A sweeping amalgamation of Denis Villeneuve's career in the biggest and greatest artistic achievement of 2021.
After a significant amount of anticipation and postponed releases, Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of the beloved novel, Dune, has reached the end of its journey by releasing in theaters. Despite arriving at its final destination, this is perhaps just the beginning of a story intended to spawn an unfilmed sequel and a handful of spinoffs. With wide eyes, a full heart, and a mind endlessly wandering into the depths of the world of Dune, I can finally exclaim that Dune managed to not only meet expectations, but surpass them. In a sweeping effort, Denis Villeneuve has managed to deliver a quality adaptation for the fans, as well as introducing an abundance of new moviegoers to the sun baked planet of Arrakis and the Fremen people that inhabit it.
From the lush and flowing greens and rivers of Caladan, home to House Atreides, to the sandy shores of Arrakis housing the native Fremen people, Dune is a monumental achievement too big for your home theater. Bolstered by an impressive and extraordinarily talented cast, unforgettable visual effects work, and a Hans Zimmer score for the record books, Dune seems to be setting up the next pop culture craze despite adapting just the first half of the novel. For how cliche it’s become within the last week, this is truly unlike anything we’ve ever seen. Although it maintains familiar storytelling beats, the merging of two different genres unite in harmony. The medieval fantasy of swords and shields meet the dystopian futures of science-fiction. Weapons are limited, technology is advanced enough, but not without its specific shortcomings. Unlike most science-fiction films, Dune ditches the iPads and FaceTime calls typically present in worlds like these. Instead, they communicate through their own inexplicable technology that the camera chooses to tell a story about, rather than the dialogue. We simply take it for what it is, rather than needing to understand why we aren’t seeing familiar props. It’s a true sign of understanding how madly in love with the material the cast and crew are. It’s an enveloping film prepared to take you on a journey, instead of telling you about one.
The core traits of Dune deal with the internal and external politics of invading land and harvesting their resources for capital gain. For being a half-century old, it is astonishing how often this story works with tremendous foresight. When we look at the premise of Dune, we can relate that to the U.S.’s invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan in the early 2000s. America designated itself to maintain power and control over the world’s greatest resource, oil. So they invaded and endangered the Middle East, defied their beliefs and systems, and used technology to take over. All great science-fiction is based on a semblance of truth in the present, to expel warnings about the future. Frank Herbert managed to do that 46 years before it became a reality for us. Not to mention that it inspired nearly every single sci-fi/fantasy story to follow. Now, enter Denis Villeneuve, a vocal, passionate fan of the science-fiction stories that forged him, and he imbues Dune with a significant amount of compassion and adoration for the material. It’s been an excruciatingly long time since I’ve felt a movie this big, able to condense it’s scale into the most personal of moments. Oftentimes cinematographer Greig Fraser allows the scope of ships to tower over the characters to create a true sense of awe. It’s definitely showy, a bit indulgent, but paired with the mechanically engineered score of Hans Zimmer, it becomes an enveloping piece of art. Characters are draped head to toe in costuming worthy of every gold statue, and the drama that unfolds between them is engaging, rewarding, and worthwhile.
Dune is incredibly dense and filled to the brim with shifting perspectives on a dime, but Denis and screenwriters Jon Spaihts and Eric Roth streamline all of that density. It trims some of the fat and allows characters to go through the motions that service their respective journey that affects others. In moments of despair or hallucinogenic sequences, all of the actors are allowed to channel the most talented form of themselves. Oscar Isaac is brooding and bold as Duke Leto, but anchored by the passion and fear of Rebecca Ferguson’s Lady Jessica. Both of these characteristics are channeled into their growing son, Paul. Played perfectly by Timothee Chalamet. His dreams incite fear, terror, paths of uncertainty, but he embraces the shadow of House Atreides and the call to leadership. As the story begins to ask more out of Chalamet, he delivers. He evolves from a cautious boy eager to ask questions, into a capable young man prepared to give orders. To see that evolution is the entire foundation of what makes Dune work. The technical aspects are a big deal, but it’s the smaller moments within his growth as the protagonist that shine brighter. In a special moment, Paul and Duke Leto share a moment amidst the graveyard of their fallen forefathers as they express uncertainty about the future of House Atreides. It’s in moments like these where Villeneuve’s understanding of the story overwhelms. Not in the scope, but the internal drama of reckoning with failure, leadership, religion, and how to overcome the politics that intertwine them.
Dune has drawn comparisons to The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Game of Thrones, but it’s more like Blade Runner than any of those. In the sense that the score and scope takes over the story and allows the audience to sit with it as it unravels. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t capitalize on the politics that are essentially the exo-skeleton to the entire operation. The status of houses, the wars they’ve waged or won, the relationships they share with others that hold a higher position of power, all dictate the direction in which the story will lead. There’s an immediate sense of urgency built into the fabric of the first act. The foreshadowing of what seems like the inevitable and how to push forward into the abstract. Tangible objects, most notably the grasses of Caladan, the sands of Arrakis, a lone beetle in a hallway, or the structures they live in breathe with life as they try to make sense of the senseless. You can also note the structure of the Ornithopters. Winged beasts flutter like that of an insect. For how desolate, barren, and lifeless Arrakis appears, life finds a way to live on. Whether it’s men enduring the rays of the Sun, native wildlife relying on the sweat they produce, the worms deep beneath the surface pulsing with hunger, or machines etched into the sands of Arrakis’ history, Dune beams with the promise of life or death. It’s a world unlike anything movies have allowed us to experience. It isn’t a world we want to visit, but one we would like to learn more about because of its vast history worth harvesting information from.
Dune lives up to the promise because of how affectionate every frame of this movie is. With trailers for the next handful of Hollywood movies looking like rinsed out cardboard preceding Dune, it’s astonishing how desperately the movies have missed events this big. Not just the scale, but looking as great as it does. The last time we got anything like this was James Cameron’s, Avatar. Your mileage with that film may vary, but bringing something completely new to life is worth the trip to the theater alone. I promise you, with every ounce of myself, that watching this at home does not do it justice. It was made with the experience the movie theater can offer in mind, and the booming score and grand visuals supply just that. With all of that being said, this feels like everything Denis Villeneuve was leading to as a storyteller. If you map out what Dune covers, and then chronicle the filmography of Denis, every other film feels like a slice of Dune. Identifying with faith, back door politics, enduring emotions that are on a different plane of existence, the existentialism of fighting for the right cause. That sounds a lot like Prisoners, Sicario, Arrival, and Blade Runner 2049 to me. Which makes a lot of sense. Isn’t all of the art we create subconsciously inspired by what we grew up loving? If Dune is a story that Denis has been in love with since he was a child, why wouldn’t he go on to make movies that just so happen to have a lot in common with his biggest inspiration of them all? I’ve fallen into cliches and some mild redundancy, but Dune really is that special. It’s the type of intimacy overwhelming movies have yearned for. It’s passionate about what it’s creating because it’s madly in love with it’s characters, the world they’re a part of, how they live within it, and how it will follow our next major protagonist, Paul Atreides. A boy that evolves into a man, that blossoms into a leader amidst the desolate ranges of Arrakis and the mechanical behemoths of it’s oppressors.