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| Quickly, lad! The takes are coming! |
Spoilers for Dune below. I've avoided talking about the second half of the novel, but if you're coming to the story fresh, I'd recommend not reading this article before you've seen the film.
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Adapting Dune means delivering on both style and substance. Lynch's '84 attempt, bound by the limits of not just a single instalment, but a cinema landscape in which longer films were frowned upon had little choice but to focus on the former. The 2000 mini-series, which mistook accuracy for artistry and "Oh fuck it; CGI" for an aesthetic, delivered only the latter. Sometimes the obvious is still worth stating: getting this done right is hard.
Villeneuve's approach, unsurprisingly, is closer to the flawed but fascinating former work, than it is the leaden latter. Indeed, it's notable that at least some of the design work here owes a debt to the Lynch version. The Harkonnen, in particular, look an awful lot like the (absent in the Villeneuve adaptation) Guild henchmen of the '84 film, and this newest version of Geidi Prime has some familiarities to the previous iteration as well.
(The degree to which the Harkonnen here look like Lynch's guild is particularly interesting, given Lynch's own Harkonnen cleave rather closer to the source material. We shall return to this point.)
I mention these echoes not to level accusations of laziness or plagiarism - taking what works from previous unsuccessful adaptations of beloved novels is a common approach, as Peter Jackson could tell you. But it's instructive what Villeneuve ports over, and what he doesn't. With less time to tell twice as much story, Lynch's film is often clumsy, but never dull. This is heightened by occasional flashes of utter weirdness - beetle-crusher hip-flasks, rats duct-taped to cats, Captain Picard and his war-pug. There's a genuine sense of how eight thousand years of time has rendered the humanity of the Imperium as unrecognisable to us as we would be to the *checks historical notes* Mesolithic hunter gatherers of the sixth millennium BCE. Those lads were still marvelling at having gotten pottery off the ground - imagine trying to explain to them the internet's effect on human society.
(While you're at it, imagine trying to also explain fracking, pharmacology, air travel, and neoliberalism at the same time, and further imagine how much of a weeping penile chancre you'd have to be to bitch Dune only explains things once.)
The glorious oddness of Salusa Secundus aside, Villeneuve's Imperium is rather more recognisable, with eight thousand years of historical travel primarily represented by advancements in technology (we're not even permitted to see a Navigator, though perhaps that's being held back for the now-confirmed sequel). This is a shame, though it's one blunted by how strong the design work is throughout. As you'd expect from the people who brought us "Arrival", this vision of the 10th millennium is absolutely gorgeous, with all the stately grandeur and hideous destructive capability Herbert imagined for a society that had regressed into a feudal model while continuing to tinker with its fighter-bombers.
Perhaps what's more important, though, is that the oddness in Lynch's film added a twisted levity to the proceedings. It wasn't a funny film (or at least, it wasn't deliberately funny), but the outbreaks of baffling weirdness helped overcome the workmanlike dialogue and portentous tone. Villeneuve's version, in contrast, has no such seasoning - oh hell, let's just say spice - and that, compared with a run time that lets him linger on almost every page of what he's adapting, results in a film that has to push the charisma of its actors and the beauty of its design as hard and often as possible, to avoid what is supposed to be read as stately grandeur coming off instead as simply dull.
This is not always successful, especially given the film's pacing. I'm pretty sure I'll dig the film more on a second viewing, when I'm not constantly being surprised by how far the film continues after the fall of Arrakeen. Still, though, the precipitous drop that begins as Yueh enacts his plan feels like it should be the beginning of the end for the film (not least because books two and three of the original novel could, quite bluntly, do with some cutting). Instead, we follow Paul and Jessica some way into Dune's second third. The sudden relaxing of pace, without any actual real upturn in fortune until the very end, creates an odd feeling of arrested descent, without any actual climb. Like coming to the bottom of a helter-skelter to find exiting the ride requires using a child's slide. Or, to use a more appropriate metaphor, feeling the adrenaline rush of free-fall before activating a gravity harness to slowly drift to the ground. It gets you where you need to go, but that doesn't mean it feels natural.
But the flip-side of the film not always being pretty enough to escape some of its structural issues is that, most of the time, it absolutely is. I can't speak to what extent Villeneuve had a particularly talented VFX team working on the film, and to what extent cinema has just had enough time to figure out how to use CGI effectively, but the result is genuinely beautiful. This is only the second film I've seen in a cinema since COVID hit early last year (the first, wonderfully, being Lynch's Dune), but I'm delighted I made that decision. It's not just that it all looks gorgeous, it's that the film recognises heighliners and ornithopters are no more inherently impressive than the endless crumbling waves of the deep desert itself. Dune was always about the double-edged nature of the awe-inspiring, and, absurd as it might sound, this is the first adaptation to actually feel like it takes part in a desert, rather than in cities at the desert's edge. Whatever problems the slow spiral in the film's final act might cause, it at least reminds us of what it means to live on Arrakis. Of what it means to be Fremen.
Whether filtered through Lunch or not, then, much of what here rings true to what Herbert, at his best, was trying to get at with Dune: what exists beyond our boundaries does not become of interest only when we want to expand into it. But Villeneuve, like Kynes, is also canny enough to prune when necessary. I think this now makes three adaptations for three that totally deep-six the idea that Paul was trained as a mentat (because Herbert figured just being a warlock and the cumulation of a breeding program to bring about a super-being wasn't quite impressive enough - anyone who complains about Mary Sues while adoring Dune needs to spend some time being menaced by a futar). More notably, while the concept of the Kwisatz Haderach inevitably appears, it does so shorn from the bullshit gender essentialism Herbert grounded it in. In Villeneuve's Dune, it's enough that the Bene Gesserit have spent thousands of years attempting to breed a super-being (which, in fairness, is quite scientifically illiterate and borderline fascistic enough). The fact Paul is male is relevant only insofar as it doesn't accord with the next stage of the breeding programme (Mohiam does accuse Jessica of believing she could bear the ol' Kilo Hotel herself, but the reasons for the accusation are wisely left unexplored).
Similarly, Villeneuve tosses aside the abhorrent queer-coding of Baron Harkonnen, and, unlike the 2000 miniseries, doesn't try to cast a scuzzy orgy aura by way of compensation. These are savvy choices and, along with realising that casting white people for every single non-Fremen is racist bullshit you can't even blame a sixty-year old book for - we end up with the least problematic adaption of the novel yet.
All of which makes the obvious missteps so much more enraging. The fact that the film ends with almost every main character dead, evil, or Fremen might blunt the accusation that the film kills its three most prominent characters of colour (with the fate of the fourth not even considered). And hey, at least Zendaya finally gest something to do in the final minutes. But while the decision to cut away the Baron's "fey tittering" and boy sex-slaves is self-evidently correct, the decision to leave in the fatphobic bullshit paradoxically becomes even more indefensible. Like, you knew there was a problem, and consciously decided that you could only be bothered to partially solve it. It would be morally purblind to suggest fatphobia is a problem on the same magnitude as homophobia (though Herbert's vilifying of anything that doesn't match the modern image of masculinity demonstrates the two issues are not completely orthogonal), but that only operates as an excuse if we believe there's only so many prejudices you can flense out in any one go. "We couldn't make him not gay AND not fat! How would people know the treacherous mass-murderer is a bad 'un?".
Not that this is the actual excuse being deployed. The only defence I've seen put forward on this so far is that the production team wanted to be as faithful to the imagery of the book as they can. This is a transparent dodge, both because it arbitrarily ringfences one aspect of the novel, and because it's not even a good aspect to ringfence. This is a guy who wrote about dogs bred to be chairs, for Muad'Dib's sake. You don't have to slavishly follow the man's design sense [1].
More to the point, it's an obvious lie. The Atreides colours are green and black, not grey and slightly different grey. Hunter-seekers are canonically floating death-sperm. The Harkonnens wear blue uniforms. The Baron himself has red-gold hair in a widow's peak (I said we'd get back to the Lynchian inhabitants of Geidi Prime). We do not require a prime computation here. The new Baron Harkonnen is fat because Villeneuve was happy with him being fat.
In a film where every decision seems to have been carefully considered (seriously, they should teach Dune in film school as an example of how to make dense literary sci-fi work), these moments of sheer laziness seems additionally problematic. Even worse than the Baron is the absolutely inexplicable decision to make the treacherous Dr Yueh the only East Asian character in the film. In fact, since we're talking about fidelity to the book apparently constituting a defence for wretched calls, let's not ignore the fact this film deliberately excises the entire build-up to Wellington's betrayal. One of my absolute favourite things about Dune is the fact the villain lays out his entire sinister plan in the second chapter. I've talked before about my issues with seeing spoilers as awful and enjoyment-ruining as a matter of course (while recognising they often can be that). I find something wonderful in a story so casually mining out every gram of dramatic irony it can from the heroes' near-total destruction. Because the mystery here isn't the point. What matters is how well Herbert makes Wellington into a tragic figure, despite the horrifying cost of his actions, and how his hatred of the Baron who thinks him a pawn brings about the total destruction of House Harkonnen. So committed is Herbert to the human cost of the Baron's plan, indeed, that whole subplots in the first third of Dune revolve around Thufir Hawat and Jessica panicking over their inability to find an alternative to suspecting each other, all while the reader knows full well who the actual traitor is.
Villeneuve's Dune excises not just the early reveal of what is actually going on, it also completely dispenses with Dr Yueh's backstory. As a result, his betrayal comes completely out of nowhere. We're not even primed to believe a spy exists, let alone that it might be the mild-mannered doctor. His history with the Harkonnen and the nature of his Suk conditioning alike are completely ignored, paradoxically making him the most likely candidate for a traitor, if only because he's barely on screen long enough to register. Which brings us back to the point - the only reason newcomers to this story could possibly have here to suspect Yueh is because of the "inscrutable Asian" trope. The film purposefully gives us no reason to glance at him askance other than institutional racism, and then justifies that attitude.
It's ugly. It's racist. And while it might be beside the point, it's also incompetent. If you're given a sixth of a billion dollars to adapt an insanely popular book (something like 20 million copies sold), kneecapping one of the characters in an attempt to make a mystery out of something every reader of the book knows is coming would be asinine, even before we return to the fact that Dune pointedly doesn't even inform us that a mystery is brewing. Indeed, in terms of the time that elapses between learning a traitor exists and knowing who it is, arguably the film gets there quicker than the book. It's just that it does it at precisely the wrong time.
Unlike Villeneuve, though, I recognise the irony here. These wretched decisions only take up so much of my post because they happen in the context of a film that does so, so well in just about every other respect. Dune represents progress on almost every front. How to exposit. How to adapt. How to not give a shit what racists will say under the guise of "faithfulness". It would have been unimaginable to me just five years ago to imagine a sci-fi film where I'm glad they used CGI rather than models, but Dune manages that too.
And ultimately, to the extent it matters how faithful an adaptation is to the source material, what could be more true to Dune than an admixture of the glorious and the appalling. Or perhaps admixture isn't the word. Maybe I mean melange. What could do Herbert more justice than a fundamental incoherence? Dune is a flawed masterpiece, just as is Dune.
We can want for more, and still recognise what we have.
[1] The most charitable reading of chair-dogs is that, just as they (sort of) did with Dune's position on homosexuality, the later novels try to walk back the problematic aspects of the Bene Gesserit breeding programs, by comparing them to trying to turn labradors into lazy boys. Reasonable people can disagree on the degree to which this particular charity is worth your donation.
