When I watched the beginning of the Denis Villaneuve’s first Dune movie (2021) with my youngest kid, it was a special moment that took me back a long time.
I’ve been a superfan of the Dune universe ever since I read the books a long time ago and the primary film prompted me to re-read the primary trilogy. And as I watched Dune: Part 2 this week at a special Warner Bros. screening, I do know I must have been overjoyed to see that the curse of bad Dune adaptations was lifted. But I needed to suppress feelings of becoming a supercritic. I feel you must see each movies, but as a sci-fi devotee, I even have to ponder whether the movies — that are so well done — really do justice to the Frank Herbert novel that first debuted in 1965. (To explain a few of this, this review is filled with spoilers).
In the primary film, the Gom Jabbar test was a crucial scene. Young Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalomet) will at some point be the Duke leading a Great House of the galaxy. But the Bene Gesserit (a gaggle of ladies who manipulate and pull strings to manage the galaxy) must test whether he is actually human.
The reverend mother makes Paul put his hand right into a black box. He feels pain and needs to tug it out. Then she pulls out a poisoned needle (the Gom Jabbar) and holds it to his neck. If he pulls his hand from the box, she says she is going to kill him with the needle. It tests whether his natural instincts — triggered by the pain within the box — will override his human awareness of the needle.
Litany against fear
Paul’s mother Jessica, a Bene Gesserit herself, has to endure this test waiting outside the room. Her recitation of the “Litany Against Fear” is one of the moving passages within the book and within the movie as well. When I used to be young, this litany helped me master my fears. I passed it on to all of my kids in what I considered good parenting.
The film scene was so well done that it washed away any concern I had concerning the film being faithful to the book. It swept away the photographs in my head from the unique David Lynch Dune film (1984), which were hard to shake. That film had Sting, but it surely tried to cram an excessive amount of into two hours and 17 minutes. The actors on this film — Chalomet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson amongst them — are thoroughly solid.
Passages reminiscent of the Litany Against Fear — told in terse ways where you possibly can get contained in the mind of a personality — were what made the unique book and the primary movie into masterpieces of science fiction. It is what compelled me to ready all six of Frank Herbert’s books, and devour one other six written by his son Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. I cannot imagine that there at the moment are one other 16 books I still should read, because the Dune universe has proven to be one in every of the most important in all of sci-fi.
Can Dune 2 live as much as the primary Dune?
There’s no disputing that director Denis Villaneuve’s first movie was amazing and the second also has flashes of brilliance in turning the words into film. The vision of Fremen riding giant sandworms within the Arrakis desert are so incredibly well done — and visualized in a way that was unexpected for me. It’s such a giant moment to learn that these giant monsters might be marshaled for human purposes.
That’s a giant plus within the second film, but there are a whole lot of pacing issues. In the novel, the primary a part of the book is devoted to learning about Dune, palace intrigue, and the riveting fall of House Atreides. As Paul and Jessica escape into the desert, the pace slows down.
We learn more concerning the characters and Paul’s resistance to the answer at hand. He can defeat the Harkonnens by embracing the Bene Gesserit generations-long manipulations of the Fremen to imagine in a messiah. But if he becomes that messiah, the galaxy will likely be subject to a horrifying jihad that can kill billions. This is a story a couple of reluctant messiah, and while it is just not filled with motion, it’s critical to the story.
As Paul and Jessica undergo their transitions, there are drug-filled sequences (it was written within the Nineteen Sixties, in spite of everything) that make for a series of very weird film moments that is likely to be hard for neophytes to know. But the film handles them well. You just have to simply accept the transition to the slower pace. It’s not only a war movie, and it translates scenes that aren’t very film-like into the screen.
The cruelty of the Harkonnens
The film does a very good job depicting the cruelty and sexual violence of the Harkonnens, the evil great house that does the dirty work of the emperor. Once they retake the planet and check out to crush all resistance, their evil knows no bounds.
As Feyd Rautha, the nephew of the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, Austin Butler can’t really live as much as the star power of Sting from the David Lynch film. But Butler is pretty creepy and the depiction of the grey and Orwellian Harkonnen world is a stark contrast to the liberty and nobility of the Atreides.
To appreciate the goodness of House Atreides and the well-meaning zeal of the Fremen, we’ve to see what the evil is like. But I do wish we had a missing character — Count Fenring, the emperor’s man and husband of the manipulative Bene Gesserit Lady Margot Fenring (Léa Seydoux) — that captured how the Bene Gesserit and House Corrino conspired to control the Harkonnens. I don’t know why Villaneuve used free reign to edit these minor characters — including Thufir Hawat — into such small or non-existent roles. I mean, he knows the super fans would spot these splinterings of the canon.
The Baron himself (Stellan Skarsgård) is a fairly evil version of the villain, but it surely’s a little bit of a downer that Herbert’s solution for the baron’s demise isn’t within the ending.
Dazzling computer graphics
These days, computer-generated computer graphics are at all times amazing. But across each movies, the computer graphics bring Dune to life. The haze of the sky over the desert is great, though town of Arrakeen looks a bit like a toy model sometimes for all of its sameness.
The sandworms are a sight to behold. The book itself has this slight flaw where the Fremen ride sandworms through the world of an atomic blast without getting any radiation sickness. (I like the googly-eyed images of sandworms bearing down on hapless Sardaukar and Harkonnen forces).
The ornithopters are amazing, flying like dragonflies. And the shimmering shields — where shields block fast blows but cannot stop slow parries — are a pleasant touch. Lasers are quite freely utilized in the desert. The movies include the scene where we see the consequence of using lasers against shields, triggering a subatomic explosion.
I feel the Guild spaceships were a bit too big, but they were intimidating. And the motion scenes were very realistic, seemingly lifted out of a desert war reel. The stillsuits were also well done, though after all the actors weren’t covered with face masks on a regular basis. These minor differences between the book and the film are forgivable within the visual medium.
What else is missing?
What’s missing from the film can also be slightly annoying to Dune nerds. The Spacing Guild — one in every of the most important factions which has a monopoly on space travel, enabled by Guild navigators who rely upon the spice to “fold space” and avoid running into stars — is entirely missing.
Instead, Villaneuve creates a bogus reason for why the Harkonnens fail to find the vastness of the Fremen forces within the planet’s Southern Hemisphere. The film suggests that storms stop the Harkonnen aircraft from spotting the Fremen. Instead, within the book, the Fremen bribe the Guild, sending them spice via the smugglers to maintain satellites out of the skies of Arrakis. One of the perfect things about last yr’s Dune: Spice Wars game was that it captured the political intrigue among the many factions.
Sure, it takes time to introduce these recent factions and the characters inside them in a movie that’s going over its time budget. But I could have done with shorter drug-filled scenes. Jessica’s daughter Alia makes her presence often known as she rapidly matures into maturity inside her mother’s womb. But the child-like Alia is nowhere to be present in the ending where she plays a critical part within the book.
It’s within the ending where Villaneuve takes probably the most creative license to alter the canon. Perhaps probably the most touching part has to do with Paul’s loyalty to Chani whilst he needs to rearrange a wedding with the emperor’s daughter to revive the peace. Jessica has an awesome line to Chani, closing the book and repairing a few of the rift between Paul and Chani.
But the ultimate scenes are modified, organising some additional conflict that presumably Villaneuve will use to establish Dune 3. The gravitas of this alteration to the novel’s ending is so big that it looks as if the director will make more changes to the canon because the story picks up with the second novel, Dune Messiah.
Perhaps the ending of Dune 2 was modified to eliminate a few of the sexist elements of the unique ending. I don’t find out about that. But it was jarring to not see a few of the material that has stayed in my mind through multiple readings. The previously mentioned absence of Count Fenring, a politician with divided loyalty, also felt like a void within the movie’s close.
Now the movies are pretty long. Dune was two hours and 17 minutes, and Dune 2 runs two hours and 46 minutes. Given that, I realize that Villaneuve needed to cut things out of the book. The ending is so good that I assumed he had to incorporate it ultimately of Dune 2. But the story has its challenges.
For sure, we’ll should wait to see how good Dune 3 is to make sure. I’m proud to see that something I treasured a lot as a nerdy geek has gotten the big-budget film treatment and risen to the size of mass culture ($433 million at the worldwide box office).
But once I read Dune in junior high, I used to be greatly dissatisfied in Dune Messiah and the third book, Children of Dune, due to the lack of motion in comparison with the primary book. Yet once I re-read the books recently, I understood how those books were so far more about characters.
Perhaps the proper solution to handle this is able to have been through a streaming TV series, with many more episodes that might capture all of the nuances without cutting things out.
Why the Dune universe is so expansive
I haven’t decided whether I’m really annoyed at these canon breaks or not. And it leads me to the query. In this age of (short) video, is it value reading the books if you happen to’ve seen the films? Is it value watching just the TikTok version of the films?
Of course you must read the books. With 29 books and counting, and an original book with its own glossary, Frank Herbert and his son Brian and Kevin J. Anderson were world builders. It is a wealthy transmedia universe, with one piece of art inspiring one other in a special medium.
Herbert’s imagination captured so many themes. Set in a desert world, you would see the politics of oil, jihad, and the Middle East overlaid on a science fiction universe. The film leans into the characters that appear pulled from Middle Eastern societies. Spice is a worthwhile resource, similar to oil.
Herbert drew inspiration from the Oregon Dunes near where he lived, and he understood the ecosystems of deserts and their harsh conditions. He was ahead of his time in studying climate change and believing within the environmental religion.
He mixed together different religious and philosophical ideas (like fusing Zen and Islam), with cult-like groups just like the Bene Gesserit, who believed in genetic manipulation, and the Mentats, who believed AI was such a threat to human existence that turning people into computer-like calculators was the one solution. The figure of Paul and the Kwisatz Haderach drew from the messiahs of our own world.
There are so many political and power dynamics that reflect the relationships of super powers in our own world. The tech planet of Ix jogs my memory of the fears across the Japanese domination of the tech industry. Writing about these factions gave loads of fodder for Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson to hold on the story.
I recently wrote concerning the large language model (LLM) being launched for The Wheel of Time, which has 14 books with 4 million words and an Amazon TV show. The generative AI-based LLM will likely be like a canon encyclopedia for fans of The Wheel of Time. And it would immediately remind writers once they are overstepping the canon as they (or fans) write ancillary stories in The Wheel of Time universe. I feel just like the Dune writers room must have had access to this sort of AI as they considered their canon-breaking script. But I’m sure these were deliberate decisions.
Dune itself would profit from having a dedicated LLM with nothing but Dune material within the AI model. And I imagine that we deserve a Dune video game and a Dune streaming series with multiple seasons along with Villaneuve’s work. (Embracer Group’s Funcom has a Dune: Awakening game coming).
Just just like the Tolkien universe or the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it’s vast and it might contain multitudes. In that sense, I can tolerate the variants of the story in Villaneuve’s film. But I’d encourage you to dive into other interpretations of Frank Herbert’s imagination.
