Dune is out in theaters, and it’s hyped. Director Dennis Villaneuve (Arrival, Blade Runner: 2049) seems to have the perfect credentials for the job, and fans of Frank Herbert’s seminal 1965 novel have waited quite some time for modern special effects to be applied to their beloved classic of interplanetary action, politics, and warfare.
I haven’t read Herbert’s Dune; take that as you will. But as a moviegoer being introduced to the story for the first time, I found myself admiring the effects and scale of this adaptation—while ultimately struggling to care much about it.
The reason to see Dune is that everything in the movie is big. Big spaceships, big deserts, big weapons. Big explosions. A big score from Hans Zimmer, although his blaring, discordant thunderings, I’ll admit, I’m starting to find a bit tiresome. And big sandworms that function as mobile sinkholes. All this bigness succeeds in its intention: to create compelling spectacle. The assault on the city midway through the film, especially, felt pretty awesome.
The problem, though, is with the small. In particular, Villaneuve fails at his most important task: to convey the harshness of the desert, which is the central driver of the entire plot.
To be sure, Dune‘s characters talk plenty about the desert and how dangerous it is, and their actions—wearing moisture-preserving suits, walking irregularly in the sand, shying from the daytime sun—do reflect the proper reverence. But it’s not enough for characters to say that the desert is brutal, or even to act like it is. We have to feel the harshness of the desert. And in this movie, we don’t.
This is because none of the characters seem all that uncomfortable walking around in it. Timothee Chalamet plays a sort of pampered prince, but somehow, the notoriously unlivable sands of Arrakis don’t visibly faze him at any point in the movie: he trots around—hair styled to perfection, makeup Twilight-esque—with his mom, and neither appear labored whatsoever. Isn’t this desert supposed to be…hot? Why is everybody handling this so well?
This one shortcoming is enough to crater the film, since, as I stated, fear of the desert is the focal point of the storyline. In retrospect, Villaneuve may not have been a wise choice to direct, with his cerebral, sci-fi background. What this film needed, I realize now, is a director of nature movies.
Villaneuve also struggles to carve out an original niche for Dune, especially since many of the novel’s inventions were looted by Star Wars and other familiar films. One can’t really blame him; the story is what it is. I do wish that he could have avoided falling back on the ubiquitous influence of the completely overrated Lord of the Rings trilogy, especially two of its qualities that for some reason have become near-requirements for any fantasy saga:
- Everyone must speak with stately, stilted diction; as if they just arrived in a time machine from the royal palace in Victorian England
- Regardless of technological advances or available magic, armies must at some point run at each other with swords
For God’s sake, it’s the year 10,191! We don’t even do that now! Put the damn swords away!
I get it, people are thirsty for a big budget cinema spectacle, and Dune is one. It’s certainly better than the last three Star Wars chapters. And there’s nothing wrong with finding a reason to get back to the theater after a long, frustrating hiatus. I just feel that this movie could have been more just than another effects-driven saga. Guess I’ll need to read the book for that.
–Jim Andersen
For more movie reviews, see my review of West Side Story.