DUNE 2: Peak Cinema Fatigue (Duneposting ctd)
Like its hero, Dune: Part 2 is a self-fulfilling prophecy -- a cinematic monument to itself. Could it ever have been anything else?
Denis Villeneuve: breathes
The Internet:
I loved Dune: Part 2, but finding actual detailed discussions of it has been hard. Across the Internet, reactions have been overwhelmingly positive; all seem eerily the same. Guys burst into mantras about true cinema, the way movies are meant to be seen, this is why movies exist, cinematic masterpiece, GOAT, we finally have our generation’s LOTR/Star Wars, etc.1 If you’re one of the dudes out there who’s said these things, please drop a line in the comments, because I honestly need to know: are you all consciously coordinating? Did some seminal guys-reviewing-movies channel stamp your collective consciousness with these phrases in particular? Is the vagueness due to Taylor Swift type amnesia — just a burlap sack of obliterating CINEMA slammed over your head for three hours?
If I wanted to be Freudian, I’d say that the frenetic accolades for Dune stem from a certain anxiety of influence among sci-fi guys, a desire to have a product that both
measures up to the great canon works they love, yet also
escapes the canon’s embarrassing stink of puerility.
Across the SFF community, there’s always been a subconscious discomfort that many of the field’s most beloved works — from Star Wars to Terminator to the original Dune novels — are to some degree cringe and juvenile in the world’s eyes. Prestige adaptations like Villeneuve’s Dune soothe this discomfort, and offer a symbolic kind of redemption for the genre as a whole. They recognize the merit of an IP while also conforming it to more sophisticated, adult tastes.2 They represent a longed-for maturation, even a succession of sorts (see the refrain that Dune: Part 2 is the new, or better, Empire Strikes Back). The prestige genre film rescues mother sci-fi from the cringe geek father and weds her to the next and more artistic generation. No Glup Shittos in sight! Audiences can maintain their dignity and feel assured that they’re evangelizing not only as fans, but as aesthetes and deep thinkers as well.3
Occupying this high-quality niche is Villeneuve’s strength — he wouldn’t have found work on such consistent, massive projects otherwise. He’s a stunning visual worldbuilder, and has an intuitive understanding and respect for any source material that he adapts. (He took on Blade Runner, he says, out of protective obligation: he couldn’t let “someone else fuck it up.”) He simply doesn’t allow bad results to happen. No wonky-looking shot or stupid dialogue or dud scene ever makes it into a Villeneuve film. He knows exactly what decisions work for big-screen sci-fi; he operates on a psychic connection with his audience as far as tastes and sensibilities go. To borrow a phrase from Frank Herbert, he’s a diamond-cutter, and can discern precisely how to strike an IP to get really, really good results.
But these powers of discernment end up being Villeneuve’s biggest constraint. Part 2 delivers excellence, but it’s a very standard excellence, peak cinema by every established metric: the monochrome beige desert, the Hans Zimmer bwaaaahs, the Fremen eyes which are blue but not too blue. The Harkonnen planet (black-and-white! ominous!) and brief embryonic imagery that references 2001 are the closest brushes with visual weirdness we’re allowed. The composition of each shot is monumental — DP Greig Fraser is the world’s best — but the not-so-quiet thesis behind every image just seems to be “we fucking made Dune!” Take a look at this huge shot of this important thing. Or this huge shot of this important thing. Hours in, the project still feels like it’s announcing itself. The self-concerned energy is even in the sound design, if you listen close enough. Drums! … Guns! … Worm!… Boom! … Thoom!… DUNE! … DUNE!
Given Dune’s troubled cinematic history, this kind of tautology was probably inevitable, no matter who ended up directing the big reboot. Post-Lynch, any Dune project would’ve had to be approached with extreme self-consciousness, and would have to grapple with its own existence and importance. It could never have been just a movie, in the same way that the Cubs could never play the ‘16 World Series as just a game. Too much importance was assigned, too many hungry fans, too many stinging memories of failure. It did need to be perfect, and not in an experimental, arthouse way. As far as film history is concerned, Dune was probably the greatest “don’t fuck up” project of all time — and it was perfect for the greatest “can’t let anybody else fuck it up” director of our time.
The acting is excellent, and performances largely conform to the atmosphere of deadly seriousness. There are, however, some welcome breaks. As Stilgar, Paul Maud’Dib’s first ride-or-die believer, Javier Bardem gives Part 2’s best and most enjoyable performance: fatherly and giddy, proud of his adopted son/savior. Functionally, Stilgar serves the same function as Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa) in Part 1: a side character in whom the entire comic relief is carefully contained as early as possible. Another standout is Josh Brolin, who, as minstrel-soldier Gurney Halleck, gets to have his baliset this time around. He reunites with Paul, shouting “Young pup!!!” and slamming him with a bear hug. Brolin is a Dune stan (apparently, Villeneuve would call him up at 3 a.m. with ideas he got in dreams, and he co-wrote the baliset song with Hans Zimmer, to say nothing of his poetry about the cast). It’s wonderful to see him relishing each second of this film. Bardem and Brolin are entrusted with all the gaiety Part 2 allows: the rest of the cast — from the stone-faced Harkonnens to Lady Jessica, now a scheming madwoman — are operating in full grimdark mode. As Chani, Maud’Dib’s lover turned main critic (an arc inspired by Ali in Lawrence of Arabia?), Zendaya acts the hell out of the Stern, Intelligent Young Woman Tragically Unheeded by a Backwards World; so too does Florence Pugh as Princess Irulan. One day, peak cinema will give us a more complex type of feminist heroine, but not today. Villeneuve and co-writer Jon Spaihts know exactly what will land with audiences, and it’s steel-eyed intensity from start to finish.
Overall, structural changes from the book are artful, and enhance the horrible, unstoppable momentum of Paul Maud’Dib’s transformation into genocidal superbeing. The massacre of his adoptive Fremen home, Seitch Tabr, is upgraded from a minor event late in the novel to a turning point around the middle of the film. It throws a clear switch in Paul’s mind: enraged, he finally embraces his repressed desires to transcend and tyrannize. The film’s best moment is undoubtedly Paul’s speech as he assumes command of the Fremen people, screamed into a vast underground chamber filled with huddled bodies. He converts the skeptics with his gift of prophesy, brings the naysayers to their knees, and whips them all into a frenzy with a vow to “lead [them] to Paradise.” Timothée Chalamet is wide-eyed, a destroyer of worlds. In a movie full of very cool, that scene was a holy fuck.
Dune: Part 2 is a grand accomplishment that represents Villeneuve at his almost-best. And I say almost, because when a director is that skilled, that capable, that visionary, he shouldn’t merely give what we want: he should teach us new things to want. Here’s hoping that he has that leeway with Messiah.
Epilogue: Is Dune OUR Lord of the Rings/Star Wars?
(1) No
(2) Obviously not
(3) After Star Wars came out in 1977, my dad and his neighborhood friends would resell gas station hot dogs and slushies at a homemade stand they built the curb, just to make enough money to see it again. They made their own book of quotes and drawings of key scenes so they wouldn’t forget how it went. I called him to ask about this period in his life and he started making lightsaber noises. My father is not even a nerd.
(4) When The Lord of the Rings came out, my brother and I (in turn) asked this poor man to tell us nightly stories about Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli for a year until he physically and mentally could not do it any more.
(drop your own Star Wars/LOTR stories below)
(5) What kid is doing this for the Dune movies? They’re made for cinephile adults. None of their dour characters are endearing or cool enough to evoke the same deep affection in people’s hearts as those from LOTR/SW. And that’s okay. That’s not ever what Herbert’s Dune was for.
(6) We have such desire for Nerd Things to be grandiose events. Deep down we loathe the cringiness of Star Wars and the loserdom that it confers on us, but O we envy its heyday — envy the mass cultural festival it was, the summer-break-long Woodstock, envy the people (like my dad) who got to bask in its energy. Now we’re adults, and our brains are wired to care about things like soft-brutalist set design, color grading, the subtle vicissitudes of critical discourse on X or Y. Like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, we yearn touch the beautiful and glowing body of a Dumb Thing — but our conditioning pulls back our hand. No! Not unless it references Tarkovsky!4
So, yeah. Dune is the film for us now. Peak cinema: cerebral, perfect, tight, controlled, mature. A grown-up thing that we must appreciate and discuss in a grown-up way.
We can’t go back. Dune is our Star Wars.
That’s our curse!
Note: this footage is fake
Notes and addenda in this footnote5
In this regard, it’s similar to Barbie: who can forget those mantras of subversive masterpiece, so much more than just a toy movie, what it’s like to be a woman, etc. And as with Barbie, everybody seems to have a willful naivete about the whole thing. Dune was Villeneuve’s “gamble”? Of course it was, in the way that only a film series adapted from the best-selling science fiction novel of all time, with a combined budget of $165 and $190 million each, starring every major actor in Hollywood, produced by two of the world’s biggest studios, with every frame curated by the best DP and effects team in Hollywood, whose every publicity moment was carefully managed to go viral, could be remotely construed as a “gamble.” Legendary Pictures signed Villeneuve to make Part 1 in 45 seconds. Zendaya’s in it. It grossed half a billion dollars and won 6 Oscars. “Was the popcorn bucket intentional?” Of course it fucking was. If you’re a critic or a platformed filmbro still rehashing starry-eyed “prodigal son” taking-on-Hollywood fantasies about Villeneuve and Dune, you deserve to be mounted in the Rotten Tomatoes Jagdschloss for the clapping seal you are.
This recent push towards high-middle-brow “taste” can be seen in print SFF as well: authors like China Miéville, N.K. Jemisin, and Jeff VanderMeer come to mind as epitomizing the literary, “win-a-Hugo-but-also-get-profiled-by-the-NYT” style of writing. There’s also the fact that SFF magazines, since the oughts, have made a huge pivot away from entertainment/pulp/popular fiction and lean much more towards MFA-type “speculative literary” fic.
See also how the New Wave marketed itself during the 60s-70s
Sometimes adults try to re-colonize childhood media and reshape it in the adult image. Hence dark reboot grotesqueries like a He-Man show with a death count
Random other thoughts:
The pumps in this movie are just awesome. I refer to the Fremen pumps that render human bodies for water (that fucking suction bag that collapses Jamis’ corpse to half its size!!!), and also the floating biofluid tubes that attend Baron Harkonnen.
Dune Messiah is going to start with the birth of Alia, isn’t it? Since they cut her from Part 2, and it seems like the precise kind of straddling-the-line-between-edgy-and-commercial thing that Villeneuve would do. Think House of the Dragon s1e1 but with less gore.
Remember Paul’s vision of himself flipping around and posing in Fremen armor from Part 1? In Part 2, it’s Chani who ends updoing the same moves and pose! I actually dig this; in the book, Paul’s visions are basically just super-powerful predictive calculations that can change based on data.
I enjoyed it a lot. I think part of the reason film bros are so into Dune online is sort of a backlash against the Disney SW sequel trilogy, and maybe by extent the MCU. Gone are the quippy dialogue and nonsensical and (supposedly) lore-breaking twists, finally sci-fi blockbusters that are also *cinema* are back. Plus I think armchair online fanboys want to invest and be “right” about the Next Big Thing. For me, I was happy to see the story played out effectively on a grand scale and I was happy that Villeneuve gave it a more serious treatment given the weight of what happens in the story (remember Taika Waititi undermining the destruction of Asgard with a joke in Thor 3? I was glad there was almost none of that in both parts of Dune). All of that being said, definitely agree that something like the OG SW trilogy will probably never happen again, but I think Villeneuve took some cues from Empire in particular for part 2.