Dune is an adaptation that doesn’t go far enough

Dune: Part Two

2024
Directed by Denis Villeneuve
★★★

There’s a feeling of immediacy you get when watching the work of an action director in full control of their craft that can perhaps best be described as “the story telling itself.” I’m thinking of scenes like the one-shot car chase in Children of Men, or the opening bank heist in The Dark Knight: those rare instances in cinema when anything that might suggest the artifice of the author’s hand at work – the movement of the camera, the editing between multiple POVs, the non-diegetic nature of the soundtrack – simply melts away, and all you are left with is pure, unadulterated experience. As if what you see on the screen were actually happening in this present moment rather than a manicured recording of a fabricated sequence. That’s the way I felt when I saw Paul and Jessica hiding behind a sand dune, furtively watching Harkonnen soldiers float through the sky to the top of a mesa, communicating the stakes of their situation with only their bare faces. Or when Rabban plunged head first into a blistering sandstorm, smoke and dust and rage choking his vision as he struggled to put a picture to the sounds of his men being picked off one-by-one by shadowy assailants. Or when Paul finally mounted the Shai-Hulud, consummating his acceptance into Fremen life with an act that can only be described as the ultimate physical manifestation of sheer willpower.

Dune: Part Two is a Movie with a capital M, one that does an incredible job animating the mythology of its source text. Every little detail of the visual imagery, from the cinematography to the costume design to even the casting, perfectly captures the very essence of the world Frank Herbert dreamt up. I never imagined Giedi Prime quite how Villeneuve does, but now that I’ve seen his version I can’t help but agree that it’s the definitive one. Just like the original Star Wars in 1977, it feels like we are watching an artist establish in real time the language by which we will come to understand the next 50 years of science fiction cinema. But what I suspect will linger even longer in his audiences’ minds will be the spectacular set pieces he’s crafted, which somehow create a sense of simultaneous expansiveness and immersiveness that is nothing short of magical. That Villeneuve managed to find space for so many self-contained, kinetic action sequences within a sprawling, intergalactic space epic is a testament to both his technical mastery and his unrivaled ambitions (well, unrivaled until Furiosa comes out at least). 

Of course, Dune is not an exercise in form without function. There is a deeper purpose behind why Villeneuve plays so much with scale in this film, cutting between closeups of characters lost in their own thoughts and long shots of imposing physical landscapes, juxtaposing intimate moments of personal introspection against the hostile geography of Arrakis. This is a text that is fascinated by the ways we mythologize our own lives—by our quintessentially human tendency to project the agency we so desperately desire onto an uncaring world governed by forces totally outside our control, transmuting the act of “reading” into one of (self-fulfilling) prophecy. None of this would be nearly so tragic if the characters of Dune, like us, weren’t self-aware of their conditions. What Villeneuve understands so well is that even when we recognize the larger structures at play that always mediate our existence – be it nature, religion, political institutions, or narrative itself – we may nevertheless willingly submit to their machinations.

And yet…in spite of all these merits, the film doesn’t quite work for me. Mostly, because of its rushed pacing; after the aforementioned opening set piece, Villeneuve largely moves away from settled, fleshed out episodes in favor of frenetic cross-cutting between the scheming of the various factions seeking to stake their claim over the course of the film’s events. In addition to familiar faces like the Reverend Mother, Lady Jessica, the Baron, Rabban, Gurney Halleck, and Stilgar, Dune: Part Two is in equal parts a tale belonging to people we meet for the first time: the Emperor, Princess Irulan, Feyd-Rautha, Lady Fenring, and Paul’s unborn sister. The result of having to develop this alphabet soup of individuals (each played by an overqualified actor) within the confines of a three-hour runtime is a loss of momentum. That sense of inevitable narrative progression, of the “story telling itself,” gets constantly interrupted by yet another cutaway to a conversation between one-dimensional characters in a previously unseen setting. For a director so accomplished at visual storytelling, Villeneuve relies far too much on stilted dialogue in the middle part of the film, and when he does decide to “show don’t tell”, characters too often reveal their psychologies through simplistic, overdetermined tropes—a sadistic antagonist displaying his peculiar combination of honor and brutality in a publicly staged gladiator combat, for instance.

The worst victim of the film’s poor editing and pacing is Paul himself; his metamorphosis from vindictive war refugee to conflicted Fremen warrior to willing messiah occurs in fits and starts, diluting the tragic inevitability of the journey that structures the entire series. We are told (again, over dialogue!) that the fate of a civilization rests on a choice that Paul must make – one that has, in some sense, already been made for him, both by the people around him and by the broader requirements of narrative  – and yet we never feel this psychological weight on his shoulders, nor do we really see the emotional toll it must take. Consider, for instance, his visions of the future: the book describes at length how Paul can see only vague impressions of all his possible life trajectories laid out all at once, presenting an excellent visual vehicle to externalize an interior life ruled by disorientation and doubt. And yet we only ever see a single liminal snippet of his visions throughout the film, forcing us to make our own speculations on Paul’s state of mind. Even once he becomes the Kwisatz Haderach and finally obtains the clarity of foresight he has sought after for so long, the denouement occurs orally rather than visually, as we hear Paul reveal his omniscience through a forceful monologue to a fanatical audience of worshippers rather than see the future he yearns for through his own eyes.

The result is a discernible absence of pathos for the central protagonist of Dune, a gap that makes itself most uncomfortably felt in the film’s climactic moments. One of Villeneuve’s most puzzling decisions is to reintroduce Jamis at a pivotal crossroads decision two thirds of the way through Part Two. An image that is intended in theory to visualize the clashing feelings of responsibility, guilt, and fear that entrap Paul instead comes across as jarring and out-of-place, simply because even those of us who rewatched Part One in preparation may have already forgotten who Jamis is. I can’t help but wonder if the sting of Jamis’ reappearance, the bombing of Sietch Tabr, or Paul’s ominous final command to Stilgar would have cut deeper had Villeneuve had the patience to plumb the depths of Paul’s relationship with the Fremen, or to immerse his viewers into the evolution of Paul’s worldview.

There is, I think, an alternate version of this film in which the camera never leaves Paul’s side even for one moment. Where the entirety of Dune: Part Two unfolds in the deserts of Arrakis and is told only from the perspective of the Fremen, impervious to the workings of any of their extraterrestrial adversaries save for when they come into direct conflict. That film would admittedly have to forfeit its claim to many of the archetypal images that will capture our imaginations for years to come: the black sun of Giedi Prime, the lush gardens of the Imperial Palace, the brutalist Harkonnen control room on Arrakeen. It would not have granted Villeneuve the space to depict so much of the book’s foundational lore, from the “plans within plans” maneuvering of the Bene Gesserit, to Princess Irulan’s attempts to navigate a world where her power is always mediated by her gender. I am not sure that such a film would be “better,” and I am quite certain it would be much less well-received by most viewers. But I wonder if that is the only version that could have done justice to Villeneuve’s vision.

Because ultimately the person who really occupies the privileged space at the emotional heart of Dune: Part Two – the one we gradually come to realize we are called to identify ourselves with – is also someone who never leaves Paul’s side until the very end. I am talking, of course, of Chani, who not only initiates the action of the entire series with her framing question in the very first lines of Part One (“who will our next oppressors be?”), but also salvages the final act with a consequential choice that fittingly marks the film’s most significant departure from the book. While I admire Villeneuve’s decision to give his version of Chani genuine agency, and to structure both the opening frames and the climax of his interpretation of Dune around her rather than Paul, he compromises on the boldness of his ambitions in the intervening five-and-a-half hours by dwelling far too long on a cast of characters that bear no meaningful relation to the film’s ultimate object. There are vague whispers of a smaller, more stripped down yet more authentic story lurking in the margins of Villeneuve’s Dune: a tragic tale of two lovers condemned to betray each other by the roles they must play within a system that denies at every turn their desperate attempts to alter the nature of their mutual reality. Too bad that we didn’t get to see that film in its entirety.

One last thing: there’s an exchange that occurs near the end of Part Two that has since become a meme. It’s the direct mirror image of an interaction between the same two characters from a scene early on in Part One, when a figure occupying a position of relative power forces the other to submit to their demands using a single word spoken in “the voice.” For a film so preoccupied with the circular arc of history, this inversion is meant to visually index the exact moment of our realization that the Fremen have merely succeeded in substituting one oppressor for another and, in doing so, fulfilled Chani’s prophecy. Yet a line that should have drawn audible gasps from the audience instead succeeded only in eliciting laughter, largely because of how social media has indelibly changed the texture of its meaning. At the time, I found myself frustrated by my inability to have a tabula rasa film-viewing experience in a post-Twitter world, but I have now come to appreciate the self-reflexive nature of the film’s discourse. So much of Dune is about the inevitability of narrative displacing itself from its original authorial intent; about the slippery ways in which stories are continuously repackaged and repurposed until they gain an agency of their own making, often to insidious effect. That Villeneuve, in attempting to craft an original work of art out of another author’s text, be subjected to the very same act of subversion via quotation by his own audience is surely the kind of cosmic joke that Frank Herbert would have loved to have written himself.