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labingiSo I'm a tough sell for a Dune movie. Not only am I fan of the book (though I confess I have not reread it in years), but I grew up on the David Lynch movie, and imperfect (and somewhat unfairly maligned) though it is, it has a place in my heart that is hard to dislodge. I was also not hugely sanguine about the performances in Villeneuve's movie based on the trailers, so this movie had some weight to lift with me.
And I can report I really liked it. I dreamed about it the night I saw it, and I dreamed entirely in terms of the new actors and their representations of the characters, so it must have really gotten into my mind. I did not, however, find it perfect, so here's a little rundown...
The Good
Taking time to tell the story. One of the only recurrent critiques I've heard of this Part 1 is that the second half drags. I didn't think so. I thought it was well paced and a nice balance of going deep into the context without slowing the plot.
Everything audiovisual: the effects, cinematography, landscapes, music, sound, visual storytelling--all of that was excellent. Others have broken it down at length, but I'll just lump that all together here.
The casting overall: the biggest win of Lynch's film for me and the biggest lose of the SyFy miniseries is in casting. This is a story about eugenic superpeople and those who can keep up with them, and that takes some gravitas. I thought this cast generally worked well visually and in terms of their performances, minus the caveat I'll discuss under "The Bad" below.
A suitably young and well-written Paul. Overall, I really liked the film's concept for Paul: small, adolescent, having some stuff to learn, but already clearly hyper-trained and very mature for this age. This landed very well, minus the caveat below.
The technology: though the film didn't mention the Butlerian Jihad, its presence is there in the tech, which is both advanced and retro, and I really liked the reliance on buttons and switches. It both looks cool and makes good sense for a culture oriented around keeping humans in charge of manipulating what tech does on a very manual level.
Stilgar's interview with Leto. Everything about this was lovely! It hit just right the balance between Stilgar's trying to make a good start with the new colonizers while having zero faith that anything will be different than before.
Chani is intrinsically a really boring character, but the film here is trying hard to make her credible and likable, and it pretty much works for me.
The Might Have Been Better
Race: I appreciate that this version is less white than we've seen before, but it also slots into a general complaint I have with current sci-fi and fantasy set outside our cultural sphere: it keeps doing something between tokenism and colorblind casting rather than being creative with how race might really manifest in that universe. There's a chance that the Corino will end up being mostly black (given Kynes and the Emperor's herald guy are), which would be cool and like an actual ethnic/regional thing. But I wish the main characters were tilted less white and that the Fremen actually had an identifiable race, since they are a group that's been largely genetically isolated for a while. (Yes, it does make sense that Chani looks mixed race; that worked well.) (I want to shout out here to Game of Thrones for getting this right, and I'm not referring to plot or character, where one can argue it's too white-skewed, but to worldbuilding, where the shifting races and ethnicities make perfect sense for the geography.)
The clunky opening narration about colonization. It felt like it was trying too hard: too hard to prove it's not white supremacist, too hard to make Chani an interesting character, a heavy lift given what the novel left us. And can't we ever have Dune without heavy narration. Stilgar's scene with Leto made the point better.
The Bad
Back in the olden days (of Ancient Greece through maybe c. 1900, in the Western frame of reference), we had these things called rhetoric and oratory that were considered very important and were very widely taught to philosophers, scholars, and statesmen. They were much discussed by the likes of Aristotle and Cicero. They were among the three subjects taught in the original medieval universities and persisted as crucial areas of study for all the Founders of the United States.
Off in the future of 10,191, they have this thing called the Voice, which is basically a hyper-charismatic, perfectly pitched use of words and intonation to get people to do what you want. It's fundamentally a branch of rhetoric and oratory. Curious, then, that these eugenic superpeople who are all polymaths rigidly trained from birth to be good at everything, these aristocrats who have to give public pronouncements about their rule, have absolutely zero concern for rhetoric and oratory.
Okay, to be fair, Leto did a good little speech and accepting Arrakis as his fief. But the dialogue usually operates between unmemorable and inappropriate to the setting, as in "You don't get it" and "Mom" and "Dad." That is not a good way to render life among high powered aristocratic elites whose lifestyle echoes the 19th century.
The direction--and I do put this down to direction more than actors' skill--tends toward monotone mumbling, which particularly for Paul is utterly inappropriate for a hyper-trained aristocrat messiah. When he says, "I know," it should not come out like "Uh nuh."
Annoyed Digression
Villeneuve is insanely talented, but he did this in Blade Runner 2049 too, another film I really love in every respect except the dialogue. There, too, the dialogue is utterly bland, functional, and without a single memorable line. In that case, the omission sticks out like a sore thumb because it's the only way in which the original Blade Runner, a film that loved language, stands out head and shoulders above its sequel. Consider lines like the whole "Tears in Rain" speech, the interplay of "Time enough" and "Time to die," Roy's paraphrasing of William Blake ("Fiery the angels fell...") or "Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you in heaven for." 2049 has... zippo. The scenes in which K is tested by the computer are brilliant uses of language but not really quotable dialogue. The next best line I got is simply Joy glitching on "K," which works more as a sound effect than a line.
If I could get on bended knee and beg Villeneuve to do one thing to up his otherwise very impressive game, I would beg him to put on his creative team someone who cares about language.
And more broadly to cinema in general, I would say, we all know it's a "visual medium," but please, please, please go back to caring about language. And while we're at it, let's not have any more adaptations of Wuthering Heights that go to super lengths to create a gritty, realistic 18th-century Yorkshire and then have people saying, "Okay." Let's just not do that again. Thanks.
End rant.
Overall, I did really enjoy the Dune movie, and I cross my fingers that it will get the sequel it richly deserves and I will deeply enjoy, even if the dialogue is disappointing.
And I can report I really liked it. I dreamed about it the night I saw it, and I dreamed entirely in terms of the new actors and their representations of the characters, so it must have really gotten into my mind. I did not, however, find it perfect, so here's a little rundown...
The Good
Taking time to tell the story. One of the only recurrent critiques I've heard of this Part 1 is that the second half drags. I didn't think so. I thought it was well paced and a nice balance of going deep into the context without slowing the plot.
Everything audiovisual: the effects, cinematography, landscapes, music, sound, visual storytelling--all of that was excellent. Others have broken it down at length, but I'll just lump that all together here.
The casting overall: the biggest win of Lynch's film for me and the biggest lose of the SyFy miniseries is in casting. This is a story about eugenic superpeople and those who can keep up with them, and that takes some gravitas. I thought this cast generally worked well visually and in terms of their performances, minus the caveat I'll discuss under "The Bad" below.
A suitably young and well-written Paul. Overall, I really liked the film's concept for Paul: small, adolescent, having some stuff to learn, but already clearly hyper-trained and very mature for this age. This landed very well, minus the caveat below.
The technology: though the film didn't mention the Butlerian Jihad, its presence is there in the tech, which is both advanced and retro, and I really liked the reliance on buttons and switches. It both looks cool and makes good sense for a culture oriented around keeping humans in charge of manipulating what tech does on a very manual level.
Stilgar's interview with Leto. Everything about this was lovely! It hit just right the balance between Stilgar's trying to make a good start with the new colonizers while having zero faith that anything will be different than before.
Chani is intrinsically a really boring character, but the film here is trying hard to make her credible and likable, and it pretty much works for me.
The Might Have Been Better
Race: I appreciate that this version is less white than we've seen before, but it also slots into a general complaint I have with current sci-fi and fantasy set outside our cultural sphere: it keeps doing something between tokenism and colorblind casting rather than being creative with how race might really manifest in that universe. There's a chance that the Corino will end up being mostly black (given Kynes and the Emperor's herald guy are), which would be cool and like an actual ethnic/regional thing. But I wish the main characters were tilted less white and that the Fremen actually had an identifiable race, since they are a group that's been largely genetically isolated for a while. (Yes, it does make sense that Chani looks mixed race; that worked well.) (I want to shout out here to Game of Thrones for getting this right, and I'm not referring to plot or character, where one can argue it's too white-skewed, but to worldbuilding, where the shifting races and ethnicities make perfect sense for the geography.)
The clunky opening narration about colonization. It felt like it was trying too hard: too hard to prove it's not white supremacist, too hard to make Chani an interesting character, a heavy lift given what the novel left us. And can't we ever have Dune without heavy narration. Stilgar's scene with Leto made the point better.
The Bad
Back in the olden days (of Ancient Greece through maybe c. 1900, in the Western frame of reference), we had these things called rhetoric and oratory that were considered very important and were very widely taught to philosophers, scholars, and statesmen. They were much discussed by the likes of Aristotle and Cicero. They were among the three subjects taught in the original medieval universities and persisted as crucial areas of study for all the Founders of the United States.
Off in the future of 10,191, they have this thing called the Voice, which is basically a hyper-charismatic, perfectly pitched use of words and intonation to get people to do what you want. It's fundamentally a branch of rhetoric and oratory. Curious, then, that these eugenic superpeople who are all polymaths rigidly trained from birth to be good at everything, these aristocrats who have to give public pronouncements about their rule, have absolutely zero concern for rhetoric and oratory.
Okay, to be fair, Leto did a good little speech and accepting Arrakis as his fief. But the dialogue usually operates between unmemorable and inappropriate to the setting, as in "You don't get it" and "Mom" and "Dad." That is not a good way to render life among high powered aristocratic elites whose lifestyle echoes the 19th century.
The direction--and I do put this down to direction more than actors' skill--tends toward monotone mumbling, which particularly for Paul is utterly inappropriate for a hyper-trained aristocrat messiah. When he says, "I know," it should not come out like "Uh nuh."
Annoyed Digression
Villeneuve is insanely talented, but he did this in Blade Runner 2049 too, another film I really love in every respect except the dialogue. There, too, the dialogue is utterly bland, functional, and without a single memorable line. In that case, the omission sticks out like a sore thumb because it's the only way in which the original Blade Runner, a film that loved language, stands out head and shoulders above its sequel. Consider lines like the whole "Tears in Rain" speech, the interplay of "Time enough" and "Time to die," Roy's paraphrasing of William Blake ("Fiery the angels fell...") or "Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you in heaven for." 2049 has... zippo. The scenes in which K is tested by the computer are brilliant uses of language but not really quotable dialogue. The next best line I got is simply Joy glitching on "K," which works more as a sound effect than a line.
If I could get on bended knee and beg Villeneuve to do one thing to up his otherwise very impressive game, I would beg him to put on his creative team someone who cares about language.
And more broadly to cinema in general, I would say, we all know it's a "visual medium," but please, please, please go back to caring about language. And while we're at it, let's not have any more adaptations of Wuthering Heights that go to super lengths to create a gritty, realistic 18th-century Yorkshire and then have people saying, "Okay." Let's just not do that again. Thanks.
End rant.
Overall, I did really enjoy the Dune movie, and I cross my fingers that it will get the sequel it richly deserves and I will deeply enjoy, even if the dialogue is disappointing.
