Denis Villeneuve did not have an easy task ahead of him when he decided to try an make Dune, of all books, the next big cinematic media franchise (and make no mistake he fully intends this to be the next Star Wars or Lord of the Rings). The book is notoriously dense and complex; a bizarre and uncompromising fusion of sci-fi themes with high fantasy complexity, and psychedelic concepts: The work as a whole is quite frankly not palatable to a broad audience. The big question then is did he do it? In making Dune (2021) Did Denis Villeneuve craft a film that can serve as the basis for a new cinematic mega franchise while respecting the esotericism and complexity of its source material?
The visceral effect of Dune is unparalleled. The film lost not
one iota of the book’s bizarre visual and world concepts. Blowing these up on to
an eminently grand cinematic scale (that may surpass even Peter Jackson’s fantasy
epic) with such uncompromising fidelity, the film achieves an as yet unseen level
of pure cinematic spectacle. The production design throughout, and even the music
and sound design are all suitably alien, but grounded in a broad palate of established
aesthetics from all across human time, culture and fiction. Alien but not alienating.
It is truly difficult to describe the majesty and grandeur of Denis perfectly executed
vision.
But this film is not without its compromises. I, myself am a
Dune fan. In reading the first book I was utterly enraptured with the political
intreague and carefully interlocked dance of passions, motives, means, plans, and
power. It’s fair to say Dune (2021) respects this ballet of shifting power, and
aspires to bring the audience into that dance, but as unlimited as the film’s
scope seems some things are beyond even its grasp. The political intreague of the
film is a fair shadow of the book’s. Many of the finer points of the Harkonnen plan
to bring down the house Atreides are sanded away in favor of a faster pace, but
the key ideas are in tact. Entire subplots, included in the book to demonstrate
the psychotic paranoia of Frank Herbert's universe of space feudalism, have been
cut entirely from the film leaving me with the feeling of something missing. However, were these plans within plans included, the film's already epic runtime
would cross the bridge to unwieldy, and those unfamiliar with the book certainly
won’t miss anything anyway.
This sanding down of details extends to even some of the book's
more compelling concepts leading to the possibility of misunderstanding the story’s
critique of the chosen one narrative. The prophecy of the book is made plain to
be a political tool of a secret society to control uneducated populations and ensure
the safety of their agents, whereas the movie plays it a bit more straight including
only one or two lines that gesture in that direction. However this seems to be an
almost deliberate side effect of Dune's best decision: a thematic focus on forefronting
the perspective of the Fremen, the indigenous population of the eponymous planet.
Even from the opening narration the movie doesn’t shy away from the fact that “our
heroes" are there to exploit the Fremen for wealth and power. The effects of
this shift are limited by the narrative of this first film but promise to be more
influential in future installments.
The prevailing thought I had coming out of Dune was that IT IS
DUNE! It is an entertaining and deeply, viscerally, engaging film, an outstanding
technical achievement and even a serviceable adaptation. The fact that Denis managed
to achieve ALL THREE is a miracle in itself. This film and its eventual sequel
(studio willing) are going to be considered seminal works of art for decades to
come.
