True confession time.
My only experience with “Dune,” as a vaulted science fiction property, is several viewings of David Lynch’s 1984 mind-fuck phantasmagoria, and my most vivid memory remains watching Sting as Feyd Rautha, looking like he’d just come off a 3-day bender at a fetish party.
Having never read any of Frank Herbert’s source material, I took my buddy Sean, a lifelong “Dune” fanatic, to an advance critic’s screening.
I’ve seen Sean, a burly bearded beast of a man, openly weep before. Granted, it was when someone knocked over and spilled a freshly open Budweiser, but still, I knew if anyone could help me know if director/co-writer Denis Villeneuve had hit the mark, it would be by watching Sean react in a darkened theater.
Dune
3 out of 5 stars
Now playing
I also wanted and needed to know whether my lack of any working knowledge of the novel’s plot, whether not knowing my Atreides from my Harkonnen, would matter. Was this “Dune” good enough to stand as on its own as a satisfying slice of highbrow sci-fi without any existing emotional or intellectual investment?
The answer is maybe, kind of, sort of.
First things first, you need to know that Villeneuve’s “Dune” is just Part One of a two-part epic. I had no idea of this until the opening credits scrawl. I also had no idea that “Dune II” hasn’t even been given a greenlight yet, at least not until I scoured the Internet after leaving the theater.
What that means, for the neophytes, is that this “Dune” is basically 155 minutes of set-up for what I imagine should be a more rousing second half, if it ever gets made.
It’s like going to see “Star Wars” and having George Lucas’ first film end just before the Millennium Falcon reached the Death Star. Can you imagine the Wookie rage you would have felt?
So, here we are. We’ve got just over two-and-a-half-hours of gorgeous cinematography filling the screen with some of the most ambitious world-building you’ve witnessed in quite some time. We’ve got the bones of the plot carefully assembled. We know a little about young Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), who must step into his father’s boots and try to calm the warring sands of Arrakis, but not nearly enough. We know even less about Chani (Zendaya), the Fremen fighter who haunts Paul’s dreams, but who is barely on-screen for more than a few minutes at a time. We have a decent appreciation for how maliciously evil the Harkonnen are in their quest to control the spice of Arrakis. And we get two extended sequences involving the giant sand worms, which serve to create the perfect amount of awe and majesty, and leave you wanting more, much more.
Is that enough to justify braving a theater in a pandemic when “Dune” also is available at home on the subscription only HBOMax?
I’m going to say yes.
As a huge fan of Villeneuve, and as someone who loves his attention to the small details, like the various ways that characters communicate in “Dune,” to his stark color palettes that somehow never feel cold, to his ability to create grand set pieces that move with fluidity and purpose, there really is no home screen available to match the might of a movie theater viewing.
However, be forewarned, no matter how much Villeneuve gets right, and according to my buddy Sean, he definitely leans into the novel much more than Lynch with a steadfast refusal to rush the intricate dynamics and developments so carefully described by Herbert on the page, it really is asking a lot to sit for 155 minutes and not feel satiated once the credits roll.
John W. Allman has spent more than 25 years as a professional journalist and writer, but he’s loved movies his entire life. Good movies, awful movies, movies that are so gloriously bad you can’t help but champion them. Since 2009, he has cultivated a review column and now a website dedicated to the genre films that often get overlooked and interviews with cult cinema favorites like George A. Romero, Bruce Campbell and Dee Wallace. Contact him at Blood Violence and Babes.com, on Facebook @BloodViolenceBabes or on Twitter @BVB_reviews.
This article appears in Oct 21-27, 2021.