A gifted-white-royal-offspring-saves-the-world trope has propelled many a novel. In Frank Herbert's Dune, not only our protagonist is a blue-blood, he also turns a blue-eyed superhero. It is a massive series of books, with titles free-styling off such Christian catchphrases as 'messiah', 'god-emperor', or 'heretics'. With Herbert's novels, we know the slippery ideological ground we stand on from its title. As most religion-inspired works go, Dune is a quicksand of intrigue, betrayed loyalties, familial trauma, heroism, and the saviour complex. Mixing the Jesus syndrome with Islam and Zen Buddhism in a science-fiction setting makes perfect sense, as, for me, all of the religious source material belongs to the fantasy genre.
Dune, the 2021 film, is an utterly joyless affair. The story would probably make sense to someone familiar with the book. I don't envy a novice to the Herbert arena, as the nomenclature alone, delivered in mutually exclusive accents by an international cast, is rendered instantly confusing, and it stays so for the duration. But let's not dwell on the story. Suffice to say, the film opens with a helpful warning: Part One. This is a standard film argot shorthand for a meandering story with no conclusion.
The royal court setting is rendered in broad Leni Riefenstahl strokes – monumentally geometric and rigorously somber. That visual tone remains for the duration, regardless of the subsequent locations. The picture is drained off all colour, leaving the audience to explore various shades of dirt brown. It seems the House of Atreides prefers its interior design to mirror the monochrome of the desert. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but when haute couture of the royal court is equally bland, you get beige on beige, and soon you don't know if you're looking at a character or a curtain. The costume designer must have been banished into the Fremen territory, as all the local desert folk sport exactly the same cuts and colour as the noble Atreides. It is all so very drab no wonder their eyes turn blue. By his own royal order, director Villeneuve decreed that all cinematography must be deprived of contrast, rendering the picture flat – consistently and relentlessly muddy.
For a film that relies on a constant chase as the propellant, the editing remains curiously lethargic. Conversations, duels, last-minute rescues, and family squabbles are all treated with the same tempo, rhythmically going nowhere. If you were to plug Dune into an EKG monitor, the flatline would not waver much.
Hans Zimmer's music doesn't exactly liven things up. The veteran composer's idea to sound modern is to resort do two-tone droning, then proceed to layer that hum over the entire film. No matter what emotion a scene is trying to explore, Zimmer underscores it with a gruuuuummmmm-doooooommmm. In his defence, when the mood strikes him, the composer offers a much more fesitve doooooommmm-gruuuuummmmm.
Villeneuve directs without any sense of drama or suspense, invariably lingering too long on every scene. He likes his shots to look compositionally perfect, which he manages for the most part. But that visual balance makes everything human-related sterile. There is a gothic feel to his method, as if Villeneuve invited us to a medieval cathedral to watch his actors pose as statues supporting the walls.
Our heroic Paul Atreides, as played by Timothée Chalamet, is not exactly athletic, so a few lines of dialogue were offered to mock his physical frailty. Yet, soon enough, he performs magnificent feats and effortlessly defeats a veteran warrior while his line of sight is covered with locks of sexy black hair. Chalamet delivers his lines without moving his jaw and through clenched teeth, so his fashionable teenage vocal fray is barely intelligible. His mommy, played by Rebecca Ferguson, is even more difficult to understand. A non-native speaker, Fergusson slurs and speeds up her English dialogue at the same time, so I could only infer her intentions through the means of deduction. I got an impression that in the sound mix Villeneuve added some strange filtering to the voices, as if to foil my dialogue sleuthing. I even pondered if something went wrong with my dependable 5.1 Dolby/DTS sound system, but then Charlotte Rampling opened her mouth and it sounded like heaven - all clear and perfectly crisp. So, it wasn't the speakers. Curiously, when Chalamet put his desert mask on in the last act, his diction instantly improved.
Before our hero gets his call to adventure, the plot must deal with his father. As played by Oscar Isaac, Atreides Sr felt like Llewyn Davis has finally matured, both emotionally and physically, and faced real-life responsibilities. I like Oscar a lot, and he does a good job here, and comes off rather unscathed.
It took me a moment to understand what Aquaman was doing on a desert planet. But then the dunes started to undulate like sea waves, crashing into the rocks. It made perfect sense, then, to cast Jason Momoa as a loyal sword-master in the House of Atreides. A likeable presence, Momoa looks and acts exactly the same as his aquatic superhero, hence my initial confusion.
I didn't exactly see Brando's Colonel Kurtz coming, though. Preposterously obese and bald, as all really evil and powerful men are, Kurtz is now a Finnish overlord Harkonnen, played by a Swede. I found it sad that, will all this obvious set-up, Villeneuve was still incapable of finding humour and irony in the fact that a human blimp can levitate. The grim Canadian is no David Lynch.
Imagine my surprise to discover not only Brando in the cast of Dune, but also Anthony Quinn. The impression delivered by Javier Bardem was uncanny: his desert leader wondered straight off the Lawrence of Arabia set. Except he spoke with a Spanish accent.
The 2021 version of Dune, for better or for worse, looks and feels like a never-ending bonus episode of Mandalorian. Which is peculiar, because George Lucas had borrowed enough from Herbert's Dune to make his initial Star Wars saga. Perhaps it is some sort of poetically just circle of irony – or a meta approach which defeats my ability to fully comprehend the purpose of it all.
I will regret saying this, but Villeneuve's Dune makes the original Star Wars feel like Citizen Kane.
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