I saw Dune last night. It was an experience.
There’s enough written by smarter people than me on Frank Herbert’s book(s). So I’m going to focus on the film and how it reflects it. As far as the novel itself, it’s sufficient to say that Herbert’s sprawling creation of culture and environment is closer to Tolkien or George RR Martin than it is a space opera. As for the film…Herbert, Denis Villeneuve and Hans Zimmer have created a masterpiece.
There are some themes that make moving Herbert’s words off the page and onto the screen risky. The first is in Herbert’s style. Dune is so much about the physical environment in which the story unfolds. And Herbert starts with tactile or auditory descriptions of things and lets the reader build the purpose or the point out of it after its arrival. How things sound. How things move. How they feel against the skin are all built on to tell the purpose of something. We never really are told what a “thopter” is. But we figure it out. The songs, prayers and superstitions define the purpose of a people. One feels like there are pictures in Herbert’s Dune. There are not. And so Denis Villeneuve had the task of not upsetting whatever visual equilibrium readers have come to. And he didn’t. The movie is as visually stimulating as any production I’ve ever seen. It keeps pace with the book. And that’s saying something.
Another is that Herbert fills the book with ringing declarative dogmatic prose.
“Fear is the mind killer.”
“The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.”
These are the sorts of words that give the book power and quotability. But they’re campy screenplay traps. The movie mostly avoids them. Or finds the right understated way to incorporate them. You don’t need much beyond the visuals and Zimmer’s score to give you the power of Herbert’s book. And so there is less words. More beauty. More expansive space. It’s brilliant.
Which brings us to Hans Zimmer, who has transcended beyond a score composer and into creating a sensory medium that requires its own genre. If the Ken Burns effect is something than so is the Zimmer effect. As he did in his partnership with Villeneuve in Bladerunner 2049 (another masterpiece), Zimmer bridges the gap between how an atmosphere looks and how it feels with sound. If you’ve ever stepped outside of a blacked out trailer into the blinding light and 126 degree heat of the Al Anbar desert you know that you can feel the air. It looks hazy and dull. But it feels heavy and intense. Zimmer’s score sounds like the desert feels. It adds the intensity that the visual alone won’t allow for. It shows how something can be huge, expansive and suffocating all at once. It’s perfect.
“Arrakis is Arrakis. And the Desert Takes the Week.”
And so will Zimmer’s score .
The casting was close to perfect. I didn’t have any idea how they were going to make Baron Harkonnen work but turning him into a galactic version of Brando’s Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now appears to have been the way. Stellan Skarsgard is disinterested and disgusting as the pig Baron should be. Chalamet is a convincing Paul. Momoa seems out of place but so was his character Duncan Idaho by design in the book and the film.
The big question anyone has when a culturally significant novel is adapted for screen is how true to the book will the film be. What stays and what goes? The film reduces the risk here by making two movies. But it’s still a sprawling task. Villeneuve uses dream sequences and visions to fill in parts of the narrative that couldn’t be assigned to more intentional scenes. The outcome is a two hour and thirty minute movie that tracks remarkably close to the first 400 pages of the novel.
The Guild, the Bene Geseret witching ways, the Imperial politics and the insurgent struggle of the Fremen all get appropriate treatment. As does the spirit of the House of Atreides. If there is a flaw to be found, it’s not clear to an avid Dune book fan how followable Dune the movie to anyone who hasn’t read the book. That’s less of a criticism and more of an open question.
Dune was released in theaters and on HBO Max concurrently. I watched it in the theater (recommended )with my 16 year old while my wife watched it at home in bed. I then woke up early and watched it again this morning. The streaming world is upon us. And I’ve got zero complaints that I now have the ability to experience the movie asynchronously with family as well as whenever I want. I’ll be swimming in Dune for the next few weeks. And I’m better for it.