Adaptation is always a risky business, and that truth is especially so for a particular kind of epic, complex science-fiction, or fantasy novel. For much of cinematic history, if you weren’t outright collaborating alongside the author of the text or inventing something new with them, you were probably best off absorbing what you could from a particular novel and incorporating it into a fresh, original concept: Such thinking gave us Star Wars, after all, after George Lucas threw the elements of his upbringing in imagination into a blender and let Marcia Lucas and his other collaborates season the final product to a palatable and irresistible taste. But for those looking for that extra something, that name-brand recognition bestowed upon dorm-room stoner classics that would cause an aging boomer to look up at the marquee and say Hey, I Remember Reading That On The Quad While Tripping Balls and then subsequently buy tickets to an evening screening, a certain few seemed unadaptable: J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings and Frank Herbert’s Dune chief among them. Both received adaptations in that era — Ralph Bakshi took the reins on an animated version of Tolkein’s tale after the Beatles couldn’t get their shit together, and tha god David Lynch worked as a gun-for-hire for Dino De Laurentis, the mega-producer in search of his own Star Wars, so that he could accumulate the capital to make Blue Velvet.
Lynch’s Dune is vastly underrated — it is a genuinely delightful and weird film, full of amazing design work and a generally low-fi, lived-in feel — yet it’s also easy to get why audiences didn’t go wild for it, given the odd-and-heady nature of the film itself. I’ll get to exactly why in a second, but it’s hard to remember just how of-its-moment the style of Dune ’84 is, and just how much better it does its decrepit, hyper-futuristic yet hideously fleshy aesthetic than many of its contemporaries. The problem is, however, that the conventions of fantasy-and-sci-fi epic storytelling hadn’t quite caught up with filmmaking right then: No one really knew how much weirdness one audience would be able to take, especially when drawing from a tome and lore as richly created and explored as it is in the books. Hell, De Laurentis ordered programs — complete with glossary — for those who were attending the film, should they get lost and need a guide to help them understand exactly what the hell a “stillsuit” or a “Muad’ib” was. It’s too much — both in an exposition sense and in the fact that the book’s story is simply too large to be jammed properly into a 136-minute film — and yet not enough, at least in a traditional storytelling sense. This is perhaps why we aren’t discussing Denis Villeneuve’s latest adaptation of Herbert’s novel as a well-timed reboot after a long series of book adaptations and tie-in merchandise and angry fanboys who are mad that the Baron Harkonnen isn’t covered in boils just like in the original.
But something wonderful happened in 2001 when Peter Jackson dropped The Fellowship of the Ring on the world like a bomb: Filmmakers (and perhaps more importantly, the studios and money men) realized that audiences could tolerate the weird nerd shit that made this complicated nonsense both hard to parse and insanely compelling. In fact, the solution had been buried in Star Wars decades earlier, but no one really cared to notice, given that, at the time, it was assumed that all of the fun ships and swords and banter seemed to be the reason people went wild for it. The lesson was this: Don’t stop and explain, just say the words, and people either won’t care if you’re talented enough in order to make it compelling or they’ll seek out what it means. This ethos fully informs Denis Villeneuve’s approach to Dune, which has the wonderful quality of playing like Herbert’s novels read. You see, the great secret of those books is that they are actually incredibly easy to read (one only knows how many times Lord of the Rings has been abandoned by interested readers over the years thanks to its beautiful-yet-complex prose), given that the writer specialized in making accessible pulp before he began to expand his consciousness towards more heady dimensions such as this one.
This isn’t to say that aspects of Dune won’t remain hard to parse, or that there isn’t any exposition, but rather it’s placed in the background, buried under layers and layers of astonishingly composed visuals and the thundering yet sonorous notes of Hans Zimmer’s genre-straddling score, assisted by a surprisingly well-paced script that covers, roughly, the first half of the novel. Villeneuve has reached deep into his playbook and applies nearly everything that he’s learned in his time in Hollywood to this particular film. There’s the ensemble cast, as well-managed and prepared as they were in Prisoners, who are allowed to breathe life into these characters and lift them off the page, with a little more space to inhabit than in Lynch’s telling. Even comparatively minor players are given more shade, such as Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa, who gets to kick ass) and Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin), and the Fremen, the desert inhabitants of Arrakis who have been in conflict with the off-worlders for years, make their appearance far earlier than in the Lynch film, and this gives them a much greater impact than just being the eventual footsoldiers for the Muad’ib’s revolution. Hell, Javier Bardem, playing Stilgar, the Fremen’s leader, is able to get one of the few laughs of the film while also adding some much-needed color about cultural traditions on a desert planet
From Enemy, Villeneuve brings both a giant spider (half-human, glimpsed as a pet in the household of the Harkonnens) and some measure of psychological complexity, as best represented in the story’s protagonist, Paul Atreides, scion of the House Atreides, who have been made stewards of the all-important planet Arrakis by their Emperor. Paul’s the result of generations of breeding, concocted by the Bene Gesserit, a history-manipulating group of psychic witch-nuns who aim to bring out Herbert’s equivalent of the messiah, the Kwisatch Haderach: A powerful being who will manipulate and change history. This Paul is allowed to be far brattier than Kyle MacLachlan’s was, but he’s also given a legitimate moral dilemma, one at the heart of the books, that the previous adaptation didn’t try to touch: He is a product of destiny, and he’s forced to consume the spice melange — a psychoactive drug that lays on the sands, which is all-important, given that it makes space travel possible — he sees visions, either prophecy or fantasy, that suggest to him the horrible consequence of his legacy. Thus, a duality: The man of fate standing in opposition to the boy who has to learn both how to lead and speak, and isn’t sure if he wants to cause all this suffering anyhow.
Those hallucinogenic scenes, where Paul envisions himself either getting slain or doing slaying, of blood-stained hands and piles of burning corpses, are a crucial element to the film’s visual palette, of which Villeneuve has pulled from aspects of Arrival and Sicario in their realization. The former’s presence is easy to feel, given how stark and minimal this post-technology future really is: If you really can “fold” space to travel long distances, that would perhaps alter the look of your intergalactic transports, right? Many of the great moments here feel like a concept artist’s wet dream, perfectly realized from the page, and it must have been a joy to work on a project like this. Every set and location, be it exterior or interior, is vividly rendered, though, as it was with Lynch’s film, it is clearly a product of its time. As for Sicario, one can feel its presence in the slow, tactical movement in the battle sequences, such as in the Harkonnen’s assault on the Atreides household on Arrakis, though, clearly, it will eventually give way to hand-to-hand chaos, as the energy shields that are worn by all combatants having long-ago eliminated the usage of most projectile weapons. I couldn’t help but think of the movements of the soldiers at the end of that film when white-clad baddies lower themselves into holes via ropes, gently suspended, armor standing out in the darkness here, and most, if not all, of the other scenes are filled with notes as graceful as those.
This brings us to our final point of comparison in the Denis Goes To Hollywood line-up and perhaps the most important aspect of how this relates to Lynch’s film: Respect for the master that came before you. As was with Blade Runner 2049, which allowed itself the space to do something new with the future-noir elements of Ridley Scott’s classic while retaining its core essence, Villeneuve pays heavy tribute to Lynch’s Dune as an essential antecedent. It would have been easy enough to ditch nearly all of the aesthetic that he crafted back in ’84, and to be fair, much is jettisoned or is inherent to any adaptation of the novel — there aren’t steaming hydraulics, nor do the bug-styled pilots of the Space Guild make an appearance — but what’s retained is fascinating. He keeps so many aspects of Lynch’s style: The formal wear of those on Arrakis, the style of the stillsuits, the environments (especially in the feel of the nighttime battle scenes), and, importantly, the weirdness. Yet he manages to find space to add his own rhythms and styles, building on top of the foundations that have been laid, both by a storytelling master like Herbert and one of cinema’s greatest image-crafters, all while helping to make this tale work better and feel sturdier for audiences to come. This Dune overwhelms you into understanding through the power inherent in the paring of the image with sound and editing, not through the complexity of its world, and one can only hope that enough people seek it out so that Villeneuve will be able to finish his tremendous tale in the near future.