Area Man Watches Dune
With bonus Timothée Chalamet content
Writing
First, an appetizer: for Fare Forward I wrote about Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch. It’s a lot of fun! I think it might be his most visually creative movie even, which is really saying something. If you you are Anderson-agnostic, this one is unlikely to change your opinion of him, and if you’re Anderson-antagonistic, well, keep scrolling…
Watching
Dune (2021)
Months ago I, like untold others aspiring to be with-it, tracked down a copy of Frank Herbert’s Dune at a used bookstore, to the glee of the cashier (“You found one?!”). Alas I didn’t actually have time to read it before the release of the film, nor did I want to go in with any knowledge of the 1984 David Lynch adaptation (other than that it exists), so my thoughts on the Denis Villeneuve-directed variant won’t be comparing it to either of those antecedents.
There are at least two ways of talking about Dune 2021 (henceforth Dune), one of which isn’t to talk about the movie itself at all. Like The French Dispatch, this was a 2020 holdover, all ready to go except for the infeasibility of opening up theaters to full-capacity audiences in a pre-vaccine world. Dune is not just Dune, it’s an Event, one that arrives both in a theatrical landscape with an uncertain future and also bookended by Disney products stretching out as far as the eye can see. It’s something different in other words, and in context that difference is easy to take as a prime facie virtue. I’ve seen a few reviews elegiacally wonder if this will be the last movie of its sort—big, ambitious, intelligent (or at least gesturing at intelligence), uniting audiences for a theatrical experience that’s more of an actual experience than a marketing exercise. I, too, could write about my Dune-Watching Experience; yes, I trekked all the way out to Georgetown to see it in IMAX and for $25 I still had to sit in those pre-renovation non-reclining seats; but I think one sentence suffices. What’s going on with the movie?
For the uninitiated or those who can’t be bothered: Dune (which adapts only about half of Herbert’s book—I’m told—and makes no pretense to try to restructure that part of the narrative to better fit a just-shy-of-3-hour-long movie) is a story of political intrigue set thousands of years into the future, in space. At the outset, the Atreides family is assigned by the Emperor to the desert planet Arrakis to rule over it and oversee the harvesting of spice, a mana-like substance that makes the universe go brrrr. Arrakis is iconically a harsh and inhospitable land of sand dunes (there are many opportunities to lean over to your date, point to the screen, and whisper you-know-what during this movie) and enormous sand worms, truly the stuff of nightmares (more on them later). The indigenous people of Arrakis, the Fremen, have spent generations developing technology to help them survive under these conditions. The whites of their eyes are also blue, which looks kind of corny the way the do it in the movie but you get used to it. Unsurprisingly, the Atreides learn that they have been led into a trap, and the main thrust of the movie is the fall of the family and their consorts into carnage and despair.
For not having any prior understanding of this story or its characters (I knew “fear is the mind killer” and had received a worm forewarning but that’s about it; also some interplanetary fascism? I digress), I found Dune remarkably easy to follow, which I suppose is part of why it’s been doing so well, at least as far as I can tell from my reporter-on-the-streets data collection. One of my friends pointed out that Game of Thrones has probably laid the groundwork for a lot of people to go into a new universe like this and just run with the rules and mythology, which I think must be right. But the filmmaking also has to do a lot of heavy lifting in a movie like this, because for all its constituent parts Dune very easily could have been a, if you’ll excuse the technical term, total fucking mess.
My opinion of Denis Villeneuve has not changed appreciably in the years since my first published movie review, a gritted-teeth takedown of Sicario, but I can handily say that Dune is my favorite movie of his to date. So many of his Hollywood-era movies (including Arrival, which does stand above the others) rely on his technical showmanship, if not intentionally to distract from the bankruptcy or boringness of the scripts he works with then at least with the consequence of doing so. Think of the night raid in Sicario, or that shot of the tree in Prisoners, or the hall-of-holograms fight in Blade Runner 2049: see, I didn’t love any of those movies but the images stick with you!
What impressed me about Dune is how unconcerned it is with going for those money shots of which we can find some good examples in the most recent Star Wars trilogy, to make the most obvious comparison (try this or this or this…I never saw The Rise of Skywalker). Here, no shot takes you out of the film by announcing itself in that way. Dune can’t take for granted that its audience knows anything about it on arrival, and unlike Villeneuve’s last couple of movies there’s far more information to get across than there is time to convey it all. So he takes a more strategic, almost ascetic approach: compositions tell you exactly what you need to know, no more no less; all the visual amazement is outsourced from camerawork to production and costume design; he leans hard on the sound design, which, apart from Hans Zimmer’s bagpipe-and-Middle-Eastern-Women-Wailing™ score-by-committee, also does some really interesting things within the soundscape of the Dune universe itself.
This method isn’t beyond reproach. The Brazilian critic Filipe Furtado (he of the mind-boggling 22,000 films logged on Letterboxd) panned Dune, calling it “an impressive achievement about itself. Probably the ideal Villeneuve movie.” Really, I get that. To return for a minute to the paracriticism about Dune: how much of what the people who liked Dune like about it has to do with the idea of what they just watched, versus the movie itself, which is technically impressive, yes, but also dour, sometimes even mechanical, more plot- than story-driven (to bring up another strand of Furtado’s critique), and frankly a bit lacking in the character department when compared to, well, TV.
If there are two things that the movie does well beyond reproach—and I think there are at least two!—one of them is Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa, whose coveted “with” billing alongside Charlotte Rampling in the cast list feels like a power play; please, Hollywood, I’m begging you, read the writing on the wall and make him the AAA-lister he deserves to be). Momoa is a veritable charisma machine and you perk up every time he’s onscreen. Moreso than any of the other doomed characters to waltz on through the script, you care about what happens to Duncan, a true friend to Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet—oh right, he’s in this, in case you forgot because some college students in the front of your theater didn’t yell “WHO’S HERE FOR TIMOTHEE CHALAMET?” when the lights dimmed), which seems to be as rare as moisture on this planet.
The other landing the movie sticks—and don’t you dare think of contradicting me on this, I will put up a fight—is the sand worms. Here is a form of genuine, localized peril that’s thrilling by comparison to the all-or-nothing danger that’s easier to lazily pull off in big, effects-driven blockbusters. These things are not going to make the universe collapse in on itself, but they are going to eat you and everything in a half-mile radius of you if you don’t get the hell away from them fast. The initial introduction to the worms is, in my opinion, a masterpiece of suspense, made even better by Villeneuve’s decision to withhold showing us the whole thing until much later in the film. I guess this is undercut by the trailers, but this is why you don’t watch trailers.
What does Dune (or Frank Herbert’s Dune) have to say about eugenics, imperialism, prophecy, being an unwilling messiah, war, the appropriate number of times to shower in a month? Here, honestly, I feel like have less to contribute. I recall most of the dialogue sounding somewhat prefab (or at least workshopped to to fit on Instagram posts), which I assume is particular to the film script and not to Herbert’s writing. Because of the truncated story, none of the big ideas really get anywhere by the end of part one (part two was greenlit a week after this one’s theatrical release), and attempting to lodge any criticisms without knowing where this is all going—while knowing that it is, in fact, going somewhere—feels like a poor use of my time.
All that said: I liked it! I’ll go back for part two, even if IMAX ticket prices have risen to $45 by 2023.
Reading
Lewton would make several movies for RKO, but while some of his collaborators would go on to work in more “respectable” genres, he never really got to graduate from low budget horror into making the kinds of movies he would have rather been making. (Whether those would have been better movies is hard to say.) But he did get to make one dream project during his time at RKO: The Seventh Victim (1943), a surreal piece of dream logic that asks if life is worth living and is willing to admit the answer might be no.
—a belated Halloween read on Val Lewton’s The Seventh Victim
In Passing, seasons are a minor thing, shifts in environmental dressing—leaves and wet pavement, snow—best observed in repeating shots of Irene’s returns to her home in Harlem, among the brownstones. Clare, the doll-eyed blonde with that smile, poses the greater weather. She gusts into the Redfields’ lives with thirst and an inconvenient charm, as well as disquieting beauty. The Bellews have relocated to New York from Chicago, Irene learns by the postmarked envelope of a letter first left unopened, then unanswered. She is through with Clare, yes, that’s right, what could, after all, come of all this?
—Lauren Michele Jackson on Passing
Coming Soon
The social media hype for Alexandre Koberidze’s What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? is giving me severe FOMO, but if you live in New York you can/should go see it this week. For the rest of us, here’s the trailer:
I hate this so, so much:
