A BOY AND HIS MOTHER

Dune (Part 1) 🐱🐱🐱 3 Maryellens

Working on a writeup of Dune 2. In the meantime, here’s my take on Dune 1, first published on Facebook on November 12, 2021. I saw the movie a second time—I think in March 2022—and thought much better of it, probably would give it four Maryellens, not three.

Sheltering under a tent with his mother during a terrifying desert night, Paul Atreides (Timotheé Chalamet), the young hero of Dune, has had it. “Look at me mother! You and your Bene Gesserits have turned me into a FREAK!”

I am paraphrasing, of course, because I’ve waited two weeks to write this. But that pretty much sums up the question at the heart of the film by Denis Villeneuve and the sprawling novel by Frank Herbert it’s based on. Yes, the avaricious, murderous, very bald, and often floating Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard) has probably killed the young man’s father, the noble Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac), in the burning city they’ve just fled. Yes, the lethal Sardaukar legions of the back-stabbing Padashah Emperor are in hot pursuit. And yes, the stealthy Fremen, a tribe of desert freedom fighters led by the enigmatic Stilgar (Javier Bardem), may very well want to kill them, too. But Paul’s real enemy is crouching beside him in the tent.

And isn’t it ever so? Mom always gets the blame. In this case, of course, Mom (Rebecca Ferguson) is a bona fide “star witch” and may deserve it. She and her gal pals have indeed been rather meddlesome, engineering blood lines for thousands of years in their wombs to try to hatch a boy messiah, the Kwisatz Haderach, whom Paul may or may not be. (Take a guess.) But given that he does seem to have some higher-level mental powers, in particular a terrifying gift for prophecy, Mom may also be Paul’s best ally. And her ovarian manipulations, not the petty politics of the Empire and the spice trade and all those mean baldies, are the real engine of the plot.

Speaking of prophecy: You’ll get no spoiler alerts here. The story spoils itself, half-unfolding in Paul’s dreams, which tell the future correctly while getting small details wrong. When we’ve seen the love interest (Zendaya) every few minutes in his dreams, her actual appearance doesn’t register. The perpetual feeling of letdown Dune gives you is one big reason the book and Villeneuve’s gorgeous adaptation of its first half—yes, children, a sequel is coming—are so very puzzling. Here’s hoping the director finds a bit of suspense for the next film.

Let me skip to the chase, Maryellen Novak, and say that despite what I’ve written so far, Dune is worth seeing. It’s a beautiful space opera. And yet, as much as I liked it, I also disliked it. Not only because Villeneuve can’t quite decide who to channel, Stanley Kubrik or George Lucas (more on that in a sec). The real issue is that there’s just no getting away from Frank Herbert, and where Villeneuve is brilliant, he wasn’t.

Let’s start with the plot. The prophesied outcome of the story being such an utterly foregone conclusion—Paul even tells us the outcome of the next movie!—has never bothered fans. Because while it’s not very successful as a novel (in the story-telling and character-building sense; God knows it made Herbert and his descendants many many millions), it’s still riveting. If you first encountered the book in a South Carolina suburb, say, in the late ’70s, when your parents passed them down to you and your brother, you will know what I mean. This was no mere novel—it was a far-ranging political and cultural critique, a fantastical forecast of the technological future, and even a revelatory theological treatise.

Or so I thought then. Now I realize the whole thing is pretty slapdash and flimsy. Poke it anywhere, and it collapses under its outmoded assumptions and naked hubris. Herbert was famously new-age and really into magic mushrooms; he makes hallucinogenic “spice” the McGuffin of his story. He was also an early environmentalist who decried industrial exploitation of the natural world and had very touching late ’60s notions about global togetherness. Also, a thing for ancient Greece: In the novel, Duke Leto claims to be descended from the House of Atreus. I’m still not clear what particular Atreides story Herbert wanted to reference. Perhaps he was just making a general nod toward the subject of pride. There’s plenty of that to be found here.

Because on top of all of the above, Dune is also Lawrence of Arabia. Herbert was a big, big fan of the film, which, it turns out, is a pretty shaky foundation to build a liberation saga on. David Lean’s epic is a profoundly moving cinematic masterpiece…AND the ultimate white savior narrative. Writing in the ’60s, Herbert runs with that, setting his story in the desert and basing the locals’ speech on Arabic. His wily space witches, um Bene Gesserit, coach these people of color to look for a messiah who’s a stranger, aka white. But they may not need one: Eating the hallucinogenic spice of Arrakis has already turned their eyes light blue.

Forgive us, Woke World. This wildly popular novel of the new consciousness was only half-conscious. As were we, its fans. To his credit, Villeneuve has changed up the casting, giving us “natives” who almost span the rainbow. He kept the corny blue eyes.

And he’s switched the gender of an important minor character, Dr. Liet-Kynes (the terrific Sharon Duncan-Brewster). But this doesn’t make Dune a feminist film, as he and his actors keep saying on press junkets. Yes, the Bene Gesserit seem to wield enormous shadow power, and yes, Charlotte Rampling has a truly fierce scene as the grandest space-witch diva in the universe, but they do it all wearing what amount to burkas. Paul’s mother, Jessica+, isn’t a duchess, but a concubine; so she’s at least exempted from the burka. And the messiah these ladies are engineering is absolutely intended to be a boy. Bottom line: Despite all their wily power, Herbert’s women don’t rule.

What on Earth is a director to do with all of this? For his famously bad 1984 adaptation, David Lynch ditched much of the hokum and ratcheted up the conflict with the Harkonnens, even casting a woefully at sea but superhot Sting as Paul’s opposite scion. (The one thing I really miss about that version: The evil Baron—not bald, but floating in most of his scenes—has twisted gay sex with a slave. It may have been an utterly homophobic characterization typical of the period, but it was queer and it was on the big screen!)

Lynch’s trademark creep factor curdled almost immediately into camp, but this Dune, in Villeneuve’s brand, which you might call inscrutable menace, should age well. His pacing isn’t as deliciously ponderous as in Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, but the film does drag sublimely from time to time. Working again with the brilliant production designer Patrice Vermette, he returns to the brutalist architecture that lent stark beauty to those films. Vermette also channels ancient Earth history, decorating the Atreides palace with wall carvings that might well be Assyrian, for example, and laying out Arrakeen, the capital of Arrakis, like the temple complex at Luxor.

There are no computers; it’s not mentioned in the movie, but 10,000 years earlier, humans “put down” machine brains in a great revolution. But the technology is naturally far, far advanced. Lots of stuff in the distant future, starting with the villains, just seems to float. Most impressive of all are the great interstellar ships that ferry our characters from world to world. Reminiscent of the starships of Arrival, they barely seem to be engineered at all. They just descend, noiselessly, ominously, and often quite slowly. Villeneuve aspires to be Kubrik, and it’s in these shots, and compositions pitting lonely figures against the sandstorms of this pitiless world, that the movie soars.

Cinematographer Greig Fraser stepped in for Roger Deakins this time, but if the movie isn’t as jaw-droppingly gorgeous as Blade Runner 2049, it isn’t really his fault. The screenplay never lets us settle anywhere; we hop from world to world and palace to palace and in the end never feel like we’re anywhere terribly specific. For a film called Dune, we spend precious little time in the sand. David Lean would not have made this mistake.

There’s just too much Dune for Villeneuve’s abstract choreography to work. He can’t sustain his sublime opaque style in the face of so many characters and so much un-plot. In puzzling contrast to the hovering interstellar tech, the ornithopter—a sort of helicopter-dragonfly our hero pilots over the desert—is rendered in very specific, mechanical detail. And the still suit, an insulated desert onesie that recycles sweat into drinking water, looks like something NASA could make. A life-and-death chase across a lethal desert—the most fun part of the film, even if you know how it comes out—calls for George Lucas, not Stanley Kubrik.

If Villeneuve struggles to settle on the right father figure—to serve up 2001 or Star Wars—so does our hero, played with deft detachment by Chalamet. Should he emulate his teacher/trainer, Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin), the leader of the Atreides army? Or his hero, Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa), a bad-ass special forces type? Or his real dad, the chilly, cerebral, patrician Duke Leto (the holy-Jesus-he’s-always-so-fucking-hot Oscar Isaac)? None of the above. In the end, he’s stuck with Mom. Ferguson is marvelous, but her Jessica is a bit unhinged for a psychic space seer. Perhaps that’s why, as he memorably says in the sand, she made him a freak.

Which brings me to Chalamet. Who better to embody a distraught teen turned intergalactic Sufi wiseman than the mesmerizing freak of Call Me By Your Name, Little Women, Ladybird, and Beautiful Boy? Chalamet polarizes audiences, no doubt. Either you think nothing is going on there, or everything is. Count me in camp Timotheé Is Everything®.

He’s possibly our first non-binary sex symbol. (No, I don’t know his personal or political stance on his or anyone’s gender; only that he’s so utterly comfortable in his skin, speculation about him is irrelevant.) With his long, luxurious hair and large, glistening eyes, he’s not at all butch, but he’s not quite queer. He’s so skinny he seems like he’ll snap in half in a stiff breeze, yet he’s taut and agile and able to hold his own in a fight. He’s young enough to be utterly at sea with his emotions, but seasoned enough to summarize the lay of whatever land he’s, um, landed on.

Chalamet is just fabulously intriguing, and he has to be to keep this baffling movie interesting. Simultaneously a wet kitten and a heartthrob, he was a brilliant choice to play a reluctant messiah. Can he save the universe? Who knows. He certainly saves Dune.

+You read that right. People will still be called Jessica in 20,000 years. They will also still play bagpipes. Don’t get me started.