Review: Dune
I can’t help but think of Stanley Kubrick every time I see a vast, robust science fiction epic. Not only because the director produced 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) — one of the finest and most influential films of its genre, and a paradigm for formal disruptiveness within commercial moviemaking — but because, throughout his career, he understood the colonialist underpinnings of Western narrative traditions and took care to emphasize the degree to which, within those traditions, violence underscores every human interaction.
Dune has its eyes on a similar understanding, or knowledge of human behavior. I have not read all of the Frank Herbert novel upon which it’s based — though I have read enough to know there’s a homophobic dimension to the book’s depiction of Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård) that is tactfully sidestepped in this adaptation. Already this tells me that director Denis Villeneuve has elected to make a film that dramatizes a classic novel while refining its themes for a contemporary, more progressive audience.
Such a decision, however, leads to some clunky ceasefires with some of the storyline’s most inherently problematic elements — namely the idea that Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) is savior to a desert planet of people who dress and speak as though they were Middle Eastern. There’s no doubt that Paul is ultimately sympathetic to, and that Villeneuve is prepared to honor if not inhabit the perspective of this oppressed group of people, yet in order for the story to function as Herbert constructed it Dune must defer to the spiritual supremacy of benevolent colonizers.
Yes, this is a story about the joining of forces to defeat an overtly cruel dictator. But the foregrounding of mighty, handsomely Eurocentric lives — against not only a backdrop of groveling, “superstitious” desert-dwellers but a villain who is rendered fat and queer — furthers an imperialist agenda rather than contradict it.
Such adherence to traditional values is felt in the film’s formal makeup, too. In the last decade, Denis Villeneuve came to be regarded for his graceful integrations of human emotion with literate pacing in films that ranged from the implosive hostility of Prisoners (2013) to the meditative ellipses of Arrival (‘16). I expected a similar intelligence from him here, yet Dune is in many ways overwrought material for the streamlined format of Hollywood blockbusters — and rather than challenge that format, sadly, Villeneuve succumbs to it.
Aside from the glory of its production design and costuming (shoutout to Patrice Vermette, Robert Morgan and Jacqueline West), Dune treads a path quite familiar to modern sci-fi movie audiences: voiceover narration… title cards that identify every new location… CG forcefields during fight scenes and eyeless, thousand-toothed monsters… pastiches of Eastern theologies… military formations that evoke the Third Reich…… a relentless score by Hans Zimmer… and the presences of Dave Bautista and Jason Momoa.
Matched by an endless procession of explosions and battle sequences, these clichés work to aggressively reduce Dune to nothing more than mere content. All of its prestige arises purely from the fact that it is based upon a respected novel, and from the polished aesthetic that accompanies its high-profile director and cast.
None of what I’ve written here is written out of a wish to wound, or to attack this project or the people who made it. I simply feel it’s necessary to maintain a careful approach when we enter the movie theater, and to remember that we can hold standards for our entertainment that extend beyond glamor and familiarity.
Given its budget and the talent behind it, Dune could have easily been a technical masterpiece. Yet on the other hand, the implicit ideology of its source material may have prevented it from ever being a work of art — because art disrupts propaganda, just as it affirms humanity. And the trend in Hollywood is usually towards the opposite.
