Review of Dune (2021) by Efram — 23 Oct 2021

DUNE REVIEW.

I am an avowed DUNE-ophile as I have read all the books and seen every iteration of them. I am also a director and creator of scripted content working in the industry as we speak. I was interested to see how Denis Villeneuve would handle this iconic masterpiece. To say I was disappointed and saddened in what I saw is an understatement. Where the book is vivid, insightful, groundbreaking, engrossing and impactful, Villeneuve’s film is lackluster, plodding, bereft of emotion, stark, and muddled. Let’s begin with the sets. Villeneuve is a stylist, a director who uses his environments as a character. This obfuscates what I believe is his inability to tell engrossing original stories. By his own admission, Bladerunner 2049 was a flop. Arrival, adapted from a great book fell into confusion and over intellectualization in his hands and now with DUNE his inability to tell an engrossing, complete intense story comes into real focus. Villeneuve is a talented director in certain respects. But even here, his set pieces dwarf his actors and their acting, as if the characters are subordinate to the set pieces instead of integral to their relevance. Caladan is a stark, dreary, grayscale world where the only inhabitants are a sullen, forlorn group of royals who have no joy or meaning in their lives even though they have been tasked with overseeing the most important element in the universe; SPICE, the substance that binds all the houses of the Landsraad together is glossed over and never fully explained as the most important substance in the universe as it enables the space guild to fold space and without it the Imperial empire would collapse. Even David Lynch got this plot point right. The scene where the Atreide’s move from Caladan to Arrakis was particularly annoying as the real uses of Spice was never explained and the guild and its masters were never seen or even given one bit of critical story attention, leaving an audience who never read the book to wander in oblivion as one of the key tenets of Herbert’s books was completely overlooked. Arrakis is portrayed as an unpopulated Toy set with no people and a monochromatic sepia laden landscape, void of life and 10,000 years of history.

Even David Lynch’s uneven if interesting version of DUNE created characters that were memorable. The Harkonnen’s in Lynch’s world are brutal, vlolent, debauched and dangerous. Remember the heart plug scene, or the pustules, or the servants with their eyes and mouths sewn shut, indelible images that enhance the brutality of the Harkonnen’s. Nothing like that here. Here they are fixtures acting like they are dangerous and brutal, but they come across as characterizations of something that begs to be illuminated but never is and deprives the film of a credible frightening antagonist.

Relationships are muddy and ineffective. The intense love relationship between Duke Leto Atreides and his concubine Jessica is poorly dealt with, just glossed over and in this Villeneuve has made a critical error as their relationship forms the lynchpin and motivation of the entire storyline. Timothy Chalamee’s Paul is sullen, melancholy, and ineffective instead of the conflicted, intense, emotionally driven, passionate and confident Paul of the books. In fact, all of the acting is as bleak as the sets, lost in quiet introspective emotions when big broad character choices are called for, if nothing else, to match the import of the story they are telling. Only Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem break this monotony.

Jason Momoa’s Duncan Idaho is smirky and self-important and Momoa acts as if he doesn’t believe his own acting. All the characters are slightly drawn and ineffective and what’s more we have no idea who they really are, where they came from or what their motivations might be, which is frustrating and shows laziness on Villeneuve’s part. Understanding who these characters are and what their motivations are is essential to understand everything else in DUNE and at every turn they prove to be less than adequate to portray Herbert’s intensely drawn arcs. If we do not understand his characters motivations, there is no reason to go any further in watching this film.

Style over substance is what I’ve always thought about Villeneuve and his work and this version of DUNE proves just that. Not to mention that this is just HALF of the film, so now the audience has to shell out more money to watch a film that should’ve been a one-time event. Self-absorption and hubris are always a bad combination in anything, especially film making that costs over 200 million dollars. To really see what is so amazing about Herbert’s definitive Space Opera, take the time to read the book and let your own imagination create the world that Herbert intended.