Dune (2021)

“What’s in the box?”

“Pain.”

So goes the most memorable line in a pivotal scene from Denis Villeneuve’s stunning Dune, an adaptation of the epochal science fiction novel by Frank Herbert. The Reverend Mother of the secretive Bene Gesserit cult (Charlotte Rampling) is testing the limits of young Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), scion of the powerful House Atreides, one of the major families in the universe, by asking him to stick his right hand in an ominous black box. What is she testing for, exactly? Nothing less than whether or not he is a human being, able to withstand pain that would drive an animal to “gnaw off

its own arm.” The Reverend Mother is in truth attempting to judge whether Paul is the fabled chosen one, the Kwisatz Haderach who will possess the “Sight,” an ability to transcend space and time and achieve an everlasting peace for the universe.

If the previous paragraph looked like a confusing mass of sci-fi gobbledegook and made your eyes glaze over, I can hardly blame you. That is the feeling one gets when reading Herbert’s original novel, which has a lengthy glossary at the end clarifying the definitions of all the invented words he throws into the prose – Shai Hulud, Butlerian Jihad, Lisan al-Gaib, among many, many more. The jargon is indeed merely one of the many challenges that the original text poses to adaptation for the big screen. The novel flits rapidly between the immensely interior and the immense, interspersing hallucinogenic visions of a dark future with grand narratives of realpolitik intrigue and colonial oppression.

Those challenges to adaption do not mean that no one has tried; Villeneuve’s film is merely the latest in a long line of attempts at adapting Herbert’s text for the silver screen. A much-maligned adaptation was released by David Lynch in the early 1980s, criticized for its didactic narration and lazy visual execution. At least Lynch was able to get something on film; in the 1970s, cult cinema legend Alejandro Jodorowsky tried desperately to get his own adaptation together, was never able to do so. The saga of Jodorowsky’s attempts to adapt this work is itself immortalized in a 2013 documentary, Jodorowsky’s Dune. All of which is to say that it’s arguably a miracle that Villeneuve’s film exists at all. What is an even bigger miracle is that it is a veritable box office hit, in spite of being given the ignoble treatment of debuting simultaneously in theaters and on HBO Max, a treatment that annihilated the box office returns of many other Warner Brothers films from last year (my heart goes out to In the Heights, The Suicide Squad, and King Richard). And perhaps the biggest miracle of all is that it is so damn good.

Dune is centered on Paul Atreides, whose father Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac) has been placed in charge of Arrakis, a desert planet that happens to be the sole source of the most important substance in the universe: melange, better known as “the spice”, which has both practical use (extending life and allowing for interstellar travel) as well as more mystical, mysterious capabilities that become clearer as the story progresses. The Atreides are tasked by the Emperor (the leader of the universe) with taking over the stewardship of the planet from their mortal enemies, the House Harkonnen, led by the fearsome Baron Harknonnen (a looming, almost sluglike Stellan Skarsgård). Why this sudden change in the balance of power? The Atreides suspect devious conspiracies being spun about them as they settle into the new planet – suspicions that turn out to be well-placed. Traitors lurk in their midst – but who?

This political plot is but the first layer of a labyrinthine narrative, encompassing the aforementioned Bene Gesserit, a clan of witches/spies (a combination thereof, really) with a slew of broad ambitions for the future of the universe, as well as the Fremen, the natives to Arrakis whose land has been ravaged by settler clan upon settler clan. To say much more would be a disservice to the script by Villeneuve, Jon Spaihts, and Eric Roth, who cleverly adapt the source material so that the structure of the layered plot is maintained without the film becoming indigestible. Perhaps their most audacious and wise decision was to cleave the book perfectly in half. The film’s ending, it must be noted, is not an ending, but rather a stopping point. Its last line is perhaps a touch on the nose: “This is only the beginning.” Dune: Part Two, greenlit shortly after the release of this film, is coming to theatres in 2023. While this may lead to some viewers being unsatisfied, attempting to cram the entirety of Herbert’s narrative into a two-hour timespan would have been a foolhardy endeavor. Look no further than David Lynch’s adaptation, which fails precisely because it sacrifices the headier aspects of the book so as to fit the entire plot into the constrictions of a single film.

Villeneuve couples his deft maneuvering of the tricky source material with a high wattage of star power: in addition to Chalamet and Isaac. Josh Brolin appears as the grizzled and grim Atreides warrior Gurney Halleck, while Rebecca Ferguson plays the mysterious Lady Jessica, the concubine of Duke Leto and the mother of Paul, and a former (or perhaps continued?) member of the Bene Gesserit. In much smaller roles (though sure to become much larger in future installments of the series) are Zendaya and Javier Bardem, who appear as members of the Fremen. The greatest delight is Aquaman’s Jason Momoa as another Atreides warrior, the decidedly jolly Duncan Idaho, whose penchant for wisecracks is matched only by his battlefield prowess.

Each of the actors do a more than serviceable job of bringing life to characters who occasionally appear unidimensional in Herbert’s text, though the nature of Villeneuve’s storytelling means that none of the performances constitute a real focal point of the film. Instead, both the performances and the plot play second-fiddle to the film’s stupendous visual execution. Audience members would be forgiven for completely ignoring the tremendous complexity of the narrative so as to be fully immersed in some of the most stunning visual effects ever put to screen. Immense spaceships emerge majestically from beneath the ocean, floating gradually upward as water cascades down. Helicopter-plane hybrids called ornithopters bat their wings like dragonflies as they dart over rugged desert landscapes. The crown jewel of the film is its rendering of the massive sandworms that reside beneath the sand on Arrakis. Vibrations pulsating along the ground menacingly portend their terrifying, volcanic eruptions from beneath, whales in an ocean of sand. Unlike so many of the CGI-infused movies that pepper the theaters nowadays, the visual effects prize themselves on their realism. The only way that one knows these on-screen ongoing are not real is because no such objects or beings are known to exist in our universe – not because the cheapness of the effects make it clear that the actors were standing in front of a green screen, as is customary in modern blockbuster cinema.

This visual courage along with the denial of a satisfying ending points towards the most refreshing aspect of Dune: a willingness to take risks with beloved intellectual property. Too many of the films based on IP with large fanbases become anodyne, spoon-feeding audiences with exactly what they want to see, failing to force them to experience any degree of discomfort. Risk-taking pervades Dune in a way that it has no Marvel film in ages. No appetite exists among the Disney crowd to try something outside of the ordinary, since that runs the risk of failure, an outcome that cannot be tolerated. Yet that leads to trite film after trite film, sapped of color both literally (the desaturation of the images in Marvel movies frustrates me endlessly) and figuratively. The spirit of Star Wars: The Last Jedi – perhaps the last time that anything audacious was attempted with major IP – was thought to be dead, but lives on thanks to the boldness of Villeneuve. Here's hoping that this film’s success leads to spirit of cinematic risk-taking carries over to other blockbuster films. I’m not holding my breath, but for the first time in ages, lovers of cinema have hope of a future where the medium’s artistic boldness exists not only in art houses, but in cineplexes as well.