “tricks within tricks within tricks,” Dune the movie need not (and better not) bother, because underneath those well-crafted layers, Herbert’s core story is a simple one.
Villeneuve’s version is only the first part of that story, and as such it’s almost all build-up: as the movie closes, Paul and his mother have only just gone off into the desert to live among the Fremen, the tribe of natives who will come to see Paul as their messiah. For those who love the novel (or are at least familiar with it) such a languorous pace will no doubt be a welcome decision — one of the problems with the Lynch version was that it attempted to cram the whole book into two hours, after all — but those who’ve never read Dune, or who might be expecting a typical sci-fi action film, may be shocked by the pacing, not to mention the decided lack of planet-smashing insanity that the Star Wars and Marvel movies have force-fed us over the past decade.
Those movies only know how to play the chorus, and the novelty wears off fast. Villeneuve’s Dune, in comparison, is a work of masterly restraint, one that is confident enough in the power of its story that it doesn’t feel the need to rush from one epic set-piece to the next in a desperate attempt to hold the viewer’s attention.
French philosopher Roland Barthes once said that photography was at its most affecting “when it is pensive, when it thinks” and Dune — somewhat amazingly —does just that. It thinks. One hopes that the commercial success of the film might prove to be a promising sign — heralding the twilight of plotless, universe-shattering, computer-generated confusion, and a return to filmed science fiction as a medium not just of spectacle, but of ideas.
