I am going to review the new Dune movie. It’s just going to take me a while to get there. So hold your horses.
Dune was the first book I tried to get my girlfriend to read. She did not like it. Which, honestly, fair enough. First published in 1965, it is decidedly not a work of modern science-fiction. Most copies include at least one hundred-page plus glossary of terms and characters. The book itself is about 200,000 words long, making for a bit of a hefty read. The plot doesn’t really get going for a while. A lot of the dialogue reads as stilted. There’s a bunch of people with names like Stilgar, the Shadout Mapes, and also Paul. A lot of barriers to entry for the casual reader. Despite these barriers, it’s still a banger. It’s hung around, staying in print since 1965 for a reason.
Dune is a bit of an oddity, at least in this day and age, in that there are over a dozen prequels, and sequels, and yet the first one is really the only one anyone has read, outside of maybe the direct sequel Dune Messiah. Several reasons exist for this. Namely, the sequels that Herbert wrote start to get weird, especially by the third one God Emperor of Dune. Herbert really leans into some wild gender politics stuff, and the series gets increasingly hallucinatory. The books are about space acid, so fair enough. The prequels, co-written by his son Brian Herbert and novelist Kevin J. Anderson, who also wrote a lot of Star Wars novels, fill in bits of the backstory that didn’t really need to be filled in, and substitute much of the thoughtful reflections on imperialism and environmentalism in the original for space fights and bog-standard space opera stuff. They’re fine, but nothing amazing. Sort of like the late-era prequels to Ender’s Game.
With all that said, I’m somewhat surprised that it’s taken this long for someone to try to make the next Marvel-style “cinematic universe” out of Dune. There is a huge back log of material, and even more un-explicated “Lore,” ripe for movies and TV shows. There are signs that it has begun however, Warner Brothers, prior to the release of the new movie, already greenlit a TV prequel series based around the Bene Gesserit, one of the groups in the book. The success of the movie’s opening weekend seems to open that door even wider. While I doubt that Dune will be as successful as Marvel, it looks like they’re going to try.
Perhaps the hesitancy of creating a Dune cinematic universe comes the past attempts at filming Dune. There have been, prior to the one currently in theaters, two filmed versions of Dune, one a tv miniseries, and the other a regular movie by David Lynch. Both are largely considered artistic failures, as well as ratings failures, though there remain fans of each. There is also another legendary non-filmed version of Dune, dreamed by up Alejandro Jodorowsky. Jodorowsky spent about two million dollars putting together an almost shot for shot guide to what he wanted his Dune to look like. It never got made due to a lack of financial backing, but the drawings, and ideas he came up with, were scavenged for various movies, including Star Wars. There had been many failures before, and the budget required to put together a movie that lives up to the book’s ambitions wasn’t always there.
I guess all this to say that the book series is highly eccentric, and I am glad that the movie kept some of that weirdness. One of the problems with the Marvelification of genre movies/TV is that they lose their distinctiveness, they get smoothed out. Marvel movies are meant to connect with the broadest possible audience. That’s why they all basically, even the “weird” ones, look and sound the same. The quips come up at obvious points and all follow the same structure. The action scenes all look similar, the plots match up with each other, and the everything starts to blend into each other. “Weird” things, or other genre staples are often hinted at, or played with for a few minutes of screen time, but are then shoved to the side to get to the more palatable fare. While this has obviously been successful for Marvel, they’ve made billions of dollars off these movies, it does start to get stale.
Dune does a pretty good job of allowing itself to be weird. While it doesn’t go full LSD trip with the movie, this might have been a hard sell to Warner Brothers, that spirit remains in small but meaningful ways. Baron Harkonnen, and the Harkonnen family in general receive most of that weirdness in the movie. The scenes with the Harkonnens, the ostensible bad guys of the movie, are some of the most visually stunning, and hallucinatory of the movie. The scene with the Baron rising from his tank of black goo in particular being one of the coolest shots of the whole movie. For Dune to not just become another Marvel copycat, these movies need to keep that sense of oddness, and visual experimentation. Stripping it of that would make this movie next to worthless.
The Dune movie is not without its faults. It is just the first part of a planned two-part movie, so I won’t totally judge it, but it should be able to stand on its own, which it mostly does. Dune doesn’t quite capture the galaxy wide scale of civilization. The book takes place across multiple planets, flung-far and wide across the universe. While this movie does take you to multiple planets, it doesn’t do a great job of showing that scale. It also does away with most of the palace intrigue that takes up the first half of the book, in favor of getting right to the action. Which fair enough, people want to see some fights, but tense negotiations between individuals are always great in my opinion. Finally, there’s not enough spice in this damn movie. It’s supposed to be like the only thing anyone cares about, and we see it once, maybe twice. Gotta give me some shots of the spice!
So there’s my review. I recommend going to see it, as well as reading the book(s). If you can, see it in the theater. It’s cool as hell.