Here, Villeneuve relies on sound design to highlight the weird and offsetting manipulation of Chalamet’s words, but he also shoots the moment as a series of flashing images where time seems to be displaced. Paul’s mother, Rebecca Ferguson’s Lady Jessica, is a member of this order, and early on we see her tutoring Paul in the strange ability to mentally coerce others via a modulation of one’s voice. Take the Bene Gesserit – sort of space witches with extra-human mental powers, if you will. Perhaps the tutorial that comes later about stillsuits – the life-saving, water-conserving garb of the Fremen – will be fascinating to the uninitiated, but those who are familiar with the source material may find that these moments gum up the works of Dune, like the sand of Arrakis that plays havoc with the Spice machinery.Īnd yet, Villeneuve frequently impresses with his ability to take tried and true sci-fi concepts and put some new spin on them. This sequence is a triumph over the exposition that continuously threatens to bring any adaptation of Dune down, but unfortunately, the filmmakers don’t always succeed on this same front moving forward. The film opens with Zendaya’s voiceover explaining how beautiful her home planet is, and succinctly summing up the violent history of Arrakis, caught as it is in the middle of bigger galactic concerns due to its natural abundance of the Spice. Again, it says Part One in the title, so be patient.
This is Zendaya’s character Chani, who some viewers may be distressed to learn is barely in this movie beyond said dreams. Meanwhile, Chalamet’s Paul – as dreamy, misunderstood, and tortured as you could want the heartthrob to be here, and I mean that as a compliment – is having prophetic dreams of a mysterious girl, one of Arrakis’s native people known as the Fremen. What awaits them on the planet also known as Dune? An uncertain future to be sure, but the Duke has a plan: Harness “desert power.” And so the whole family packs up and moves house, including the Duke’s military advisors (and Paul’s tutors) Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa), Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin), and what appears to be every soldier and house servant who works for the Atreides. Paul’s father, Duke Leto Atreides (a heavy-with-responsibility Oscar Isaac), is sent by the Emperor to the desert planet Arrakis to take over production of the Spice. Timothée Chalamet stars as Paul Atreides, scion of the powerful House Atreides in a far-off future where a substance known as the Spice is the most valuable commodity in the known universe. Heresy, yells the Frank Herbert fan! But we all know that what works in a novel might not work in movie form, and vice versa, and Villeneuve’s biggest misstep with Dune, Part One is how misshapen and plodding it feels in its second half, as if the movie doesn’t quite know how or where to end… before it just suddenly does.
The result of this split is not just a license to let many of the book’s smaller moments or supporting characters breathe more, but also to perhaps be too devoted to Herbert’s work. The director, his co-writers Jon Spaihts and Eric Roth, and producer Legendary Pictures made the seemingly sound decision to divide the sprawling novel into two separate films, so in fact the onscreen title to this installment is actually Dune, Part One.
For all its amazing imagery and A-list stars and very cool interpretations of the nerdier aspects of Herbert’s book, this version of Dune doesn’t fully coalesce.
Could Villeneuve, who had pulled off the seemingly impossible with his fantastic sequel to Blade Runner, finally do justice to the tale of Paul Atreides? Unfortunately, the answer is… not quite. But those takes didn’t quite manage to translate the more epic and spiritual qualities of Herbert’s work. Once thought unfilmable – just ask Jodorowsky – it was finally adapted by David Lynch into a famously off-kilter film in 1984, and then a Sci-Fi Channel miniseries version also got some traction in 2000. When Denis Villeneuve signed on to direct a 21st century version of Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel Dune, he was no doubt aware of the book’s long and often tortured history in Hollywood.