Arrakis—Dune—Desert Planet.
The opening moments of Dune will fill you with awe and wonder.
First is there only darkness. The beat of a drum. Then rolling dunes, sand—and spice, glittering bronze-cinnamon in the wind.
A girl’s voice.
“My planet Arrakis is so beautiful when the sun is low,” she says. “Rolling over the sands, you can see spice in the air.”
The peaceful moment is shattered. Horns blare ominously as a soldier in an alien-looking space suit and flowing robes trudges through the twilight desert, lasgun in hand.
“At nightfall, the spice harvesters land,” the girl says, and we see one such machine, like some fiery beast amidst the plumes of darkling sand.
“The outsiders race against time to avoid the heat of the day,” the girl says as the drums beat faster. We see men and women laying in ambush in their desert garb. We see the girl, her eyes the unsettling blue-within-blue of her people, the Fremen.
“They ravage our lands in front of our eyes,” she narrates. “Their cruelty to our people is all I’ve known. These outsiders, the Harkonnens, came long before I was born. By controlling spice production they became obscenely rich. Richer than the Emperor himself.”
We see rows upon rows of vast spaceships lined up in front of sprawling battalions. Men marching. A clash in the desert between Harkonnen troops and Fremen freedom fighters. Lasguns blasting spice harvesters into fiery ruin.
“Our warriors couldn’t free us from the Harkonnens,” the girl says over it all, “but one day—by Imperial decree—they were gone. Why did the Emperor choose this path, and who will our next oppressors be?”
Of course, this is nothing like the opening to Frank Herbert’s novel upon which Dune is based. The film, wisely, sets the stage for the greater conflict early, introducing us to its chief players before diving headlong into the story.
Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac), head of the powerful House Atreides, has been ordered by the Padishah Emperor to take control of the planet Arrakis. House Harkonnen, the wealthy and powerful rulers of Arrakis for nearly a century, have been ordered to leave and return to their home planet of Giedi Prime, leaving a vast fortune behind.
Arrakis is the only planet in the known universe where the magical spice mélange can be found. Spice is the most valuable substance in the known universe, granting not only an elongated life-span but also special abilities to various powerful factions including the mystical order of the Bene Gesserit. The mysterious Spacing Guild and its Navigator use the spice to control their monopoly on space travel, granting them an iron hold over the Imperium itself.
All of this is established, briefly, during the opening of the film in order to set the stage for what’s to come. It’s a slight divergence from the book, but one that feels necessary to make the adaptation work on-screen.
We are introduced to Duke Leto and his Bene Gesserit lover and concubine Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) as well as various members of their household including the swashbuckling Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa), the oddly baliset-free Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin) and the Duke’s advisor and mentat, Thufir Hawat (Stephen McKinley Henderson).
Stunning glimpses of the Atreides home world, Caladan, and its rocky beaches and tumultuous oceans root us in a place that is utterly foreign to the arid sands House Atreides will soon call home. Here is a water planet, green and grey, mountaintops shrouded in blankets of cloud, rugged but habitable—a stark contrast to the endless sands and sweltering heat of Arrrakis.
Director Denis Villeneuve’s Dune doesn’t bother sticking to the letter of the novel, choosing instead to juggle chronology when necessary to ease audiences into what is a complex and sometimes confusing narrative.
The novel’s opening sequence comes much later in the film. Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), son of Duke Leto and Jessica, is brought by his mother to a room in Castle Caladan. Here, the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam (Charlotte Rampling), chief witch of the Bene Gesserit and Truthsayer to the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV, is waiting.
Paul is tested—the Bene Gesserit think he might be the “chosen one” aka the Kwisatz Haderach—by placing his hand in a box while the Reverend Mother holds a poison needle called a gom jabbar to his neck. In the box is “only pain” she tells him, but should Paul remove his hand, he’ll die.
Thanks to his training in ‘The Way’, Paul endures, passing the test and taking his first step toward his destiny—a destiny that this film only begins to explore.
The important thing you need to know about Dune is that it is only the first of a two-part adaptation of Herbert’s novel. It covers roughly the first two thirds of the book itself, right up to the novel’s time-jump, essentially.
This means that it leaves out much of the story as well as numerous characters and scenes that we encounter much earlier on in the book. Villeneuve and co-writers Jon Spaihts and Eric Roth made a narrative decision to withhold a great deal, presumably for the second film.
While we meet the Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård) and his nephew Beast Rabban (Dave Bautista), Paul’s Harkonnen analog, Feyd-Rautha, is nowhere to be found. Much of the book’s politicking and intrigue is missing entirely. I suspect that some of this is being saved for the second film, where we’ll delve more into the Emperor’s scheming.
Other exclusions are more puzzling. An entire plot involving a traitor in the midst of House Atreidesis glossed over to such a degree that I’m half-convinced we’ll get some pivotal scenes later in a Director’s Cut.
I don’t want to spoil too much here, but those of you who have seen the film and read the book will know what I’m referring to here.
Nevertheless, Dune hews close enough to the novel and certainly to the spirit of the novel, that nothing truly important is lost. Herbert’s story is lyrical and almost poetic at times; Villenueve’s film is visually sumptuous and profoundly beautiful, even during its ugliest moments. The film captures the feel of the novel and in many ways expands upon it exactly how a film adaptation ought to.
(The 1984 adaptation often follows the letter of the book more closely while not capturing its spirit, and is often cartoonishly grotesque by contrast. More on this in a separate piece).
From a design standpoint, this is quite frankly one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. The costume design is as rich and detailed as it is bizarre.
The black-robed Bene Gesserit; the oval-masked dignitaries in their elaborate cloaks; the armored troops of House Atreides and the elite Imperial Sardaukar; the simple black tunic that Paul wears; the elaborate dresses of Lady Jessica and her maids as they cross the sands of Arrakis for the first time; the Fremen and their desert garb and water-preserving stillsuits. There’s never a moment in this film where you’re not gawking at something or someone.
The special effects feel natural throughout. The body-shields are subtle, a faint blue glow you barely notice after they’re activated turned bright red when a blade passes through (though I wish we’d been given at least one scene of a lasgun interacting with a shield and the terrible fallout such a combination is said to make).
A daunting sense of scale permeates the film. The massive spaceships that House Atreides leaves Caladan on are dwarfed by the Guild transport ship that shuttles them through space to Arrakis. The city of Arrakeen is all sand-colored rooftops and shaded interiors. The planet is too hot for bustling outdoor streets.
Then there are the massive spice harvesters and the flying carry-alls that bring them to and from the spice deposits; the insect-like ‘thopters people use to fly across the sands. All the little bits and pieces of Dune-tech that help make the world feel real.
Then, of course, there are the worms.
You’ve glimpsed these in the trailers but the massive sand creatures are truly a sight to behold on the big-screen. The second film will almost certainly take all this spectacle to even greater heights.
Technologically, we have arrived at a place where the scope and scale of Dune can be fully realized, but it’s the artfulness of the design itself that makes the world of Arrakis and its alien technologies and environments truly come to life.
The sound design is every bit as impressive as the visual design. The creepy, immensely ominous score composed by veteran composer Hans Zimmer, sets the mood perfectly. It’s a mix of swelling strings, intense choral interludes and subtle electronic elements that’s every bit as dark and foreboding as the film itself.
Equally impressive is how the film handles the Bene Gesserit power of the Voice. One scene in particular, in which Jessica trains a reluctant Paul in the Voice’s subtleties, is handled especially well, using sound effects rather than just vocal distortion to convey how powerful this ability truly is.
Sound and visual design are used deftly to show Paul’s emerging powers as well, and how the spice affects those powers, intensifying his prophetic dreams and granting him strange, all-consuming visions, often of a strange girl with blue-on-blue eyes who we come to learn is Chani (Zendaya), a Fremen of the desert and a follower of Stilgar (Javier Bardem).
Chani doesn’t have much of a part in this movie, but will almost certainly play a vital role in the sequel (a role, I suspect, that will be justifiably expanded on from the books).
Some of the changes in the film are welcome. I actually think gender-swapping Liet-Kynes, the Imperial Judge of the Change and planetary ecologist, works well and makes sense. Kynes is played by Sharon Duncan-Brewster who does a terrific job.
The film is also far more diverse than the lily-white 1984 David Lynch version, whose Fremen are all bizarrely pale. It is a testament not just to more diversity in film, but also to common sense in filmmaking, that people who inhabit a desert planet have darker skin than those who do not.
The One Big Problem
Other changes feel a little less satisfying. The novel can feel rushed at times, but the movie even more so, if only at times.
There is almost no time spent between House Atreides landing on Arrakis and the inevitable Harkonnen assault. I would have liked to see more of Duke Leto’s reaction to the state of Arrakis after the Harkonnen withdrawal. In the book he bristles often at the injustices imposed upon its people by his predecessors and there’s a sense of real tragedy when his reforms are cut short. Here, we skip ahead too quickly, glossing over these details.
The film does do a great job with many of the little details, faithfully including small touches like the portrait of Leto’s father and the head of the bull that killed him. These little gestures to fans of the book are nice, to be sure, and serve as rich world-building, but I would have liked a bit more of the scheming and politicking that feature so prominently in the original.
That all seems to have been brushed aside, perhaps to keep the runtime in check. Movie studios balk at anything longer than 2-and-a-half hours these days (and often at anything much shorter).
This is perhaps a little ironic of me to say, but I wish it had run longer.
Anyone familiar with my film reviews will know of my Rule of 20. That is, most movies these days should be roughly 20 minutes shorter (at least). I’ve wagged my finger at films like Army Of The Dead, Black Widow, Aquaman and even the new Suicide Squad. There are exceptions, of course, such as A Quiet Place Part II and its 90-minute runtime.
But with Dune I would have been happy with 20 minutes more. A three-hour Director’s Cut would make me very happy, especially if we could get a bit more of the intrigue, a bit more of the grotesque Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, perhaps a slightly deeper dive into Thufir Hawat and his Harkonnen analog Piter de Vries (David Dastmalchian).
Thufir Hawat’s role in the film is strangely truncated as well. Same for the really vile and slightly insane Piter. Mentats are such intriguing characters in the novel, but here they’re little more than advisors.
On the other hand, I like that we get a touch of humor to lighten the mood, something utterly absent in the book. I’m fairly certain that Frank Herbert wouldn’t know what comic relief looked like if it slapped him in the face. Duncan Idaho joking with Paul helps alleviate the gloom instantly. So does Duke Leto’s reference to “wanting to be a pilot” rather than a Duke, a gentle little poke at Star Wars if ever there was one.
Gurney Halleck telling the Duke “I don’t like that man,” after Stilgar leaves the room made me laugh outloud. There’s a hidden joke in that one.
Gurney is played by Josh Brolin, and Stilgar by Javier Bardem. The two were last seen together in the phenomenal Coen Brothers adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men. That’s an old feud if ever there was one.
Indeed, casting is so on-point I’m not sure I have any complaints.
Chalamet is the perfect choice for Paul—perhaps not as young as in the books, but does anybody really want to watch this movie with a 15-year-old lead?
You couldn’t have picked a better Chani than Zendaya, and I’m excited to see more of her in Part 2.
I’m happy to see Oscar Isaac land a truly great role in a space opera, having had to suffer through three lackluster Star Wars films as a character whose potential was never fully realized (again, the “wanted to be a pilot” jab is on-point).
Jason Momoa brings Duncan Idaho to life and gives him charisma and verve he doesn’t really have in the books (though my girlfriend was not happy when he shaved his beard partway through the film).
Chen Chang as Dr. Yueh also does a terrific job, though his role has been cut down far too much. At least the Imperial-conditioned doctor is played by an Asian actor this time and lines up much better with how we imagine him in the book. Though, speaking of Imperial conditioning, we don’t really get . . . anything at all about that in the movie.
Skarsgård is an imposing Baron, though even with all the added pounds he’s never quite as morbidly obese as I pictured the Baron in my mind’s eye.
I should also note that neither this film, nor the 1984 version, portray the Baron’s fat the way I see it in my imagination. In the book he’s propelled about on suspensors since he’s simply too fat to walk otherwise. I always pictured these attached to every part of his body: His arms held up by suspensors, sagging flesh draped over each one. Suspensors on his back and around his belly and clasped to the rolls of fat on his thighs and buttocks.
Here, the Baron only has suspensors on his back which he uses to float high above the ground, making him almost pillar-like as he hovers above his hangers-on and bodyguards. Here he looks fat but also tall. I want him floating about closer to the ground, his girth everywhere at once.
Verdict
Dune is a visual feast and a space opera tour de force that should please fans of the novel despite some small changes and its missing final act.
I’m not sure how newcomers will feel about the movie, but if nothing else they’ll have plenty of gorgeous vistas, incredible sets and masterful CGI to enjoy, and perhaps a world they’ll be curious to delve into further. (Check out my Dune book club over at my Substack if you’d like to read up on the novel).
There is much of this story yet to be told, though I suspect the sequel will need to embellish the novel’s final act a great deal. That’s not a bad thing, actually. Unlike The Hobbit which devolved into ludicrous inanity in order to stretch out to three films, Dune the novel could actually use some embellishing.
Crucial characters have yet to be introduced and a great deal of courtroom skullduggery and all-out desert warfare (much of which I believe the novel glossed over far too much) is still to come.
Of course, Dune: Part II remains theoretical at this point, hinging on the whims of Warner Bros. and the success of Part I. Even then, a sequel would be years in the making.
“This is just the beginning,” Chani says at the very end of Dune. I certainly hope so.
Let me know what you thought of Dune on Twitter or Facebook or the comments section at my Substack. Thanks for reading!
Follow me on Twitter and Facebook. You can support my work on Patreon and sign up for my newsletter on Substack. Subscribe to my YouTube channel here.
