Dune

 Denis Villeneuve's Dune (2021) is disappointing in all respects.  As advertised, the film is visually grandiose but, with some exceptions, pictorially inert.  The huge landscapes, of course, are mostly desert and, therefore, the picture seems designed in shades of light brown, beige, and grey.  Indeed, the movie is mostly monochromatic and would probably look better in black and white.  Heavy reliance on special effects imparts to the film a stilted, claustrophobic feeling -- the picture is edited in a very sedate, even, conservative manner.  Villeneuve wants you to admire his huge sets and sepulchral chambers and throne rooms and so the film loiters a bit on some of its most expansive locations.  The movie's sensibility is Fascist -- the big scenes involving hordes of soldiers kneeling before their lords look like grey-brown out-takes from Triumph of the Will.  This is the sort of movie in which people don't walk from here to there -- rather, they "process" or parade across the set, big phalanxes of marching men that form ornamental patterns similar to what Fritz Lang accomplished in Metropolis or his two-part Nibelungenlied  epic.  The landscapes are imposing but the stony battleship-shaped islands in the rain --off Scotland, I suppose -- look better in the recent Star Wars films and the huge deserts locations with eroded heaps of rock rising from enormouis drifts of sand are seen to better advantage in David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia or George Miller's Mad Max:  Fury Road.  The acting is wooden and completely dull.  But, of course, this is a result of the awful script -- it's full of cliches and stilted aphorisms and none of the dialogue is even remotely plausible.  Furthermore, the people speak in a weird mixture of feudal locutions, faux Arabic, and gratingly modern slang.  Although the characters mostly have weird euphonious names that sound vaguely Muslim, one of the guys in the movie is called Duncan Idaho and a warrior played by Josh Brolin acts like he just stepped out of TV cop show.  The principal villain, Baron Harkonnen is cribbed in whole from Marlon Brando's bizarre turn as Captain Kurz in Apocalypse Now.  Bathed in Rembrandt-lighting, the huge bald man caresses his vast orb of a skull, exactly mimicking Brando even down to his strange half whispered lisp with which he delivers his fortune-cookie lines.  At one point, Harkonnen surfaces from a pool of what looks like motor-oil in which he is recuperating from from being killed earlier in the movie -- when he emerges from the murky fluid, he is lit exactly like Martin Sheen popping up out of the jungle swamp waters to assassinate Kurz in the Vietnam picture.  When a bunch of flying craft with scissor-shaped wings travel in formation over the desert, the shots are designed to imitate the helicopter sequences in Apocalypse Now -- all that is missing is a performance of "Ride of the Valkyries" on the sound track.  (The Hans Zimmer score is bombastic, deafening, and dull -- it just repeats the same flourishes over and over again.)  There are many effective shots in the movie and the pictorial highlight of Dune is a big battle in the monochrome capital city on the desert planet Arrakis -- the place is full of vast ziggurats and pyramids shaped like those at Teotihuacan in Mexico (in fact, the urban planning in the place looks to be 10th century AD Mexican). Accomplished actors in the film like Charlotte Rampling and Xavier Bardem just look silly.  

The film's plot is very simple.  Despite claims by some reviewers that the picture is hard to understand, in fact, Dune has a lucid narrative that is classically formed.  The first forty minutes or so of the movie are devoted to exposition.  The picture sets up the situation:  the House of Atreides has been granted the concession to harvest the hallucinogen "spice" from the desert planet of Arrakis.  The concession was earlier operated by the Harkonnens who are bad guys, villains of the worst sort.  The Harkonnens have been mining the spice needed to dope up the Space Guild Navigators, a group of freakish mutants who drive the interstellar crafts of the "Imperium", the name for the confederacy of worlds; the navigators pilot their craft in some sort of drug-induced and visionary stupor.  The nasty Harkonnens, who march around like Nazis, have been mercilessly exploiting the local Fremen, a group of desert-dwellers who look like Bedouins and wear bluish burnooses equipped with tubes that they run up their noses for some unknown reason.  (No doubt, Frank Herbert, the author of Dune described their physiology and use of the tube in great detail in one of the appendices to his series of novels.).  A group of witches has something to do with the good guys at the House of Atreides, the dynasty that has been granted the spice concession by the Imperium when the wicked Harkonnens were expelled from the planet.  The witches, called the Beni Jesseret (or something on that order) are a group of weird women who look like nuns.  But one of them member is the concubine to Lord Atreides and the mother of Paul.  Paul, played by the tiny and effete Timothee Chalamet (even the actor's name is twee) has certain characteristics that suggest that he is the long-awaited Messiah, the Mahdi to use the word from the movie Khartoum tthat turns up in this film, worshipped by the mercilessly exploited Fremen.  The Beni Jesseret have a special voice that they can use to hypnotize enemies and make them do their bidding, but, mysteriously, they refrain from using the voice most of the time, just allowing the pointless mayhem to continue around them when a single uncanny and resonant "Stop!" would suffice to end all the fighting.  (One shudders to think what would happen if one of these peculiar nuns shouted to their enemies:  "Why don't you just fuck yourselves!")  No doubt, Frank Herbert wrote an appendix in one of his novels explaining the peculiar reluctance of these weird women to use their magical command voice.  This is one of those super-powers that if exercised too frequently would render the plot's various perils superfluous and nugatory.  All of this and lot more is set up in the first 45 minutes and handled fairly efficiently.  

No sooner are the Atreides ensconced in Arrakis, then, the evil Harkonnen launch a sneak attack to destroy their rivals.  This sneak attack is splendidly visualized with seas of fire falling from the skies and shadowy figure hurtling through besieged corridors.  All of the House of Atreides are slaughtered except for the effeminate Paul and his mother, as well as a couple of brave retainers.  (Although the story takes place 10,219 or something with anti-gravity space ships hovering everywhere and massive steam-punk technology used to extract the spice from the desert, people run around swords and fight elaborate duels hand-to-hand with edged weapons.)  After the battle, the film is nothing more than an elaborate chase with the good guys struggling to escape the vicious Harkonnens and the barbarous Fremen watching from the sidelines.  By the end of the film, Paul and his mother have established their credibility as leaders with the insurgent Fremen and the hero announces "This is the beginning" whereupon the film (part 1 of a two-part saga), simply goes black.  

As this plot summary shows, the movie is an amalgam of a Western recast as a primitive space opera and a reprise of T. E. Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the source material for Lawrence of Arabia which Dune resembles, although much to its detriment.  Specifically, we see the good White folks fleeing vicious outlaws across dangerous terrain full of wild animals (here desert sand worms that are as long as freight trains) and even wilder Apaches -- in this case, the noble if savage Fremen. (The nomadic Fremen are led by Xavier Bardem playing a thankless role that would have been relegated to Anthony Quinn in the "Golden Days" of Hollywood.) Similarly, the dynastic set up, a duel between two empires is redolent of the setting of the First World War in Lawrence of Arabia with the hero leading a desert uprising against the cruel Ottoman Turks, here the Harkonnen.  The movie is strangely indifferent to its own racist premise:  a White Messiah or Savior will come to the brown peoples and lead them to victory against their oppressors.  The trope of the White savior come to assist the primitive colored folks is intrinsic to the story and can't be ignored.  (This theme is integral to Lawrence of Arabia as well but, because based on Lawrence's own anguished and hallucinatory account, treated with much more nuance and subtlety in David Lean's film version of this story.)  The movie seems strangely faithful to Herbert's novel, a book that I've tried to read several times and abandoned because it is so poorly written and so infested with the most primitive of space opera motifs.  For instance, in one scene, Baron Atreides says that he should marry Paul's mother -- of course, we thought the couple was man and wife.  And, later, someone disdainfully remarks that the Baron's concubine is dead, killed in the big battle in the Babylonian-Mexican capitol city.  This detail is simply pointless but shows that the scenarists thought that they should cleave close to Herbert's book.  

The movie is fairly dull.  The worms are not impressively depicted.  (They seem to have mouths full of Blue Whale baleen with which they sift the sand for nutrients. Where they get the water to sustain their vast and horny bodies is unclear to me -- possibly there are aquifers deep under the dunes from which the sip drinks from time to time.)  I will end with faint praise.  Despite my cavils, the picture is sufficiently interesting that I expect I will pony up admission to see Part II.  I suppose the picture is superior to David Lynch's spooky chaotic version -- but there's nothing in  this new version as memorable as Lynch's spice-doped space navigators, hideous mutants bobbing around like enormous guppies in some kind of stew.    

(I saw the film in Rochester, Minnesota on the largest screen available, an IMAX projection system.  In fact, that screen isn't all that huge.  It reminds me of the screens in old-style movie palaces such as those in downtown Minneapolis around 1966.  Hopkins, in 1965 may have had a larger screen. The image is projected or shown in a golden section rectangle and, certainly, doesn't wrap around the viewer.  At the theater in Rochester, for the noon showing, the theater was pitch-black -- no one thought to turn on the lights.  And so we entered and had to grope around in the darkness for our assigned seats (a new and nasty innovation in movie-going) in inky gloom.  This was extremely hazardous.  Then, at noon, the theater began the presentation with a series of deafeningly loud coming attractions, a series of five big "event' movies featuring comic book heroes -- these are the sort of movies that you couldn't pay me to attend, utter garbage.  But, for some peculiar reason, the thunderous coming attractions were played without any picture whatsoever, just noise and a black screen.  Finally, during the last coming attraction, the screen lit up with explosions and super-heroes being flung pointlessly through the air.  But at that moment, all of the house lights came on and the pictures faded away in the glare.  Then, Dune proper began but with the house-lights still lit and, therefore, diluting the images on screen.  Someone complained at this point.  So what was the response?  The theater shut off the lights and began to project again the whole horrible series of coming attractions trailers -- this was, I must note, sheer torture.  After Covid, I attended a movie that was projected wrong so that all of the action took place in supernal (this was The Green Knight).  Then, there was a whole series of mistakes made at the theater in Rochester where I had come to see Dune.  It makes me despair of leaving my house to see a movie -- at least at home, I don't have to risk breaking an ankle in utter darkness, can avoid punishingly loud and stupid coming attractions and see a movie shown at approximately the level of brightness that the film maker contrived for his or her work.  No humans are involved any more in projecting or screening movies and the result is that it's painful to attend a movie in the theater.  Dune, a long movie (two hours and 35 minutes) didn't start properly for more than 45 minutes after it was scheduled to begin.)