"Dune" (2021) Review

We’ve been down this road before.

Dune is a story that’s been adapted to the screen three times now. The first attempt to make it onscreen (apologies to Jodorowsky) was in 1984 under the combined efforts of mega-producer Dino De Laurentiis and David Lynch. It’s a film that has its fans. I’m not one of them, though I do like a few scenes in it (the Spacing Guild Navigator sequence towards the beginning of the film absolutely rules).

The second attempt made it onto TV screens in 2000 on the SyFy channel (long enough ago that it was still called the SciFi channel). In my personal opinion, this was a very valiant attempt, expertly adapted by writer-director John Harrison into a three-part mini-series. The structure of the story was completely sound, and Harrison even managed to add flourishes of his own to the script. However, the scope of TV productions simply wasn’t what it is now, and the series is constrained by budgetary constraints.

Now, we’re onto the third attempt, a movie that represents half of the story that debuted over half a century ago when Frank Herbert managed to get Dune published in 1965.

There’s a long-running belief that Dune is un-filmable. As a fan of the novel, I highly disagree with this notion. The fact of the matter is that much of the imagery in the novel is deeply cinematic, as seen by the dozens (if not hundreds) of films, TV shows, comic books, and video games that have cribbed their visual language from descriptions of Herbert’s novel.

What makes Dune so damn difficult to adapt? Simply put, the sheer density of its mythology. It isn’t just a matter of Dune’s world being highly detailed in the novel, but how all of those details interconnect. Herbert wrote a world that’s factions and politics were highly reactive to one another, meaning that if you name one part of its universe, you’re almost forced to name every single other part of it.

If there’s something that Denis Villeneuve’s newest incarnation manages better than most is picking and choosing what parts of its dense mythology to adapt. In fact, in being picky about what parts of the mythology to emphasize, Villeneuve and his screenplay collaborators, Eric Roth and Jon Spaihts, have managed to set the stage for a “Part Two” of this story that I couldn’t be more excited to see in October 2023.

But we’re talking about Part One, and as it stands, Denis Villeneuve’s Part One is a fantastic setup of things to come.

For the totally uninitiated, 10,000 years from now, mankind has spread across the stars and now operates as a literal space empire. Their are Barons, Dukes, an Emperor and fiefdoms to manage, Houses of “royal” blood, and all sorts of political factions that have formed.

All of them are bound by one basic law of the universe: The spice must flow. “Spice” is a hallucinogenic drug found on an entirely desert planet called Arrakis. While it has medicinal qualities, the drug is what makes space travel of the future possible. If spice production stops, the universe stops. Controlling this resource leads to the most desperate behavior imaginable, and when the cruel House Harkonnen is banished from their control of Arrakis by the Emperor, the (relatively) noble House Atreides is suddenly asked to take over.

House Atreides is led by Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac), who accepts the Emperor’s task. This thrusts our lead character, Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), son of the Duke, into a world he’s barely ready to face. To make matters worse, Paul’s mother, Lady Jessica Atreides (Rebecca Ferguson) belongs to another organization called the Bene Gesserit that not only threatens his existence but has taken steps to predetermine his fate. Worst of all, the Atreides may find themselves in the crosshairs of a much larger political conspiracy that threatens to destroy them completely.

Now, the movie makes mention of a ton of different terms from the book, things like Sardaukar, Shai-Hulud, Herald of the Change, the Spacing Guild, and many more. I’m sure some fans of the book might be disappointed to know that many of these terms are only mentioned, and only a few are really elaborated on (sadly, this version doesn’t even attempt to depict a Navigator from the Spacing Guild).

What this adaptation zeroes in on though are the Bene Gesserit, and in my opinion, it’s a really smart call. The Bene Gesserit is an organization that acts as if it’s a religious practice, but the reality of their operation is that they are attempting to breed a human being with a mind powerful enough to see into the future and lead the universe, a hypothetical being they call the Kwisatz Haderach. The religions they spread throughout the universe are nothing more than ways to prepare populations for the arrival of their project that’s been going on for thousands of years.

This adaptation, more than any adaptation before it, communicates this concept of false religion incredibly well, and it makes the story much more compelling, especially after Paul learns that his mother believes that he is the Kwisatz Haderach. It creates tension for Paul’s character where he struggles to deal with being born into many roles, none of which he had a say in. He is the future of his royal house and an heir to possibly being a messiah, it creates a natural focal point that the film does a damn good job of capitalizing on.

The scope of this film is absolutely gigantic, and there’s a huge number of cast members that I haven’t even touched on yet. You have Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa), an expert warrior for House Atreides and a confidant to Paul, Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin), the leader of House Atreides military, Thufir Hawat (Stephen McKinley Henderson), essentially a human-computer, and Dr. Wellington Yueh (Chang Chen), whose title describes his purpose.

And that’s just House Atreides! House Harkonnen, the mortal enemy of House Atreides, includes the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård), his nephew Beast Rabban Harkonnen (Dave Bautista), and their own human-computer Piter de Vries (David Dastmalchian). There’s a faction on Arrakis called the Fremen who live off of the desert, one of their leaders being Stilgar (Javier Bardem), and among his people is the young Chani (Zendaya) who keeps appearing in Paul’s dreams as a vision.

Again, this is a ridiculously dense universe they’re working with, but what I find stunning about the movie is how it just commits to this universe. They may not fully explain every aspect of the mythology, but they show you almost all of it. The movie may never identify its human-computer characters by what they’re called in the novel (a mentat), but you still understand that’s more or less what they are. The film is fiercely dedicated to the idea of “show, don’t tell,” and if an aspect of the mythology isn’t absolutely essential to a scene’s drama, it goes unnamed.

This commitment is where director Denis Villeneuve’s style really takes hold. Villeneuve’s films often have very grounded camera moves and compositions, and he uses this style completely to his advantage. So much attention in this film is dedicated to seeing how the elements react to everything. When ships land on a rainy night, they blow water everywhere. When they land in the desert, a sea of dust kicks up. Even if you find yourself lost in the terminology and particulars of this universes’ politics, so much of the film is made in a way that feels immersive and all-consuming.

So many modern blockbusters strive for realism in their effects, but there’s something uniquely special about the way Dune employs so many different tricks, both digital and practical, to make its worlds feel like tangible places. So much of modern “grounded” science fiction filmmaking feels nothing like this, where the technology feels incredibly foreign yet seems plausible inside of the worlds the film is making.

The film also has an intense understanding of how to depict scale, captured in the most staggering way possible by cinematographer Greig Fraser. Villeneuve and Fraser understand exactly how to visually communicate the size of any given thing, whether it’s a spaceship, a city, or a 400-meter sandworm.

In all of this grandeur, it’d be easy to lose track of the human performers that drive this film, but they’re pretty great for the most part. I will admit, I felt that many of the actors were a bit stiff early on in the film, but it’s clear that the film is trying to establish the differences between how these royal characters act in public versus how they act in private. Oscar Isaac as Duke Leto seems strangely reserved until deeper in the film as he exposes his deep vulnerabilities to Lady Jessica.

This also applies to Timothée Chalamet, who seems a bit too reserved for some of the film’s runtime if it wasn’t for the fact that Paul as a character is disconnected from almost everyone around him, especially as he learns of his possibly predetermined fate. Chalamet manages to thread the needle between “proper royal son” and “young man resentful of his lack of control over things,” though I would like to see his character show a bit more humanity (while he still can) in Part Two.

The standout performance here comes from Rebecca Ferguson as Lady Jessica, who completely threads the needle between “woman terrified of the Bene Gesserit and what her son might become” and “woman who will slit anyone’s throat to protect her son if need be.”

For me, the surprise was just how well-suited Jason Momoa is to playing Duncan Idaho. I’m personally very hit and miss on Momoa’s performances, but I’ll be damned if he didn’t totally bring Duncan to life here. Conversely, I wasn’t super impressed with Dave Bautista as the Beast Rabban, but the movie doesn’t give him a lot to do. Sadly, David Dastmalchian isn’t given nearly as much to do as Piter de Vries, but he crushes what little he’s given. And Stellan Skarsgård does a lot with very few lines, channeling Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now for his version of the Baron. It works, to put it mildly.

Though, the performer who does the most with the least screentime here is Charlotte Rampling as Reverend Mother Mohiam of the Bene Gesserit. She literally has two scenes, and you will not forget her presence in either scene even if you try. She is the most frightening presence in the entire movie hands-down, and strangely enough has a couple of the film’s most quotable lines, which was something I didn’t remotely expect.

The film is backed up by a score from Hans Zimmer and it’s… Good. There’s a lot of it I love that feels very distinct to this movie, but there’s plenty of it that sounds like Zimmer’s other scores over the years, which have basically become a style of their own. As a result, some of it sounds unfortunately derivative, though it didn’t really affect my enjoyment of the film in a negative way.

Frankly, the biggest issue this movie has comes with the limitations of this film being “Part One” of a story. There’s a lot that’s not resolved by the end, which is acceptable considering Part Two is on the way, though where they decided to split the story in half might leave some folks scratching their heads.

As a fan of the novel, I completely understand why they chose to end this film where they did, and how they did. However, if someone unfamiliar with the book walked away from the film wondering why the hell it did that, I wouldn’t blame them. I think the film doesn’t necessarily do the greatest job of communicating the significance of the events that wrap this film up, and I wish they’d figured out some ways to do just that.

Ultimately though? I loved this adaptation, so far. In terms of covering roughly the first half of the novel, Dune is an adaptation that delivers on almost every front. It brings a dense science fiction world to life in an immersive way rarely seen at the blockbuster level in the modern era, and it brings a murderers’ row of performers to populate it. With a solid score, an overwhelming sense of scale, and some of the best visual effects of the last many years, Villeneuve and his team have made a film that’s my favorite movie of the year so far.

Here’s to hoping they nail Part Two.