Dune - The Newbie Review
Zendaya and Chalamet looking regal. Screenshot: Warner Bros. Pictures.
I have not read Frank Herbert’s Dune. I have heard of Dune and its influence on Science Fiction, which feels like an understatement. Many of today’s most popular franchises would not exist without Dune, most notably Star Wars.
And now there is a new Dune adaptation (there have been a few), with Denis Villeneuve at the helm. And it is a visual splendour. This is an epic. David Lean would be proud. It is also unwieldy, fails to explain stuff and ends before it properly gets started. It is a frustrating masterpiece.
Starring Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Jason Momoa, Josh Brolin, and Oscar Issac’s luscious beard as the good guys of House Atreides, Stellan Skarsgård, Dave Bautista and David Dastmalchian as the villainous Harkonnen, and Javier Bardem, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, and Zendaya as Fremen, this cast is stacked.
The movie throws you down the deep end from the get go. It starts with exposition from Zendaya (part of her seven minutes of screen time), and then cuts to members of the house Atreides brooding in their very gloomy estate. Patriarch Leto, played by Oscar Isaac and his glorious beard, is appointed steward of the planet Arrakis by the universe’s emperor from the villainous Harkonnen, a situation he and his team of advisors immediately identify as a trap. The Harkonnen would never give up control of the planet willingly, as Arrakis is the only known source of “spice”, which makes interstellar travel possible.
Son Paul encounters his own challenges: he is haunted by visions of Zendaya, and then tested with excruciating pain by an old Bene Gesserit, a teacher of his mother Jessica, to figure out his humanity. There are mentions of a breeding program, secret influential sisterhoods, mentats, and several other complex words and plots within the first fifteen minutes. Dune is unforgiving.
Here’s Oscar Isaac’s perfect beard to distract you. Screenshot: Warner Bros. Pictures.
Which actually works out pretty well for the most part. The entire production design, as well as the soundtrack, evoke the feeling of a lived-in foreignness. Things look and sound differently than what we are used to from Sci-Fi. Hans Zimmer goes for it hard on the soundtrack, so hard, he even made a soundtrack for the art book (and a sketch book? There’s a lot of Hans Zimmer’s Dune on Spotify). The sound design is superb, from the vibrations of the insect-like versions of helicopters, to the sound of the body shields House Atreides uses and the giant sandworms worming their way through the sand dunes on Arrakis.
The sandworms really embody Dune: enormous, beautiful and slightly incomprehensible. The movie ends before the story really starts and that is after almost three hours of runtime. But it is a stunning three hours. Denis Villeneuve’s movies have always been gorgeous (partly thanks to Roger Deakins in Sicario and Blade Runner 2049 and Greig Fraser here). But the scale of Dune really takes the cake.
It has been a minute since I have seen my last true epic. Doctor Zhivago, in 2015, back when Omar Sharif died. But Dune managed to capture the magic that only epics can leave imprinted in your being. The awe-inspiring scope, the earth-shattering score, the ensemble cast that just keeps getting more stacked the longer you watch. It is a movie worth going to the cinema for. Especially because this is only Part One. There is more Dune on the horizon.
