Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is probably the biggest sci-fi epic since Star Wars has ended its latest trilogy with the Rise of Skywalker. And with that comes a huge number of bandwagoners, both positive and negative. Its either the best thing ever, or totally awful and there’s little in between.
Well, for my two cents, I thought that the movie was pretty great. Its definitely not perfect, but the directing and production value are top notch, even if the storytelling isn’t amazing at times.
It really is impossible to value this movie as a whole, since it is very clear that this is half a story. It is two-and-a-half hours and tells half a story. For context, I read the first book in the Dune series at the start of the year, and I thought that it could possibly be a single movie if there is a lot of lore and context cut down. But then I saw David Lynch’s version.
Love him or hate him, Lynch’s Dune is a bit of a mess. Its so weird and dense and Lynchian and doesn’t fully work. Its not bad, but its not great either.
Possibly Villeneuve’s Dune’s greatest strength is the cast. The jury is still out if Timothee Chalamet can pull off the warrior ruler Paul of the second half of Dune, but he plays really well as the brooding teen that is being used by most of the other characters in the story. He also has good chemisty with Oscar Isaac’s Duke Leto, but obviously that won’t be a factor in Dune II.
I didn’t love Rebecca Fergusson as Lady Jessica, but it is a tough and thankless role. She goes from fearful and controlling to just fearful of Paul.
Villeneuve’s Dune is focused and gives the story time to breathe. It has an almost dogmatically strict adhesion to the source material, but strayed in a few choice moments.
The fact that Doctor Kynes is a woman as opposed to a man, as they were in the book, makes absolutely no difference narratively. But there are other characters that are changed, and not for the better.
Doctor Yueh
Okay, so if you just watched Villeneuve’s Dune, you don’t really know what happened with Dr. Yueh, played by Chang Chen. In the film, Yueh is simply a minor character who appears in two scenes before betraying the House Atreides.
Its a similar story to Lynch’s Dune, which has some leeway, as it has to barrel through an immense amount of exposition and story in a miniscule amount of time. And also his vision had a definitive end.
Dune the novel is large, but it is also incredibly dense. Everything has multiple names and the history is rich and plentiful. Its tough to remember everything while watching a two-and-a-half hour movie, and both versions of the movie forgo explicitly describing what things like the Kwisatz Haderach and Bene Gesserit mean, but context clues get the audience by on minimal information.
This doesn’t apply with Dr. Yueh and the mystery of who betrayed the House Atreides. Because in the book, after Paul is attacked by a hunter-seeker, it becomes clear that someone has betrayed the Duke and let a Harkonnen spy into the palace.
Then a good chunk of the first act is everyone trying to figure out who the traitor is. Duncan Idaho, Dr. Yueh, Gurney Halleck and Thufir Hawat have been given equal emphasis so far in the story, and even Jessica herself is seen as a suspect. No one is comfortable with anyone else, and it is a major driving force of tension early on in the story. Its tension that doesn’t really exist in either film.
In my opinion, focusing on the betrayal would have made for a more immediate watching experience, especially for a film that does not have an ending. Duke Leto’s story is one of the only aspects of this film that has an ending. But without any heft to the mystery, the resolution to the Duke’s storyline lacks weight.
In the novel, Dr. Yueh is a physician, that has gone through Suk Imperial Conditioning. That Conditioning is basically like an extreme version of the Hippocratic Oath, so much so that it is seen as impossible for these physicians to cause any harm.
And that is why Dr. Yueh’s betrayal is so surprising and impactful in the book. The Duke quickly dismisses Yueh as a possible suspect, and by proxy, the reader also dismisses him.
The problem is in how the Harkonnens managed to break Dr. Yueh. Its not great. They just kidnap his wife and children, and told the Doctor that they were going to kill his family if he didn’t betray the Atreides. Its a rather obvious solution, and its hard to believe no one else tried that before. But the plan was put into place by the mind of…
Piter de Vries
Who? That’s what I think I would say if I had just seen the film and nothing else. Piter is played by David Dastmalchian, of the Suicide Squad fame, and is barely featured in the film. Piter is a Mentat, along with a similarly underused Thufir Hawat (Stephen McKinley Hendersen). Mentats are also a victim of this bareboned style of exposition, along with Dr. Yueh.
In the lore of Dune, there was a battle a long time ago between man and machine (as machines had become sentient) and the humans won, vowing to never create artificial intelligence again. Its an interesting distinction against most typical science fiction, which is littered with robots.
Now, is that necessarily essential? No, of course not, but it does hwlp describe what a mentat is. Since there are no more computers, humans need some way to do what computers can do. And so Mentats are akin to human computers, capable of vast calculations and borderline future-seeing abilities, just by calculating odds. I can remember Thifur saying one thing that was a great calculation, but that was all I can remember. No mention of what a mentat actually is.
Piter De Vries is also a mentat, but corrupted by the Harkonnens. There are a lot of chapters that take place with the villains, and many times Piter is the reader’s proxy, until his death of course. He’s the one that concocts this scheme for the Baron Harkonnen, and is the one that found the way to break Dr. Yueh.
In the movie, Piter goes to see the Sardukar army, and dies when Duke Leto gasses the room. Its an interesting development when he dies in the book, as it completely changes the dynamics of the villains, he’s the villain we are closest to, and it is surprising when he dies. None of those are true in the film, and the only way people would know about him is that that’s the guy who played the Polka Dot man.
Sardaukar
The ties that bind Yueh and Piter together is that they have little to no impact on the second half of the book (or the second movie in this case). Its clear that most of this movie is building up to events in the second half of the story, including fleshing out the prophetic dreams Paul has throughout his time on Arrakis.
If you can allow me to be cynical for a moment, there could be a different reason outside the realms of the movie itself. Dune is a big name in the world of science-fiction literature, a decidedly older demographic. There are big names in the movie like Oscar Isaac, Rebecca Fergusson and Josh Brolin, but they can’t be considered superstars. To a lot of people, Isaacs is the guy from Star Wars, and some people might recognize Brolin under all the makeup and CGI from the last two Avengers movies.
Zendaya is a big draw, especially for the young crowd. And there were young audience members that were disappointed in her lack of screen time. Big names get big numbers at the box office. Older people were already interested in the Dune name, Zendaya gets the younger tickets.
Anyways, when adapting a work, its all about give and take, especially with the gargantuan Dune. Give more to Zendaya’s Chani, there’s something that will go missing.
Unfortunately, it came at the expense of the Sardaukar. They exist in the film, but without anything that made them special in the novel. The Sardaukar are an elite fighting force that come from the Emperor’s prison planet. It is a brutal planet, and only the best of the best become Sardaukar, the most fearsome fighting force in the universe. Sure they are some intimidating force in the film, but not to the point in the book.
The Harkonnens are not the most intimidating physically. The Baron is morbidly obese, and needs gravity lifts to move around his immense weight. He has two cousins, a meatheaded barbarian named Glossu Rabban, and a lithe and cunning would-be heir to the throne named Feyd-Rautha. Only one appears in the film, Dave Batista’s barbaric Glossu Rabban, and it remains to be seen if Feyd-Rautha will appear in the sequel. It reasons that Villeneuve decided to hold off on the second nephew as to introduce something new in Dune 2.
The intimidating force in the book is the Sardaukar. They are a presence in this film, but not to the extent that they are in the novel. The Sardaukar aren’t just a good fighting force, you don’t survive if you cross blades with them. They are a death sentence and the film just doesn’t have the same gravitas. When Duncan stalls the Sardaukar to save Jessica and Paul, it is shocking that he kills some of them, not that he dies.
The film kind of augmented this by putting a lot more weight on the Baron. It is no longer Piter’s idea for the take-over, but the Baron’s. He no longer kills members of his staff indiscriminately like in the Lynch version. Unfortunately, the Baron doesn’t really have anything to do in the first film, and he doesn’t interact with the main cast, outside of the capture of Duke Leto. He’s a puppet master, pulling the strings behind the scenes, never out front.
Conclusion
Should there be a conclusion if the film didn’t have one?
In all seriousness, its really hard to judge this as a movie. The end leaves a definite sour taste in the views mouth, especially those unfamiliar with the source material. A story isn’t just an ending, but a lot of time is setting up things that will resolve at the ending. And the old adage is true, stick the landing and many issues can be smoothed over in the minds of the audience. Sour the ending, and many great moments will be forgotten.
Dune does not have an ending. It doesn’t really have a cliffhanger. Just a few minutes after a knife fight and what felt like a tacked on Zendaya voice-over, the credits roll. It almost feels like Villeneuve tried to stuff the runtime as full as possible, and added a “This isn’t over; in fact, its just beginning” speech as late as allowed by the studio.
So this movie could very possibly be just an afterthought. It wholly depends on Dune 2 being good, because if it isn’t, there is no reason to watch this movie again. Its like having a great soup to start a meal. It all really depends on the main course. You aren’t going back to a restaurant that has a good salad but a terrible main course. Odds are that Dune 2 will be good, it is a Villeneuve movie, and he seems to only make good movies. But right now, Dune Part 1 is an incomplete, if not very good story.
The Sensations of Storytelling 