I’m less aware than Titus is of these things, but this is the first movie since the Covid-19 shut-down that truly seems an event. Green Knight, which we’ve discussed here on PostModernConservative (scroll down) should have been an event, and is for anyone who sees it, but it did not get wide release and backing, probably due to certain baffling aspects of the plot. (BTW, see Titus’s recent piece on the original medieval poem over at Law and Liberty, and if you do see the film, don’t miss his American Cinema Foundation discussion he links to on the film—it’s in the post you’ll find on Green Knight if you keep scrolling down our substack.)
Some of the new Dune’s reviewers have said the plot doesn’t quite click, which they say has to do with it being a part one and thus not having an obvious place to end, but my wife and I, and not a few other members of the audience, left the theater feeling this was the best sci-fi film in decades. It truly swept us away. Amazing score and sound. Best cinematic utilization of the desert since the first Star Wars and Lawrence of Arabia—and you won’t believe how good the sand-worms move and look! Maybe the plot-unfolding was not perfect, but I totally agree with this Quinn fellow whose review I embed below that even though it is two-and-a-half-hours long, I could have easily welcomed another thirty minutes.
It is not in the sci-fi modes of a) out-from-our-earth-in-weakness films like Interstellar, Contact, 2001: A Space Odyssey, or the director Denis Villeneuve's previous sci-fi film Arrival, nor of b) grim visions of our future films like Logan’s Run, Alien, Blade Runner, etc., nor c) of the more fantasy-like and hopeful out-from-our earth sagas like the whole Star Trek franchise and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. Rather, it is clearly in the space opera camp of Star Wars, taking place in some other galaxy, and involving heavy use of fantasy-tropes. It’s faithfulness to Frank Herbert’s book of course makes it a more somber-toned opera—there’s none of the light American dash of the Luke and Han characters, nor things like the Mos Eisley bar scene. It’s also a harsher world, political and morally more like the one of Lawrence of Arabia, or even the ham-handedly uber-cynical one of Game of Thrones.
Anyhow, here’s an appreciative Herbert-fan and sci-fi lover’s perspective:
Dune is a book packed with a number of rich ideas, and makes a cultural mine not of Norse and Old English materials, as in Tolkien, but of Arabic and Islamic ones. I read half of it when a teenager, but pooped-out 2/3 of the way through, and so I was in fact glad to the see the at-times-cringeworthy 1985 version when it came out, just so I could learn how the story turned out. I’m not a natural Herbert fan—there’s a grimness to his vision, and an absence of anything akin to Christian or American hope, that isn’t really rectified, to my taste, by his messiah-theme with the Paul character. Maybe I’d think differently if I gave the book another chance, as an adult.
The 2021 film is quite faithful to the book, but the idea from it that emerges strongest for me is a classic theme in sci-fi, especially in the space-opera kind, namely, the opposition of the shock-and-awe power of hyper-advanced technology, most clearly embodied in massive lumbering space-ships and their fire-power, and the possibility of individual heroism making any difference in such a world, by means of hard-earned martial virtues/skills, and/or magical/spiritual powers. Lucas’s Jedi were the perfect combination of these two “fantasy” elements of human resistance to technological domination, but of course, throughout his saga, what Lucas would do is provide scary pictures of overwhelming technological power—our first glimpses of the Imperial Cruiser, and especially, of the Death Star—but then provide way after way for his cheeky American comic book heroes to get around them, and defeat those forces.
The same opposition is there in Dune, but it doesn’t drain out into insignificance as it eventually does in the Star Wars saga, such that we always expect that Han Solo and crew will find a trick, and such that everything boils down in the end to Jedi-dynamics. Technology gets defeated too easily.
On this opposition, Dune is far more adult. Both in book and film, the continued importance of a man’s fighting skill is highlighted, despite the presence of amazing technological power. While the film doesn’t capture this enough, the fact that the Saduakar have a Spartan-like or Janissary-like superiority in fighting ability compared to all other troops, due to their being raised on a penal-colony planet, is a key one for the plot. What the film does show us, however, is that the use of body-shield technology seems to have diminished the importance of shooting in combat situations, and increased the importance of skill in hand-to-hand fighting.
And in a number of scenes and ways, the film juxtaposes images of either a) our noble-class main characters, or of b) organized, even geometrically elegant, bodies of fighting men, against MASSIVENESS. They stride out, trying to convey confidence as they walk as a group, from some gigantic ship or palace structure that dwarfs them. The space-ships here are nearly all pretty unique in visual design, though they do hearken back to certain classic sci-fi painters of the 70s, but sound-wise and shot-wise, their giganticism is made far more intimidating than what we’ve usually experienced. Yes, the special effects, auditory and visual, that Villeneuve can deploy are obviously far more advanced than what Lucas had at his disposal, but we must note that he does so with great artistic effect. He and his team also hit upon a certain minimalistic style, with shades of Islamic, Meso-American, and Japanese art, that also heightens the impact. You’ve really got to see it on a big-screen!
Dune the film even risks suggesting, despite what’s reported and seen about the importance of the Saduakar’s prowess, that a reliance upon fostering classic martial skill, especially of the civilized kind embraced by the House of Atreides, is made hopeless by the awesome power of the technology on display. There’s one scene, where very-Pearl-Harbor-like, the troops of Atreides run out from the palace to try to get to their space-ships under the fire of a sneak-attack from space, and we see a few thousand of them move out across the airfield in a kind of mass, orderly, quick, and with all determination, but as we are witnessing the huge explosions delivered by the enemy space-craft upon their doomed ships, we realize that a single one of those (laser-phaser-whatever) hits could wipe out this entire field of men.
Without providing any spoilers, I can say that a similar tension exists regarding the use and development of individual spiritual powers. The hero of our saga Paul, was bred and raised with significant input from an organization of witches, as his mother is one. This organization, the Benne Gesserit, are like the Jedi in having trans-planetary reach, and involvement in a shadow-y way the galaxy’s high politics, but are unlike them, in being nearly all female, in putting little emphasis on individual martial skill, and in seeming to be as much about manipulating religious beliefs of credulous populations, like the Fremen of Arrakis, as they are about connecting to something like the Force. Again, Dune is like Game of Thrones in that it often points to the importance of Machiavellian and multi-layered political intrigue, and the Benne Gesserit seem as much concerned with that, albeit in a very-long-game way, as they do with their spiritual or psychic powers.
The emotional coldness of Frank Herbert’s vision and world is such that, unlike with Tolkien’s or Lucas’s characters, we never get to feel that close to them, or comfortable with them, and we always sense their being overshadowed by grand, beyond-their-control forces. They are in some ways too greater than us modern democratic men and women for it to result in a story we’d embrace—imagine a Lord of the Rings with no Hobbits but only Aragorns!—and what is more, they are perhaps themselves too subject to movements even greater than they. That, I suspect, is the main source of some critics feeling the plot of the 2021 film doesn’t quite click. There are a few bits I admit could be stronger—as Mr. Quinn says, there should have been more breathing-time after the Atreides characters arrive on Arrakis, i.e., on the Dune planet. I also feel the key combat-challenge scene of the film near its end ought to rectify this sense of emotional sense of distance we have with the characters more than it does, but it does provide a workable way to end the story as it has progressed so far.
Moreover, this is a film where the images, sounds, and movements wind up mattering more to you than your connection with the characters.
Anyhow, I intend to see this part again while it’s still in the theaters, and I look forward to the second. Let me know what y’all think once you get out to see it.
"imagine a Lord of the Rings with no Hobbits but only Aragorns"
The Worm Ouroborus?