Dune is Fun, but Man is it Fucking Stupid
Another Letterboxd export, enjoy paragraphs and paragraphs of rambling about Dune! Why did I watch Dune? I typically skip big blockbuster movies and Hollywood in general, as I get into at the end of the Dune 2 review. I find myself just exhausted and uninterested in the current cultural moment, and just as crops need fertile soil to grow, I feel that if art is to be nourishing to me at all it has to come from some sort of rejuvenating cultural context. But, one of my close friends is really into Dune, and without getting much more into it... I figured I'd give it a shot. It helps that I really enjoyed Incendies by Denis Villeneuve, and I'm not opposed to grand fantasy epics at all (I think Star Wars, well the original ones, are great!) and after all, everyone's always talking about Dune like it's this inimitable classic. I've heard "fear is the mind-killer" and all that hundreds of times... which maybe mistakenly gave me the assumption that this story is a lot deeper than it is. At the risk of sounding like a snob, I think sci-fi and fantasy readers can have a bit of a low bar, and I typically find myself wanting more to sink my teeth into than those books want to provide... but I'm sure many people feel the same way about anime, whose particularities and cliches I love. How I feel about Dune is no doubt how many people feel about One Piece or something.
Regardless, any time I can break myself out of my habits and routine I'll take that chance, and I've not been watching movies for half a year (and not been watching movies in English, that is to say, with no language learning motivation at all, for longer than that -- the last one I watched was The Substance). Breaking habits means more opportunities means breaking more habits... so I tried something new, and didn't get as much out of it as I hoped, but at least I tried. And I did learn something -- I think I'm probably done with blockbusters, lol.
Dune
Was going to split it in two, but I ended up finishing the entire movie in one day and I'm not sleepy yet so let me fire something off right now.
The fact that I breezed through a two hour movie like this isn't nothing. It's consistently engaging and genuinely well-made. The world has tons of cool touches and bits of iconography. I'll get back to that in a second...
But man, this is the movie everyone's been hyping up for four years? This is ultimately, beyond its admirable execution, fundamentally Disney Star Wars with a slightly different flavor. Am I missing something? I hate to be the pretentious asshole here, but maybe I've just become too much of a snob to get into something like this.
The dialogue is absolutely atrocious, and the movie feels like it's mostly dialogue (of course, it's not; everything is given just enough time to breathe, which is why it's not exhausting). In a scene in the beginning, Oscar Isaac (Isaac Oscar? the fuck is his name?) confesses to young Paul in an Uncle Ben moment that originally, he wanted to be a pilot. Young Paul smiles and responds, "you never told me that." I realize I'm coming off like a total asshole here, but there was really no need for Paul to say anything. He could have just smiled. But maybe it's the classic scifi bookstopper in this, maybe it's the Hollywood screenwriters, whatever it is it's bent on stripping out all the subtlety and being just a hair more didactic than it needs to be. But maybe that was for the best? The space that the dialogue is supposed to leave for the acting is missing, but the acting was maybe never up for the task. I began to see, maybe, the hints of the precocious young Paul Atreides towards the end, but that's about it. The rest of the performances were just irritating. A small thing that bothered me is the fact that there's no fake Transatlantic accent or anything to lend gravitas to the dialogue. At least make them fake British or something, pull a Peter Jackson! Everyone here just talks like an American, and Timmy particularly mumbles about as much as he did in Call Me By Your Name. Hearing everyone say "Arrakis" borderline triggers my dysphonia. Maybe they were trying to sell some kind of realism? But it totally fails, since the kind of stilted dialogue they're saying is stuff like "You are not ready. But I will teach you the ways of the desert..." and "The mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience." Lol. Lmao. It's the absolute worst kind of corny sci-fi dialogue that sometimes works but mostly doesn't. But even that slips every once in a while! At some point, Paul mumbles to his mom: "you good?" lol DECIDE what tone you are going for, man. I know Denis is French-Canadian but you're not a different fucking species come on figure it out.
Anyway, enough complaining. I loved the production in general. I don't think the images get to really speak for themselves as much as I'd like but the world looks great. Geometric metal lattices and other bits of Arabic design, the fantasy influences in the futuristic setting, everything is pretty cool even if, well, I don't think it comes together as well as Star Wars. Is Dune older than Star Wars? It probably is, holy shit. No wonder. But Villeneuve is no George Lucas, I have to say. Still, though I'm not a "worldbuilding geek" like that, I thought it was really cool. The worms were awesome, the special sand walk, the steel suits and the threatening Baron. Everything works on the level of iconography and I can understand why this movie caught on the way it did.
The beats of the story were neat as well. There's a bit of a power fantasy element going on. Poor Paul, a great destiny thrust upon him. The scene of the siege on the House of Atreides is really thrilling and compelling. But he won't shrink from his destiny! His path forward is in the desert. I can understand the grand scale of the whole thing, I just think the cringe dialogue undersells it is all.
I feel like there should have been a bit more here, in terms of making the images and the story speak with one another, and maybe there will be. What does it mean that Paul is part of a long line of matriarchs? He does sell it sometimes, early on in the movie when he is wan and frail and beautiful. What does it mean that the worms are attracted to rhythm? How can you live a life with no rhythm? There's so many cool things to explore in the theme of the desert and water, and how it influences their customs like spitting on the ground as a greeting.
Anyway, I don't mean to be a hater, I really don't. I guess I was just wrongly expecting this to be Art, and it's not. It's just a really good blockbuster movie. I can't hate that much. And I mean better this than Marvel. Onto part two...
Dune Two
This one won me over much more than the first! I was glued to my seat for the entire final battle, which was maybe over an hour long? And I'm not even a war movie kind of guy, it was just absolutely thrilling.
I want to say more nice things about this movie, but I'll start with some more nasty things, sorry. The acting and dialogue continues to be, for the most part, absolutely atrocious in this one, and I never ended up getting over it. I think the fact that there's far less dialogue in this one compared to Part One is a huge improvement, and that's about all I can say on that front.
It dawned on me that the casting really missed the mark. I really, really don't want to be the kind of guy that slags the only black woman in the movie, but I have to say it. Zendaya is pretty terrible in this movie. What's not her fault is that her character is reduced to scowling and sulking for nearly two hours with barely anything to do. She's also got the voice and presence of someone who feels way too young and way too ordinary to be the kind of fierce fighter she's meant to be. It felt very "high school play", honestly. Her chemistry with Paul, I guess, works about as well as any other relationship in these damn movies, but I can't say it was convincing. It's not just her though, I think the fact that the movie had to go for the celebrity casting was to its detriment. Turns out, the emperor is just Christopher Walken, talking and acting like Christopher Walken. Not really a character, per se. Almost more of a cameo, despite his massive importance to the story.
It's not all bad news, though. I think Timmy does manage to sell his speech in the cave, his Lisan al-Gaib moment. There are some intriguing new characters, too. Florence Pugh is one of the more fully realized characters despite her little screentime, embodying the canny daughter of the emperor. Austin Butler (who I had never seen before) is really compelling as the psychotic nephew of the Baron, spitting and frothing and acting like, well, a damn psycho. The section of the film on the Harkonnen planet is, in general, my favorite part of the movie.
I keep harping on this point, but I think something really needs to be done about the accents. It seems like such a shame to build such a grand, wonderful world and then be so careless about how the characters live in it. Apparently, Javier Bardem has a different accent than Zendaya since they're from different tribes, but neither of them talk like any of the other Fremen. Jessica has a bit of a British accent going on, which gets much stronger with the unborn Anya Taylor-Joy, but Paul speaks like any random zoomer Knicks fan. I suppose the Harkonnens are supposed to have some sort of Germanic thing going on, but there's not a whole lot of similarities between the three major family members. The Bene Gesserit pronounce "Lisan al-Gaib" in all sorts of different ways, which is maybe feasible, but I imagine this learned order would be sticklers on that point. I'm not trying to be a nitpicker here. I genuinely think that language is important. It conveys class, culture, and all sorts of other things. Tolkien understood this! But language is also deeply human and this film seemed not so concerned with the human aspects of the story.
And for that matter, what a shame that so much of this film is spoken in a made-up fantasy language that (again, because of the shoddiness of the rest of the "linguistic world-building") I don't believe the actors are truly speaking. It's very difficult to convey emotion this way, and it just didn't work beyond the level of messages. It's essentially just more narration, and eye-rolling narration at that.
For all these films fail to achieve on the human level, however, they are absolutely impressive in scope, and this is even more apparent with the sequel. I absolutely loved the alien black and white rounded architecture of the Harkonnen planet, the aesthetic of the bald pale guys is just wonderfully unsettling. Villeneuve plays a bit with silhouettes in this one and the last. Paul Atreides, with his flowing black cape, looking on as the missiles rain down on the imperial convoy, is just plain cool.
I loved the additional layer of family intrigue that comes into play here. I think that was definitely a missing element to sell the high fantasy sort of tone and it fit perfectly. Florence Pugh and Paul negotiating a political marriage is really neat too, but god why did it have to be Paul and not me? Anyway, maybe this story could have used some more incest or something, but hey, apparently the Letterboxd intelligentsia thought Paul wanted to fuck his mom, so there you go. Paul seeing visions of his "bloodline written throughout time" is the rare bit of corny dialogue that I actually thought was a cool way to express this theme, for whatever reason. The element of the ominous Anya Taylor Joy fetus is also interesting and adds a much needed weirdness to the story. What the hell is her deal? A time-traveling fetus? That's fucking awesome.
Now maybe this is just my interpretation, but I feel like there's some much-needed ambiguity about whether or not the fetus is actually speaking through her mother all the time. She certainly is sometimes, but this could also be a convenient vessel for her mother to be honest for once. For that matter, I also like the (again, just my interpretation) ambiguity about Bene Gesserit and prophecies. There's some truth to it, certainly it was known beforehand that an omniscient male heir to their bloodline was a theoretical possibility. But the order uses prophecies and religion as a political tool and a force for change, so it's a bit unclear to what extent these prophecies were planted there on purpose rather than spiraling out of their control. Because I get the sense that, despite how much they like to think so, controlling the Atreides for 90 generations and all that(another bit of cool scale and worldbuilding), some things are beyond their foresight.
Overall, I can't say I feel dramatically different about this film compared to the original. I think it's fair to kind of consider it all as one thing, with all the merits and flaws landing in one or the other film simply due to the way the story is necessarily structured. And I think I need to give this film way more credit. It really is rare to get a fantasy epic with this kind of grand scope and craft and consistency. Since they're all so massively popular and influential, I feel like there's a more examples than there are, but the list of comparable movies is actually quite short. Harry Potter, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings... I mean, there's not many. I appreciate something like that being made in our time, when Hollywood, seems, quite frankly, absolutely cooked.
Something I noticed about myself is that I rarely watch American movies anymore. My French tutor actually kind of agreed with me, which was reassuring: "les films américains, j'ai toujours l'impression que ça raconte rien". I'm not quite so cynical, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't understand his perspective a bit. Maybe I'm just not cut out for Hollywood, or where it's gone to now. I sometimes feel like, especially in recent decades, market forces have limited the range of expression to something that's far too narrow compared to the possibilities of what film can be. Of course, there must be good stuff out there, but it feels almost like an accident. With French movies, the government hands out money to some nepo baby and they make some pretentious navel-gazing nonsense about rich people fucking and smoking cigarettes. But you know what? I don't mind that so much, in comparison. At least it's trying to be art as much as it is a product, even if it's failing. Anyway I'm starting to ramble like a pretentious asshole here...
I enjoyed Dune. I thought it was cool and fun and I'm glad I can talk about this on Saturday with my friend who absolutely loves this shit and talks about it all the time. I'm glad to be part of a big cultural moment in a way I rarely make the effort to be these days, and I should do that more! Would I watch it again? Almost certainly no. Will I watch the third part? Absolutely yes. And I'll have a good time. And sometimes movies are just a good time.