As a fan of Sci-Fi and Fantasy, I am very used to disappointing adaptations: whether it’s The Hobbit stretched over too many films, or whatever the original Northern Lights film had going on, it’s uniformly quite bad. However, every once in a while, a film actually lives up to how much I loved the book, and Dune is that film.
Dune: Part One is a film adaptation of the original novel, directed by Denis Villeneuve. It tells the story of Paul Atreides (played by Timothée Chalamet), the young scion of a noble house in a feudal interstellar empire 20 000 years in the future. Him and his family must travel to the most dangerous planet in the universe, as conflict between competing political factions over the planet’s supply of the most precious resource in existence shatters the peace.
Personally, I loved it. If you get the chance, you should go see it. It combines the captivating story and world of the novel, that has earned it the position as one of the most influential Scifi books ever written, with an otherworldly score by Hans Zimmer and an as visual impact that can a film allow. Villeneuve’s filmmaking captures the sheer awe-inspiring scale and beauty of the world, from the titanic ships to the alien design of the setting, from the costumes to the burned beauty of the desert. What’s more, in particular, the VFX behind all this is excellent. The relatively unknown source material is compensated for by an all-star cast that give amazing performances including Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Oscar Isaac, Rebecca Ferguson, Jason Momoa, Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem, Charlotte Rampling, Stellan Skarsgård and Dave Bautista.
This is not the first outing of the film: for a long time, it was broadly considered unfilmable. There have been more than a few failed adaptations, including an unmade project by Alejandro Jodorowsky in the 70s, a 1984 film by David Lynch that should probably have stayed unmade, and an entirely forgettable miniseries in the 2000s. One of the major strengths of this film, unlike the original 1984 film, is that it splits the story into two parts.
This is a rare case of a story being split into two films, that is not just a futile and transparent cash grab: the novel is 900 pages long and the plot structure lends itself to a two-part split, and even with the divide various subplots and points of worldbuilding are still cut out. I think Villeneuve does a very good job of balancing the need to make the film a satisfying standalone feature and the fact that it is only Part One, although this is not a universally shared opinion. The main function of these cuts is to make the film accessible, removing some of the denser, and more esoteric lore of the novel. This has been mostly successful, even if you know absolutely nothing about the film, you likely won’t be that confused. The one downside of this being only the first half is that Zendaya has a very minor role. Her character is exceptionally important to the second half, so she mostly appears in this film by the way of dream sequences, only showing up in the flesh as the opening narrator and at the very end, although she is great in all 7 minutes of her scenes.
One of the most infuriating criticisms I have seen surrounding this film is that it is either derivative or clichéd. The original novel Dune was written in 1965 by Frank Herbert and was followed by a further 5 novels spanning thousands of years with Paul Atreides’ story ending with book two in Dune: Messiah (1969). Since then, Dune has become one of the most influential sci-fi works ever written and its fingerprints are all over contemporary sci-fi, from any outing of a Chosen one trope, to Game of Thrones’ habit of killing off characters mercilessly, to everything in the Star Wars original trilogy. Frank Herbert genuinely founded a jokey organisation called the “We’re Too Big to Sue George Lucas Society” with some other writers. One of the things that has secured this level of influence is the enduring power of this novel. Director Denis Villeneuve has spoken about the effect of this saying “I made this movie for myself. Being a hard-core Dune fan, the first audience member that I wanted to please was myself: “Everything you receive is there because I love it”. Like Denis Villeneuve, to have read it as a teenager and for it to have had a deep effect, is not an uncommon feeling towards Dune, and one I am quite familiar with to the extent that I wrote half my EPQ on this book. Dune has to this day continued to attract new readers with its worldbuilding that raised the bar for what sci-fi can do, the sometimes poetic writing style and the nuanced take on ecological and geopolitical themes. The latter of which have only grown more relevant as overreliance on oil, Islamic fundamentalism, rising totalitarianism, ecological destruction, and escalating conflict in the Middle East have come to dominate the news cycles.
Dune has been compared to Lord of the Rings a fair bit. A recent Guardian review of the film described it as “science fiction’s answer to Lord of the Rings” and Arthur C Clarkes’ wrote in a review of the novel in 1965, “I know nothing comparable to it except Lord of the Ring”’. And like Lord of the Rings, it might have used up the budget for really, really good sweeping sci-fi and fantasy epics for the next 20 years. If you get the chance, you should go see it, ideally in cinemas if possible as the soundtrack and visuals are amazing on a full-scale cinema screen. I love this book, and I loved this film and I hope that if you do see it, you love it just as much as I did.
SPOILERS BEWARE
This is the bit where I get to talk about the film without minding spoilers. This is not the sort of film that relies on shock factor and knowing the plot will not make your experience worse, but if you do want to go in blind, please stop here.
The major problem behind Dune is that it is only the first half.
The first half of the novel (and the film) tracks the fall of House Atreides to their enemies House Harkonen with the support of the emperor. They come to the desert planet Arrakis, where lies the only source of the most valuable substance in existence, which they have been ordered to assume responsibility for. This ends with the death of Paul’s father Leto, with Paul and his mother Jessica forced to flee into the desert to seek shelter among the Fremen, the native people of Arrakis. The second half of the novel takes place a few years later and covers Paul seeking vengeance against the Emperor and House Harkonen, ending with Paul being installed as emperor after seizing the throne in an autocratic coup.
The central idea of Dune and Dune: Messiah is that Paul is not a good person and is very explicitly a critique of the blind trust placed in charismatic leaders and the Chosen one archetype in general. Paul is the protagonist, but he is not a good person. He is the Chosen One twice over but neither of those things put him in a good light. Firstly, he is the Chosen One because of the prophetic powers developed by a millennia-long eugenics program by the dominant religious group as part of their autocratic power grab. Secondly, because the native people of Arrakis falsely consider him the Messiah because of colonialist religious violence and manipulation by the dominant religious group of this world. He exploits this belief to support his power grab, in the process triggering a Jihad that kills billions in the devastation caused by this religious war. I remember when I first read Dune, getting to the end, and feeling the bottom drop out of my stomach realising that as a reader I had blindly trusted Paul, right up until he threatens to essentially destroy civilisation as it exists unless he is made emperor. This is the message of Dune: that we should not trust charismatic leaders and as the book says, “No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero”. The film seems to be getting at this but until Part 2 is released in 2023, and until Part 3 (adapting Dune: Messiah) is greenlit, we have no idea how this is going to go. Certain aspects of this plotline have been set up in the film including what Jihad Paul has already foreseen, but until then, I don’t know how this is going to go. Until then, viewers that are going to see the first film might just not quite get the message.
