Beautiful and Epic ‘Dune’ Has All It Needs, Except a Hero
You have to delve pretty deep into the cast of Denis Villeneuve’s gorgeous epic Dune before coming across a mediocrity. It’s the kind of movie that feels confident enough to bring in Charlotte Rampling for a couple scenes and trust that she can deliver the goods from behind a dark veil (she does) or let Stellan Skarsgard deliver an interstellar version of Brando’s Kurtz and have faith that it won’t be ridiculous (it’s not). Why then does the movie put the whole enterprise in the hands of Timothée Chalamet, a likeable enough actor but not exactly one who seems likely to inspire legions of desert warriors to overthrow a galactic empire? This a question whose only likely answer is that every now and again the movie industry decides one performer can be cast in anything. Right now, that performer is Chalamet.
In Villeneuve’s take on Frank Herbert’s epochal 1965 science-fiction novel, which is set many thousands of years in the future when the known galaxy is ruled by an emperor and a host of squabbling royal families, Chalamet plays the hero, Paul Atreides. The intense but untested only son of Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac) and his concubine Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), Paul is pitched into the crucible after the Atreides family is ordered by the emperor to move from their home planet Caladan to the desert planet Arrakis where they are ambushed by the rival Harkonnens. Paul’s arc requires him to go from entitled palace-dwelling royal scion to battle-tested quasi-Jedi. Though Villeneuve has otherwise delivered a sumptuous visual feast redolent with high drama and breathtaking scenery, this is not a convincing transition for Paul.
Chalamet never gives too much away as an actor. This is an odd maneuver, given that many of his roles (Call Me By Your Name, especially) are written as young men wracked with emotion. The energy he brings to Dune is somewhat dazed, toggling between passive and petulant much like the uncertain Prince Hal who Chalamet played in David Michod’s The King. This is an understandable take for a character wracked with terrifying dreams and overcoming one life-threatening crisis after another, but not the sort of personality likely to inspire followers to hurl themselves into battle.
Herbert’s Paul is one of science fiction’s original Chosen One characters. Like later iterations from Luke to Neo who the character inspired, Paul is a quasi-Christ figure who combines unmatched warrior skill with a certain mystifying Zen insight that sets him apart from and ultimately above the humans who surround him. Herbert wrote much of Dune from Paul’s perspective. This put readers inside his spinning head as he juggles violent prophetic nightmares with the baffling royal intrigue which even his critical thinking and mind control education by Jessica (part of the all-female Jedi-like Bene Gesserit order) and combat training by Atreides weapons master Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin) cannot prepare him to master. In Villeneuve’s version, Paul’s internal struggle registers mostly as a taut tension in Chalamet’s face.
This blind spot is unfortunate, because in most every other way, Villeneuve has done commendable service to Herbert’s novel. Having already shown an eye for epic futuristic vistas in Blade Runner 2049, he expands his palette with Dune to include brighter tones, an elegant design scheme marrying ancient traditions with technology thousands of years more advanced, and a sense of aristocratic ceremonial grandeur that actually enlivens rather than deadens the drama. The result is visually stunning and frequently beautiful, the blues and greens of watery Caladan contrasted with the burnt tans of Arrakis, the interior spaces vast and dusky.
In some ways, it’s a far more straightforward take than David Lynch’s wonky, weird, and frequently grotesque 1984 steampunk vision and the acid hallucination that would have been Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unrealized version (the one meant to star Mick Jagger, Orson Welles, and Salvador Dali; soundtrack by Pink Floyd). Even the story’s more outré elements — like the massive and deadly sandworms that both generate the lucrative “spice” drug that makes Arrakis so valuable and make the desert-covered planet even more dangerous than its lack of water and metal-shredding sandstorms already do—are portrayed with a cool precision that does credit to Herbert’s science-based writing.
For the movie’s first half, Villeneuve manages the impressive trick of covering a vast array of background exposition while still moving the story along at a pulse-quickening pace. He paints the pictures that were missing from the novel, which was more engaged with Paul’s inner struggle and deadly palace intrigues than describing things like city-sized transport ships and the helicopter-like ornithopters, whose buzzing wings give them the appearance of large metal hummingbirds. Resisting the urge of modern blockbusters to thud and thump the audience into submission, several key moments are played with an eerie quiet — a couple scenes where Imperial stormtroopers called the Sardauker float into battle with a dark grace are all the more effective for being completely silent.
Most of the secondary characters are vividly represented, particularly loyal Atreides courtiers like Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa, deftly balancing charm and menace) and Thufir Hawat (Stephen McKinley Henderson). Their presence is sorely missed in the later stretch when Paul and Jessica flee to the desert and try to ally themselves with the Fremen, Arrakis’s indigenous Bedouin-like desert dwellers and the family Atreides’ best bet for getting back at the Baron Harkonnen (Skarsgard, reveling in the character’s gluttonous villainy).
The movie’s later sections feel truncated and not as rich. Villeneuve and his co-screenwriters Jon Spaights and Eric Roth wisely didn’t try to cover the entire novel. Instead, they called this iteration “Part One” and stopped a couple hundred pages shy of Herbert’s conclusion, when Paul has yet to convert the Fremen to his cause and unleash them like Lawrence of Arabia in a planet-spanning war of liberation. (The colonialist manipulations inherent in Paul’s rise to power in the Fremen community are only hinted at here and will likely be more explicit in a follow-up movie.) While that decision gives the story room to breathe, ending things at the moment it does also makes the movie feel like a prologue rather than a self-contained story. This is a common-enough occurrence at a time when movies are less self-contained works of art than nodes in a never-ending stream of sequels and remakes and offshoots but slightly disappointing nonetheless.
Given that, it would be putting too much criticism on Chalamet to blame him (and a similarly spark-free Ferguson) for the movie’s somewhat deflating finish. Ultimately, Paul is just not a terribly fascinating hero — perhaps Lynch was onto something when he cast the flatter-than-flat Kyle MacLachlan in the role. Coming from exalted rather than humble origins, Paul is not so much dauntless as he is anointed, which is generally not a good look in a hero.
Title: Dune
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Writers: Jon Spaights, Denis Villeneuve, Eric Roth
Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Jason Momoa, Stellan Skarsgard, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Chen Chang, David Bautista, David Dastmalchian, Zendaya, Charlotte Rampling
Studio: Warner Bros.
Rating: PG-13
Year: 2021
