DUNE: Villeneuve Plays it Safe and the Results Are Very OK

Many have pondered for years what a “good” adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune novel series might look like. In our current era where blockbuster cinema aims to create realistic, plausible worlds out of the fantastical theorized ones, it’s no surprise we get Denis Villeneuve’s very practical film. If anything can be considered the polar opposite of the bizarre and wildly interpretive fan art and conceptions of this famed series – from the hilarious book covers to Jodorowsky/Mœbius’s 2,000 page storyboard to David Lynch’s disowned weirdo adaptation – then Dune, or as it’s sleekly stylized, ⊃ ᑌ ᑎ ⊂, is it.

The Hollywood Method to Movie-Making

Dune is a fine adaptation that works on the basic levels of storytelling and entertainment that Hollywood builds its backbone on. The two hours and forty-five minutes actually roll by faster than a speeding sandworm and the pace even in its slow moments still makes the stakes palpable. Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) is the Duke of his house and the result of years of shadowy cross-breeding of a nun-like sisterhood known as the Bene Gesserit. They have special powers of control via the pitch of their voices and Paul is one of the few humans who is blessed with these, signaling that he is in some way destined for greater things. Paul’s father, Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac), and the House of Atreides take over the planet Arrakis as orders from the Emperor and they begin to harvest the spice melange, a psycho-stimulating fuel substance that is the most valuable commodity in the galaxy. What they don’t know (but soon realize) is that the Emperor sent them to Arrakis to die and now Paul is the one who is burdened with the future of his house.

The script, which molds and flattens the book’s literary style and dense socio-politics into the pre-packaged Hollywood template, hums efficiently along, giving us morsels of Paul starting to slowly understand his power and what he is capable of doing with it. The movie moves rapidly and succinctly through the different terminologies and histories that exist within the story, though the term “Kwizatz Haderach” is never explained – only left as something important, something more than what Paul is right now. He has visions of the future, specifically a girl named Chani (Zendaya) – one of the Fremen, an indigenous people of Arrakis – who seems to be important to Paul’s destiny. Paul comes across several Fremen, all of who understand something about him that he is still unaware of.

Staying Within Your Director’s Limits

Villeneuve’s direction is more reminiscent of his brisk and intense work in Sicario, even though some of the film’s gigantism and monolithic elements recount the oval spaceship from Arrival and the angel statues from Blade Runner 2049.

The biggest achievement of this film is that it knows exactly where and when to cut the fat to allow every scene to hold weight while the visuals tell most of the story. For those who have read the novel, this movie is more akin to an adaptation of the Sparknotes or the Wikipedia synopsis. It evades pontificating on the religious and political apparatuses that Herbert is clearly interested in, leaving them to be inferred. There is a ground-level understanding of the hostilities between the Fremen and the Harkonnen/Atredeis colonizers and just enough historical information to get us up to speed with Paul’s place and potential future within this conflict.

As much as IMAX helps its cause, Dune, in all its efficiency, tries too hard to make everything believable and tangible. While this may be in line with Villeneuve’s love for muted color palettes and quasi-brutalist architecture, this is more widely a cultural imprint on the way we approach fantasy and sci-fi movies today. Advanced technology and SFX have exponentially increased the ability to simulate reality. In turn, the fantastical and unbelievable capabilities of these forms instead have lent to some creators trying to make things look as plausible as possible to audiences (I still remember laughing and rolling my eyes when the big fight in Captain America: Civil War took place at a literal airport terminal).

It’s weird for a series like Dune, which has a history and iconography that is so wild and galactic and reveling in the visually comical to see characters who look and have the emotions of marble chessboard pieces in a landscape filled with large dusty tanks and metallic monoliths of ships and crafts.

Conclusion: Dune

This Dune adaptation plays it as safe as possible, which is probably for the best. It’s a practical choice considering the real difficulties of the material and the complete failures (in terms of general appeal) of the previous iterations of it in the cinema. It also is probably for the best in terms of the creative limits of Denis Villeneuve, whose ponderous sci-fi cinema is not really my cup of tea. That he went the route of turning this stylistically and pace-wise more into a ‘Sicario-in-space’ fits well for what I think he does best. This is a movie that aimed to essentially wrangle a monumental and deeply intricate work of science-fiction into a popular Hollywood product. The end result is something perfectly adequate and makes its 2 hours and 35 minutes seem much shorter than it is … and I can’t say I wasn’t entertained.

What are your thoughts on this adaptation of Dune? Let us know in the comments below!

Dune was released in theaters and streaming on HBO Max on October 22, 2021.

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