An ornithopter, a little dragonfly-shaped airship From the much awaited blockbuster “Doon” Cruising on the sands of the arid planet Arrakis, its brown and almost white shape stretches like a five-story meringue on an IMAX screen. Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac) and his son Paul (Timothy Chalameta) on their way to inspect a giant mining vehicle with bureaucrat Lit Kaines (Sharon Duncan-Brewster), who will decide whether evil Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgrd) has betrayed the Duke and his family. Then, all of a sudden, we catch a glimpse worm, and we understand: we are here to see a tiny speck of a person trying to bend the IMAX-sized forces to his will and instead be transformed by them.
We are here trying to see a tiny particle of a person bend Imax-sized forces to their will and instead be transformed by them.
Frank Herbert’s novel “Dune”—with a frustrating mix of space bureaucracy, mystical lore, and pulse-pounding, monster-fighting action—is a difficult book to adapt. Its power largely depends on how well the reader is willing to present half the novel with sympathetic pulp sci-fi action and world-building. The reason fans of the book power through that nostalgic first half has to do with its incredibly weird and eccentric second half, which exaggerates all of its space opera tropes and instead The nomadic life in the Arabian peninsula depends heavily on the traditions of and other areas that attracted Herbert. (One heroic clan, the Freemen, are clearly holy warriors; there are plenty of references in the book and its sequels to a cataclysmic war called Butlerian Jihad.) The novel’s guts persist today, even though it inspired dozens of adapters. Yes, official and unofficial, including George Lucas, David Lynch and french comics genius mobius. At one point, Alejandro Jodorowski Salvador Dali was made emperor. There’s an entire movie, “Jodorowsky’s Dune,” about how he never got to shoot his version.
Director Denis Villeneuve chose to adapt the book’s only mechanical first part into “Dune: Part 1”, a risky move as it would have required Villeneuve to create some visual singularity of his own to advance the story. Is. It’s a sci-fi film on a big-ticket blockbuster scale similar to the lengthy two-part finale of Marvel’s “Avengers” films, but here Villeneuve manages to create something that stands out in addition to the sheer length and complexity of the plot. Gorgeous in words. Their giant spaceships, the size and shape of floating brutalist buildings, stagger us. The planet Arrakis – Dune itself – is both highly barren and hostile and seems to be full of deep learning. While these special effects suggest a vast world, their minimal exposure lets us fill in the many gaps for ourselves. We are left to wonder, not just observe. It’s a feeling I’ve missed.
At the center of it all is Chalamet’s Paul, a casting choice that confused me until I saw how gigantic and hostile Villeneuve had made of everything and how strong he had in this slender, doe-eyed, handsomely unexpected actor. There was counterpoint. Paul has to evolve into his role as leader of men, and Chalamet is callous and childish; It’s hard to imagine that Isaac has gained any gravitas in the form of his father. Watching the film made me realize that it was about Villeneuve. Paul’s leadership is imposed on him; He is intentionally small and childish in the face of indifferent forces that can tear him apart from a whisper. His closeness to his mother, Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), emphasizes how young he is, but when he is introduced into his command of shady psychics, we begin to see that his perceived weaknesses are strong. How will you become And when, at the end of the film, he has to fight a duel to the death, Villeneuve makes us regret the end of Paul’s innocence in a way he couldn’t have with a cocker cast.
Lynch’s “Dune” adaptation from 1984 is unintentionally clunky in its pacing and a sort of surrealist almost masterpiece. Lynch was given a sizable budget (as opposed to his smaller, better-regarded films of that era), and fans of Lynch might find it tempting to see that, in fact, an avant-garde director would take all that cash and a ton. What does the novel do with sci-fi. It’s a film that both begs to be made again and a film that raises the bar impossibly high.
Villeneuve has opted out of that challenge. His “dune” is entirely his own, and while its pace is leisurely, it is with intent and consummate craftsmanship. perversely, Warner Bros. has publicly stated That Villeneuve would be allowed to complete the project only if the film did well, including on HBO Max. Maybe it will. But its scope and scale are the kind of big-screen experiences I thought existed only in memory. And its subject, the forces of history brought to bear on a struggling man, is powerful in direct proportion to the size of the screen you’re viewing it on.