Dune (2021)

Score: 3.5 / 5

Denis Villeneuve is my favorite director right now for a lot of reasons, and his films are all on my regular favorite lists. As he's moved into science fiction and major franchises, I've been slightly skeptical; not because he didn't knock Blade Runner 2049 out of the park, but because I've worried that studio oversight would limit his vision or shoehorn accessibility into his work. We've seen it happen before. And Villeneuve's latest, Dune, is only exacerbating my anxieties to that end because, while my exact concerns did not come to pass, it is easily my least favorite film from the genius.

As with any big franchise -- especially in this genre -- most discussion will revolve around the adaptation process. Frank Herbert's '60s groundbreaking novel and his five (?) sequels spawned an entire shared universe of interplanetary politics, economics, and war, and it was notoriously labeled as unfilmable after David Lynch's 1984 cinematic attempt. I've never read or seen anything about Dune, so this review will not engage with those concerns, but I'm aware enough of its sprawling world-building scope to understand that there is enough within the franchise to excite anyone interested in heady ideas of environmentally radical geopolitics, anti-capitalist exploitation, and unusually complex gender and racial dynamics that hinge on religious identity. In these respects, I'm planning to read Herbert's series in the coming months, if only to check it off my list. But this film did almost nothing to excite the prospect of more, and given the widespread praise of it, I'd like to reflect on why.

The plot is, I think, shockingly simple. In the distant future, a galactic emperor decrees that the powerful Atreides family will relocate and become the rulers of Arrakis, a desert planet. What seems a curse is complicated due to the presence of "spice," a unique natural resource only on Arrakis, which is crucial for space travel (and hallucinogenic trips) and therefore the most valuable element in their civilization. Making this move, the Atreides patriarch (the ever-handsome Oscar Isaac) realizes they are in the midst of a power play between the paranoid emperor and other dynastic families vying for wealth and influence, none more so than the villainous Harkonnens (and their patriarch, a deliciously wicked Stellan Skarsgard), who previously ruled Arrakis. As the family learns more about their new place in galactic geopolitics, they must fend off traitors; their son Paul (Timothee Chalamet) becomes a man and a messiah, seeing visions and exhibiting powers cultivated by his deeply religious, slightly witchy mother (Rebecca Ferguson), and connecting with the native population to mysterious ends.

As the title card for this film indicates, this is only "part one" of the story, which will reportedly conclude with a "part two," and so it is by no means a complete narrative. Its extensive work in world-building is nothing short of spectacular, and deserves to be seen (and heard, in a droning Hans Zimmer score that threatens to blow out speakers) on the biggest screen available. But its characters, largely archetypal, are much harder to parse because they simply do not go through standard dynamic developments. The closest we get is the callow (dare I say shallow? Sorry, I'm not a big Chalamet fan) Paul becoming a man, but as much as he learns about himself, his mystical gifts, and his place in the violent intrigue of this interstellar Game of Thrones, he ends the movie finally finding "the girl" he's been seeing in visions (Zendaya), which is about as trite a resolution as we could have gotten.

It's a thoroughly entertaining experience, and in Villeneuve's hands often feels like the sort of epic that will add it to fans' shelves alongside major movies from George Lucas, Peter Jackson, Christopher Nolan, Stanley Kubrick, and Ridley Scott. I especially liked that it is so (apparently intentionally) allegorical, and was probably one of (if not the) first in its genre to tap into Islam as a good thing, as well as a certain sensitive portrayal of ecoterrorism. The native people of Arrakis (the Fremen) appear to be modeled after Arab Muslims, and "spice" read to me as oil, which the alien invaders sweep in to take over and fund wars much like Westerners (and in Westerns, at that). I confess myself most confused not with the material itself, nor with its visionary spectacle, but with its technical delivery. The editing is all over the place, in my mind, and almost every time I was prepared to settle in and absorb a new frame -- each gorgeously, gloriously composed -- it would cut to another shot. This worked well during the action sequences, including any time sandworms attacked and flying through a sandstorm, but not so well in intimate scenes or any shots meant to inspire sensations of grandeur or even fear, such as the weird religious test of pain Paul goes through very early in the film.

Perhaps part of my ambivalence for this movie stems from a similar annoyance with other soft science fiction devices, specifically an over-reliance on original vocabulary. You may have already gathered as much, but this movie made very little sense to me because of its thick screenplay, which is comprehensible only if you can effectively remember and contextualize its many characters, organizations, and technologies after only hearing them briefly. I say "hearing," but that's the other major problem: I could barely understand most of the dialogue in this film. Much like last summer's Tenet, I expect I'll like (and comprehend) this movie a lot more when I can watch it with subtitles. The sound mixing is fine, but the editing should have been mindful of their audience, many of whom have no idea what's really going on here, and so need to be able to listen accurately and without driving us to distraction. I appreciated that the screenplay didn't make its exposition feel like exposition, but the flip side is that it took me a while to feel reasonably confident about anything going on.