They said this movie could never be made. They were wrong.
There’s a reason why the audience at the Venice Film Festival, not a traditionally sci-fi friendly venue, stood and applauded for 7 minutes after the film’s premiere. It is magnificent.
George Lucas could never have made this film. But neither could this film have been made without George Lucas. Villeneuve, the director, has clearly borrowed a lot from Lucas’ visual imagery here, particularly in designing the flying vehicles.. That’s a compliment – Lucas’ true genius was in his visual imagination. Villeneuve creates his own universe of varied landscapes — sometimes beautiful, sometimes grotesque, but always recognizably human, and never disgusting.
Frank Herbert’s book was not long on character development. Villeneuve solves that problem by putting together a talented ensemble cast – actors who are able to suggest a backstory and a fully-developed personality for their characters in short scenes with only a few lines of dialogue. Timothee Chalamet, a gifted screen actor who is able to suggest a whole range of emotions through his eyes, was born to play Paul. But the rest of the cast is outstanding too — I particularly enjoyed Jason Momoa as Duncan and Javier Bardem as Stilgar.
I read the book mostly as a prescient story of environmentalism, but of course it’s a commentary on colonialism too. Villeneuve is on to this – he spends a bit more time than the book does on the mandate that sends the Atreides from their cold and rainy home world to a desert planet that is short on people and long on a crucial transportation resource. In case you miss the point, there are bagpipes. For those who find that stuff annoying, he quickly pivots to the core story of the book – how to manage Arrakis and its inhabitants.
To his credit, Villeneuve resists the urge to romanticize the Fremen. They are tough bastards, but they have their issues too. If I have any criticism of the movie, it’s that we don’t see enough of the Fremen. That’s because the movie stops short of finishing the book – it’s Dune, Part I — so we don’t get to see the part of the story where the Fremen become more prominent, except in Paul’s future visions. Don’t worry, though, it’s not a cliffhanger ending.
Run, don’t walk.
PS: I have no idea why this movie opened in Italy several weeks before the US premiere. I’m glad it did.