'Dune: Part One': The Spice and the Damage Done
Revisiting Denis Villeneuve's 2021 opus in advance of its sequel.
Dune: Part Two comes out today! I’ll be seeing it just a few hours from now. Being the OCD nerd that I am, I naturally re-watched Dune: Part One earlier this week in anticipation of the sequel. My thoughts are below. So ingest some melange, hop on a chaise-hulud lounge, and join me as we travel to the distant, exotic, and dangerous planet known as Arrakis…
2021’s Dune: Part One is a little bit of a mixed bag. As a sci-fi/adventure film, it’s very, very good; as a representation of Frank Herbert’s monumental 1965 novel, it’s so-so.
In defense of the brilliant French-Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve (Arrival, Sicario, Blade Runner 2049), who directed and co-wrote this latest version of the story, adapting Herbert’s 800+ page book was never going to be an easy task; attempts to do so famously felled both David Lynch, who made a barely-watchable movie starring Kyle MacLachlan and Sean Young in 1984, and the Sci-Fi Channel, who produced a rinky-dink miniseries with William Hurt and Giancarlo Giannini in 2000. That Villeneuve was able to create anything as good as he did is something of a minor miracle in and of itself.
For those of you unfamiliar with Dune in any of its previous forms, the highly political and spiritual story takes place roughly 20,000 years from now, after humans have mastered interstellar travel and colonized the universe. They’re able to do this thanks to a spice, melange, which has psychotropic properties. Melange is found exclusively on a single desert planet, Arrakis, and is incredibly dangerous to harvest: Arrakis is environmentally perilous (it’s extremely hot and severely devoid of water), its indigenous people, the Fremen, are hostile to the imperialist off-worlders, and it’s populated by massive, monstrous sandworms, called Shai-Hulud (the namesake of the most excellent band), who are attracted rhythmic vibrations, such as people walking and machines running.
Arrakis has been ruled with an iron grip for eighty years by the barbarous House Harkonnen, commanded by the devious, gluttonous Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård) along with his brutally-violent nephew, Glossu “Beast” Rabban (Dave Bautista). But as the story begins, the Emperor (who doesn’t appear in Dune: Part One, but will be played by Christopher Walken in Dune: Part Two) has transferred control to House Atreides, led by the Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac); his concubine, Jessica (Rebecca Fergusion); their only son and heir, Paul (Timothée Chalamet); and the brave, loyal warriors Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin) and Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa).
This transfer of power appears to be a gift - for whomever oversees the harvesting of melange stands to accrue incredible wealth. In fact, it is an act of political subterfuge: the Emperor fears that the Duke has become too popular and could overthrow him, so he sends House Atreides to Arrakis knowing that House Harkonnen will attempt to wrestle back ownership of the planet by any means necessary.
All goes according to a plan, and an ambush - which also involves the clandestine participation of the Emperor’s elite army, the Sardaukar - leaves Duke Atreides dead and seems to wipe out his entire family.
What no one knows, however, is that Paul and Jessica have evaded assassination and made their way into the unforgiving desert. There, they meet the Fremen, including Stilgar (Javier Bardem) and his daughter, Chani (Zendaya), about whom Paul has been having visions.
Jessica, you see, is a member of the Bene Gesserit, an all-female spiritualist group with supernatural abilities; they have been toiling in the shadows for generations attempting bring about their first male member, whom they call the Kwisatz Haderach and who the Fremen refer to as Lisan al Gaib; a prophecy claims that this messianic figure will bring freedom (and water!) to Arrakis… and evidence strongly suggests that Paul is this person.
Dune: Part One, which adapts the first half or so of the novel, concludes with Paul and Jessica joining the Fremen and disappearing into the desert; Dune: Part Two, based on the book’s second half, will see Paul cementing his position as the Kwisatz Haderach and leading the Fremen in a rebellion to vanquish House Harkonnen once and for and all.
If you found those last few paragraphs confusing, well, you can see why adapting the novel has proven to be such a challenge; truth be told, this brief summary only barely even scratches the surface of the intricacies within Herbert’s tale. Dune is so full of world-building and political machinations as to make Game of Thrones seem straightforward by comparison.
To make Dune work as a movie, Villeneuve and his co-screenwriters, Eric Roth (Killers of the Flower Moon, Forrest Gump) and Jon Spaihts (Prometheus, Passengers), had to sacrifice many of the concepts that make Herbert’s novel so intellectually stimulating: I’ve yet to speak to anyone who saw the film and didn’t read the book that even noticed the story takes place in a world without computers. A large part of Herbert’s mythology is centered around the idea of so-called ‘Mentats’ - humans who have been trained to serve the same function as computers in the wake of a war against Artificial Intelligence that resulted in the outlawing of thinking machines (a theme which certainly seems relevant today). Mentats still exist in Villeneuve’s adaptation, as exemplified by characters like Thufir Hawat (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and Piter de Vries (David Dastmalchian), both denoted by marks on their lower lip and the way their eyes roll into the backs of their skulls whenever they do complex calculations…
…but no one ever actually utters the word ‘Mentat,’ let alone explains what they are. The omission is especially glaring because in the book, Paul has begun to undergo Mentat training and Bene Gesserit training prior to his exile - the implication being that his adherence to both the scientific and the spiritual ultimately helps him to become the Kwisatz Haderach (melange is the final ingredient in his transformation, natch). Because the whole Mentat concept has been all but jettisoned in Villeneuve’s movie, that implication is lost, which makes his ‘chosen one’ status infinitely less interesting.
Perhaps even more problematic, however, is the ways in which Villeneuve et al. were forced to short-shrift supporting characters in order to fit as much of Herbert’s story into their film as possible.
This is arguably most evident in the portrayal of Dr. Yueh (Chang Chen). Yueh serves House Atreides, but ultimately betrays them, helping House Harkonnen to stage their Pearl Harbor-esque sneak attack, because the Baron has taken his wife hostage. In the book, Yueh has a very close, personal relationship with the Atreides, and feels more than a little bit conflicted about helping to bring about their demise. His fate is ultimately tragic: after helping to kill the Duke Atreides, he learns that the Baron Harkonnen has already executed his wife… just before Yueh himself is murdered. In other words, he ultimately betrayed these people he loves so dearly for no reason.
But Yueh is barely a character in Villeneuve’s film, so his role as a Judas carries little of the Shakespearean weight afforded the role in the novel. And while it’s somewhat understandable why Villeneuve and his collaborators would opt to abbreviate his part in their movie, they really give the dude the short shrift: after the Baron tells him that his wife is dead and then promptly murders him, he doesn’t get so much as a reaction shot. How does Yueh feel in his final moments, knowing he has unnecessarily engaged in such evil acts? Viewers are given no clues. This renders the character’s motivations so irrelevant that they may as well have changed them altogether; that he even has a wife is purely incidental.
If I’m hard on Dune: Part One, it’s only because I so admire both Herbert and Villeneuve (Arrival, which was adapted from Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life,” is, truly, one of the best science-fiction movies in recent memory, if not ever). Nitpicky as I may be, I’d still assert that Villeneuve got more right than he did wrong. Greg Fraser’s cinematography is breathtaking, and no one can accuse the film of failing to capture the physical scope of Herbert’s imagined world; Joe Walker’s editing is inventive and impactful (other than missing that reaction shot of Yueh, of course); the production design, by Patrice Vermette, and the costume design, by Robert Morgan and Jacqueline West, is perfect; Hans Zimmer’s score is exciting and beautiful; and the cast totally nails it - I was initially skeptical of Chalamet’s ability to play a figure so imposing as Paul Atreides, and shame on me for doubting him.
Most impressive, however, is that Villeneuve managed to retain the single most important thematic element of Herbert’s novel, which is also the one that would have been both the easiest and most convenient to excise: Paul Atreides does become a savior with demigod-like abilities… and that’s not necessarily a good thing.
Throughout the film, Paul has potentially-oracular visions of his future as the liberator of Arrakis and the leader of the Fremen - and of the jihad that will someday be carried out in his name should those visions come to pass (the movie carefully substitutes the phrase “holy war” for jihad). Understandably, this is the root of the character’s greatest internal struggle: if he fails, he and his family will be wiped out forever, but if he succeeds, billions of people across the universe will eventually be slaughtered in his name.
This is precisely what occurs in Dune’s sequel, Dune Messiah, which Herbert wrote in 1969, reportedly because he felt that people had missed the message in his original tome: set years after the first book, the story finds Paul having ascended to become Emperor, the consequence of which has been a staggering amount of bloodshed (there’s a moment in the book where some of Paul’s followers marvel at the comparatively puny number of people killed in the genocides perpetrated by Hitler and Stalin). Herbert understood the inherent danger in demagoguery, that the oppressed often become the oppressors, and that the line between freedom fighter and despot is porous; he knew that these kinds of geopolitical conflicts are rarely so black-and-white as we’d like to believe. Paul Atreides doesn’t get to celebrate with the Ewoks after bringing down the evil Empire - his fight never ends, and he comes to embody the very thing against which he once waged war. I won’t spoil the ending of Dune Messiah for those of you who have never read it, but suffice it to say, it’s pretty bleak (subsequent books in Herbert’s saga are also increasingly bizarre - Paul’s son, for example, eventually merges with a Shai-Hulud).
Early word is that Villeneuve has managed to keep this theme intact in Dune: Part Two. That the filmmaker has endeavored to maintain this aspect of Herbert’s tale… that he hasn’t simplified things by making Paul the sinless hero audiences surely want him to be… is simply incredible (not least of all because these are mega-budget studio pictures).
Villeneuve has said that he’d like to adapt Dune Messiah once Chalamet is a little older. We’ll see whether or not these ambitions ever come to fruition, but I certainly hope they do: if ever there was a time to refute the cult of personality, this is it.