Dune (Legendary Entertainment, Villenueve Films, Warner Bros., 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9:20 my husband Charles and I watched Denis Villenueve’s 2021 film of Frank Herbert’s science-fiction classic Dune – or at least the first half of it, since the movie comes to an abrupt cliff-hanger ending when Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and his girlfriend Chani (Zendaya) interfaces with and joins the band of Fremen headed by Stilgar (Jasvier Bardem). The Fremen (pronounced “Freh-men” in the film even though I had assumed the correct pronunciation was “Free-men”) are the native inhabitants of the planet Arrakis, colloquially named “Dune” because its surface is almost all sand. It has no water to speak of, and in order to go about outside on its surface humans have to wear “stillsuits,” which capture people’s moisture and sweat and recycle it into drinking water. Arrakis is important because of a hallucinogenic drug, called “spice” (actually in Herbert’s novels it has an alternate name, “melange”), whose importance is explained in a part of Herberrt’s Dune that did not make it into the film script by Villeneuve, Jon Spaihts and Eric Roth. It seems that the events of Dune take place a full eight millennia from now, and in the meantime humanity’s increasingly sophisticated computers staged a rebellion. It was eventually put down, and to make sure it didn’t happen again the human race created an Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt not make a machine in the form of a human mind.” Instead the authorities created a special group of people called Mentats who would do the jobs humanity had formerly assigned to computers, and individuals with the right aptitudes and skill sets were singled out for training in the discipline of being human computers. (One of the most powerful scenes in Dune is when hero Paul Atreides is told that he’s secretly been given Mentat training utterly without his knowledge.) The hard part of relying on human beings instead of computers for travel across long stretches of space is keeping the Mentats alive, well and alert during that time, and for that reason they are given spice, which has made it the most valuable commodity in the universe.

As Dune opens, the Emperor has taken away the spice franchise from the Harkonnen family and given it to Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac) and his family instead, which includes his mistress Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) and their son Paul. (One of the things that particularly bothered me about Dune the novel when I read it half a century ago is this blithe assumption that humankind has continued to advance technologically but its class system and overall social structure has regressed to feudalism. That’s also a common conceit in many genre novels, especially ones perched on the cusp between science-fiction and fantasy the way Dune is.) There’s a hint in the film that’s somewhat more developed in the book that the Emperor did this deliberately to set up the House of Atreides for failure and get Duke Leto killed (which he is, thanks to a traitor in his entourage). Paul has already received warrior training from Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa, still a hot young man but a bit too grizzled here for the almost unearthly beauty he showed in Aquaman) and Gurney Haslleck (Josh Brolin). One aspect of the book that does make it into the film is the Bene Gesserit, a sort of women’s guild to which Lady Jessica belongs. It’s headed by the Reverend Gaius Helen Mohiam (Charlotte Rampling), who reminded me a lot of Celia Lobsky’s (Mrs. Peter Lorre) role as the Vulcan high priestess in the “Amok Time” episode of the original Star Trek. Lady Jessica insists that her son be given the Bene Gesserit training even though the order has never admitted a male before,and throughout the movie Paul is repeatedly warned not to take the Bene Gesserit’s claims that they are a totally benign organization that seriously.

The central conflicts of Dune – at least the first part – are the Atreides’ position on the planet, the way the departing Harkonnens sabotaged as much as they could of the equipment needed to bring in the all-important spice harvest, and the morally ambiguous role of the Fremen, who are depicted very much like Native Americans. It’s my understanding that Frahk Herbert himself was either all or part Native American – after the first two books in the Dune cycle he wrote a 1972 novel called Soul Catcher, his first work outside the science-fiction genre, about Native Americans. (Judging from the Wikipedia summary of Soul Catcher, it seems like the plot of John Ford’s 1956 Western The Searchers told from the Native point of view.) The metaphor between real Native Americans and the fictional “Fremen” of Dune came through far more strongly this time around than when i read the book 50 years ago. There is a good movie lurking around in the plot, characters and situations of Dune, but alas Denis Villenueve didn’t make it. (I haven’t seen the earlier version directed by David Lynch, though I remember a late-1990’s TV-movie adaptation my husband Charles and I watched.) Dune the movie is sunk by the same faults of Villenueve’s previous film, Blade Runner 2049, particularly a ponderousness that makes it seem like if he has his movie move along very slowly it will seem “profound.”

Dune is nowhere nearly as terrible as Blade Runner 2049, which struck me as worthy if the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave an award for All-Time Worst Sequel to a Great Film. But it’s still pretty dreary, and even tha action scenes seem dull, everything bathed in desert fog and dankly lit so this movie literally becomes hard to watch after a while. Even the sudden last-minute appearance of one of the giant sandworms which live under Arrakis’s surface, terrorize the local population and (as explained in a part of the book Villenueve hasn’t reached yet) actually create that precious spice fails to terrify because Villenueve directs it so ponderously. I’ve seen three of Villenueve’s films so far and actually liked the first one, Arrival (in which Amy Adams gave a terrific performance as an earth scientist assigned to figure out how to communicate with recently landed extraterrestrials), though my generally good notice on my moviemagg blog post had some caveats, notably Villenueve’s apparent disinterest in linear plots and through-lines. “The conceit behind the story is that the aliens don’t think in linear patterns and have no conception of time as a one-way continuum of past-present-future,” I wrote. “O.K., but if they have no linear thought patterns, how did they build spaceships in the first place? Don’t you have to think in linear terms to be able to develop technology at all? And what’s even worse, the filmmakers use this conceit to set up a truly revolting surprise ending à la The Sixth Sense.” I actively hated Blade Runner 2049, and when I heard Deniks Villenueve was doing a remake of Dune, my comment was, “So that man is going to desecrate another classic science-fiction story?” And his imdb.com page has the depressing news that he’s going to do it a third time because his next announced film is an adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvcous with Rama!