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DUNE (2021)
Director: Denis Villeneuve Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Jason Momoa, Josh Brolin, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Stellan Skarsgård, Javier Bardem, Chang Chen, Zendaya, Dave Bautista, David Dastmalchian, Charlotte Rampling MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 2:35 Release Date: 10/22/21 (wide; HBO Max) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 21, 2021 There's a notoriety surrounding Frank Herbert's 1965 science-fiction novel Dune and the attempts to adapt it into a movie. Some of that comes from a failed attempt in the 1970s, but most of it comes from the ungainly 1984 adaptation. The prospect almost seems cursed at this point, considering that it has been almost 40 years since anyone dared try again. The new attempt is co-writer/director Denis Villeneuve's Dune. It's certainly better than the previous cinematic adaptation, if only because it doesn't become bogged down in trying to fit every detail of the novel—including the whole of the story, although that's a different issue—into a single movie. This version doesn't require an encyclopedia to figure out who's who, what's what, and why anything is happening. The new movie makes sense. That may seem like a low bar to overcome, but as much as people like to say the little things matter the most, they don't mean a lick if the big things are almost impossible to comprehend. The screenplay, written by the director and John Spaihts and Eric Roth, takes its time to ease us into this intergalactic world of political intrigue, revolving around a single planet, where the most valuable commodity in the universe can be found. Those who don't know Herbert's book, except by reputation, or only know its story from the 1984 mess might be surprised to find how relatively simple this tale is. Then again, Villeneuve and company are only adapting half of the first novel in a multi-part series, so there's obviously more to it. If the track record of getting the first book to the big screen is any indication, someone might eventually finish a complete adaptation of Herbert's cycle before the era in which this story is set. The year is 10,191, and space travel and trade are fueled by a substance called Spice, which can only be found on the desert planet Arrakis. The primary plot involves two families from different planets: the house of Atreides and that of Harkonnen. The latter has been overseeing the collection and refining of Spice on Arrakis, but part of the planet's local population, called Fremen, has been attacking the Harkonnen clan's operations. An unseen galactic emperor pulls that family from Arrakis and offers the job to the Artreides house. That's a lot of exposition at the start, as we're introduced to the general world of this story and the central characters, and it's definitely not the end of the lessons about history, cultures, various tools, and other matters that we receive here. If one removed all of this back story and the scenes establishing assorted locations and ships and peoples and creatures, the plot itself would be finished within a relatively short period of time. Going through it would be futile, since so much of Herbert's narrative has been replicated in the decades since the book's publication, and read like the book report that much of the dialogue sounds like here. Our hero, who's mostly an empty vessel for things to happen to him for most of the movie, is Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), the son of Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac) and his father's favorite concubine Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson). He has been trained in combat by members of the Artreides' military, including Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa) and Gurney Helleck (Josh Brolin), and in telepathy by his mother. There are hints and rumors that Paul is some kind of messiah or chosen one, but hints and rumors are all this particular story has time to provide. That's because Villeneuve isn't only busy slowly filling in details about the story's greater universe and more intimate worlds—its politics, its locales, its history, its assorted gadgets and devices and ships. He's also making sure we take in all of these sights and visions of this futuristic realm. The filmmaker lingers on great space ships, breaching their undersea docks or looking like tiny insects relative to the massive entryways for interstellar travel, and the landscape of Arrakis, its endless desert torn up by giant harvesting tanks and a city that was built to match the color and geographic formations of sand, and more specific spaces, such as the dimly lit halls within that city or the grim catacombs of the lair of the floating blob known as Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård). The production design and visual effects on display are intricate, seamless, and logically designed elements of a futuristic world that is based on geometric shapes and monochromatic color schemes. A lot of work, in other words, has been put into bringing to life a series of blandly convincing and convincingly bland aesthetic choices. A few organic-looking—helicopters that are designed like insects—and actually organic—the gigantic sphincters that are the sand worms—touches break up the visual monotony a bit, just as a couple performances (Momoa and, on occasion, Isaac) break through the dreary tone of the tale itself. Dune is a lot to take in, on account of its ever-expanding world and visual spectacle. Because of its thin characters and sparsely incomplete plot, the movie also leaves little to care about and consider. Copyright © 2021 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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(for sequences of strong violence, some disturbing images and suggestive
material)
