The Atreides Family Is Dune’s Secret Sauce
Denis Villeneuve gave his sci-fi epic a center that can hold: the Atreides fam
Previews for Dune were all about that drama. Paul (Timothée Chalamet) screaming, his hand in the pain box. Duncan Idaho (Jason Mamoa) just killing it, literally and figuratively, in some outer space metal battle box. Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac) looking resolute and ready for inevitable warfare as a honking spaceship door creaks open on Arrakis. A giant, fat, throbbing, black sandworm looming in unthinking menace over two tiny humans stranded in a vast night desert. Beautiful, ethereal Chani (Zendaya) hovering in wispy white robes across the sand, sun rays haloing all about, whispering Paul’s name.
Who all these people were and how they related to each other were questions for another day. What the first teaser trailer came to sell were intergalactic blockbuster showdowns, and hooo whee, did they look mighty fine.
As an innocent to the Dune scene, I learned next to nil about its storyline from previews alone. But I was intrigued enough by the spectacle, and exhausted enough by self-immersion in America’s perverse daily news deluge, and persuaded enough by my sci-fi enthusiast baby brother — who is, like Villeneuve, a fan of the trilogy — that I put down the doom scrolling and read a real book.
Frank Herbert’s original source material is a masterpiece of creative landscapes, plot, pacing, and analogy on our ecological death wish otherwise known as the oil industry. Not masterful: the god-awful dialogue, the anti-maternal stoicism of Lady Jessica, the spectacularly cheap nihilism. What gets you flying through Dune, the book, is its high-stakes, fast-paced, multi-dimensional plot — political maneuverings a’plenty, set in a universe of vying royal Houses, a shady space traveling business cabal, and some shadowy, off-world Emperor with string-pulling capabilities no one seems to fully understand. Hovering over all the action like a black sand storm is Paul’s ordained “terrible purpose,” whatever that might entail. It’s hard to put down. But a brilliant showcraft of character development, this book is not.
I finished reading Dune in enthusiastic agreement with The Discourse that Denis Villeneuve had chosen for himself many tiers of difficulty in adapting this trilogy. How do you guide an uninitiated audience through the intricate web of connections and backstories linking a (very) large slate of characters with different languages, home worlds, religious practices? How do you visually convey the extensive internal dialogue from Lady Jessica when her Bene Gesserit training doesn’t allow her to show fear or emotion? Do you go big on Herbert’s ecological disaster theme, or do you play up his view that the dark arts of politics are universal and universally end in corruption, oppression, and destruction?
Off I went to the internet in search of answers. Did I learn of director Denis Villeneuve’s devotion to Dune, the book, since his youth in Canada and his absolute dedication to its successful adaption? Check. Did I read up on Greig Fraser‘s cinematography profile and what kinds of visual bliss he’d be bringing to this endeavor? I did. Did I become aware of the manifold talents belonging to a singular Hans Zimmer, music composer extraordinaire? Oh yes.
What’s all this embarrassment of riches doing in one film, you may wonder, as did I, which is what convinced me to take my streaming content-contented butt on the road and actually see this production alight upon a silver screen.
The visuals and score alone… Be still my heart. In conveying the tiny finitude of human characters against the vastness of ancient cities, rolling deserts, outer space, Villeneuve possesses inimitable talents. You looked up at a clear black sky choked full of stars one night in the mountains as a child and felt an awe and a terror, a draw and a revulsion, at the stone cold, pious enormity of this universe, and Villeneuve says: I can show you that feeling with my camera.
There are several scenes of colossal, gorgeous and elliptical spaceships taking off and landing down, and if you’ve seen and/or heard any of these sequences, you know you could enjoy a whole movie of just that. A freakishly massive metal planet of a spaceship pulling up out of a valley lake because why not keep your intergalactic vehicle parked under tons of water? This makes no logical sense, but it is bedazzling cinema sense. The arrival of Duke Leto’s entourage on Arrakis, that long and windy walk the Atreides clan takes from ship to greeting party, hundreds (thousands?) of local citizens standing, excited or agitated, murmuring, pointing from a distance — it is a scene for the ages.
And yet, if you’ve seen Villeneuve’s efforts in Bladerunner 2049, you also know that a tour de force of visual craft and tonal precision does not, in fact, linger long in the ol’ consciousness. You don’t think much about it after the show is over.
Dune is different. And the difference is that Villeneuve, who has spent four decades dreaming of making Dune into a film, saw what was worthy of central placement: the Atreides fam.
Save the opening prologue from Chani explaining the expensive spice melange of Arrakis and the colonial terrors inflicted on her native Fremen people in its pursuit, the full first half of the movie is devoted to Duke Leto, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), their son Paul, and the extended Atreides tribe. We begin on their home planet, Caladan (an Earth-like habitat, if Earth were all Scotland). Lady Jessica and Paul have breakfast together. Paul trains for futuristic knife fighting with Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin), during which we hear that the villainous Harkonnens are supremely brutal, that Paul has to be ready and able to defend himself at all times.
Paul greets Duncan Idaho and asks to go ahead with him to Arrakis, gets turned down, is teased. Paul and his father go strolling through the ancient graveyard of past Atreides kings and have a fortifying heart-to-heart about Paul’s self-doubt, his future path, and the Duke’s great embrace of him, no matter what that path is.
When Reverend Mother Mohiam (Charlotte Rampling) shows up to test Paul (aka possibly murder him), Lady Jessica personally awakens her son, lays out his clothes, has arranged for Dr. Yueh (Chang Chen) to meet them and ensure Paul is fully healthy, in his best possible form to face the harrowing Gom Jabbar trial.
The prevailing emotion throughout is love, though there’s none of the banter-y signposts of familial affection American viewers are used to here. This is a serious bunch, and they’re serious for good reason. But a deep, abiding love for one another comes through in every scene, and for that, you can give Villeneuve full credit.
In Herbert’s Dune, Lady Jessica never outwardly exhibits her maternal side, however much she agonizes about Paul internally. You read her mentally worry over him in countless passages, but no one ever sees this — she is stoic, controlled, self-contained. It’s a kind of strength, and it has its many uses, but such austerity makes for a cold mom.
In Villeneuve’s Dune, as played by Rebecca Ferguson, Lady Jessica’s fierce love for Paul is never in question. She’s hard on him because she is (rightfully) terrified for him, and Ferguson manages to convey this in myriad ways — what looks for all the world like a debilitating panic attack outside the Gom Jabbar testing room, the gentle care taken in how she wakes Paul up, the desperation in her voice when she instructs him to obey the Reverend Mother.
Similarly, Duke Leto is written as a somber man, bordering on harsh. He is ambitious, duty-driven, hard-nosed. But in the hands of Oscar Isaac, the Duke emanates steadfast devotion to Lady Jessica, and especially to Paul. He’s the sort of dad a kid can talk to, someone who accepts and even understands conflicted emotions. As he tells Paul in the cloudy Caladan twilight, even should he reject leadership of the Atreides House, he’ll still “be all I ever needed you to be — my son.”
This is not the Duke I encountered on my first read of the novel Dune; Villeneueve’s version is an unequivocal improvement.
But I’ll confess I’m still not entirely sure how Villeneuve and this blue-ribbon cast manage to establish the deep and ironclad Atreides love and loyalty in such a short space of time. It’s a mystery, I think you might say there’s some magic going on here. Whatever the confluence of responsible factors, what you get in Dune is audience investment. Because these characters so beautifully care for each other, you care about these people too — you care about this story.
It’s what was missing in Bladerunner 2049. The exceptional cast, the involvement of Hans Zimmer, the sci-fi angle, the fusion of ultramodern and ancient, the question mark over your main character’s identity and destiny — it’s all there in the Bladerunner sequel too. Of course, you’re getting Villeneuve working at the peak of his talents with monolithic visual scale as well. And yet… it’s not a world I want to stay in, there’s not a character I care too terribly much about.
The human connection Villeneuve brings to his Dune adaptation is the difference, and it is a profound difference, and give the guy some extra credit because he conjures it up out of a book not much concerned with the emotional stakes for its characters. I’d expect disagreement exists for what I’m about to say, but my take on Herbert is that, as an author, he was most interested in destroying messiah narratives, and not too keen on exploring the human condition.[1]
But it is the human condition from which stories spring. Watch closely, and the cracks in each Atreides character are there — Duke Leto’s pride, Lady Jessica’s excessive secrecy, Paul’s indecision, even Gurney Halleck’s paranoia. These are not perfect people, which is why they feel real, and why you find yourself caring about their fate.
And while it is not only to see if they can overcome, or forgive, or just get past these failings and save each other that we watch — we’re watching and listening because a team of creative visionaries are putting their best efforts forth — it is for these human reasons that Dune stays with you, lingers.
Dune gets the love.
[1] Concern is warranted for what Dune: Part II is going to do to theater-goers who haven’t read the book. Without SPOILER ALERT-ing too much — still, this is a real SPOILER ALERT, take heed — the best cinematic corollary is the Star Wars prequels. Unwittingly, the gift of those films was their infamously poor production quality and abysmal acting. Hayden Christiansen can be quite good on film, but he really wasn’t good at all in the role of Anakin Skywalker, so it didn’t hurt much (at all?) when he went full dark side. Dune will be different.