Will Dune (2020) Be Any Good?
The trailer for part one of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune adaptation hit the internet recently and, to put things mildly, it doesn’t look great. Dune is a somewhat difficult book to adapt, but I also believe Denis Villeneuve is probably the wrong person to adapt it and has assembled the wrong team to help him. The reasons for this stem from not only the trailer, but Denis’ body of work as a whole.
Denis Villeneuve
Denis Villeneuve is one of the best filmmakers in the world right now and is receiving the full “auteur” push that Christopher Nolan got about ten years ago. Denis started off making French language movies in Canada, but a string of English-language successes: Prisoners, Enemy, Sicario, and Arrival, have made him one of the rare filmmakers who is able to bridge the “art” and “commercial” sides of filmmaking, both in terms of his work and public perception of it. The next step was inevitably for studios to grab ahold of him and get him to helm a run of “sophisticated” blockbusters. The first of these, Blade Runner 2049, was an absolute shit show and it’s looking like Dune is in danger of becoming the same.
One big point of concern is that Villeneuve’s style served his early work extremely well, but may end up being a hindrance as the scope of his work grows. The cold, slow, alienating style he deploys in his best work such as Prisoners, Sicario, and Polytechnique serves to enhance those movies greatly. His earlier work is often dark, deathly serious, and intensely intimate, focusing on complex moral or psychological themes and conflicts within a small number of characters. The cold emptiness and matter-of-fact presentation gives his themes room to breathe and creates a natural moment-to-moment tension that permeates even the quietest scenes in his best work. Even in Arrival, a larger budget sci-fi film about alien visitors, this style works because the central conflict and scale is kept at that uncomfortably intimate level, focusing largely on a single person’s attempts to solve a troubling riddle.
This style backfires spectacularly in Blade Runner 2049. 2049 marks Villeneuve’s first attempt at telling a larger-scale story but the entire film feels sterile, inert, and lifeless. The scale of Dune is even greater, and is likely more vulnerable to similar missteps. In contrast to Villeneuve’s earlier work, Dune has a massive cast of characters all jockeying for power in a chaotic and violent world. None of them are especially complicated, but this serves the story’s themes which are less psychological and more sociopolitical in nature: class, religion, war, environmentalism, and the nature of history and how civilizations advance, decline, and rebuild. Whether or not Villeneuve can make something like Dune feel appropriately grand or epic is yet to be seen, but his work so far is not particularly promising.
The Trailer
The trailer does the film no favors whatsoever. Right off the bat the whole films seems to be shot in drab monochrome designed to make the bizarre, alien, and exciting world of Arrakis seem as dull and uninteresting as possible. Monochromatic color schemes work well in Prisoners and Sicario, but for Dune and 2049 they’re generally a bad idea. In addition, the art direction seems quite uninteresting, with much of the action taking place in minimally decorated empty rooms, hallways, or outdoors. Hopefully this isn’t indicative of the final product as something as visually imaginative as Dune deserves a better representation. Then there’s the awful rendition of Pink Floyd’s “Eclipse” droning over the action, which feels woefully out of place.
One puzzling piece is the prominence of Dave Bautista’s Glossu Raban, which feels silly given that his character is relatively unimportant compared to major villains like Baron Harkonnen and Feyd-Rautha. Knowing that this Dune extravaganza will be a 2-parter and no one has been announced to play Feyd-Rautha, I wouldn’t be surprised if Feyd-Rautha is left out of the first movie entirely save for a little tease at the very end, and that Glossu Raban is the main villain for the first installment. This would fall in line with a particularly idiotic trend in modern blockbusters where early films in a series have terrible villains so they can build up to the cool ones later. A perfect example of this is how the makers of Justice League decided to feature Steppenwolf, a character no one has ever heard of, as the main villain instead of someone more interesting just so they could tease at Darkseid and have him appear way down the line in some film that will now never be made. It’s a bad idea proven to deliver bad results.
Perhaps the worst offense shown in the trailer, other than being irredeemably boring, is the King of Cringe Timothee Chalamet as the hero Paul Atriedes. Chalamet is an actor who is often very difficult to watch, possessing almost no charisma whatsoever yet continually being cast in roles demanding he rely on this non-existent resource. Even worse is that Paul Atriedes’ character arc, the transformation of a naive prince into a hardened king, is virtually identical to the character arc of Henry V in David Michod’s 2019 dud, The King, also starring Chalamet. In effect, we’ve already seen Chalamet try and fail at this exact character in another movie, and the Dune trailer doesn’t inspire much confidence that the 2nd time around will be dramatically different.
Ending on Some Positives
Besides Chalamet, the rest of the cast looks pretty good. It’s nice to see that some of the characters are finally being played by actors who fit the physical description. It took nearly 40 years for an Asian guy to finally play Dr. Yueh (an Asian character), so kudos to the casting director on that one. In addition, the Fremen are meant to be a group of dark-skinned desert dwellers so it’s nice to finally see someone like Zendaya cast as the Fremen character Chani as opposed to, say, Sean Young. Also Javier Bardem is swarthy enough, I guess.
The sandworm looks pretty cool as well, which is something considering how inundated we are the CGI these days to the point where it’s hard to be impressed anymore. Another nice touch was the representation of Holtzman shields. Holtzman shields are energy fields emitted from a device on character’s belts that are able to block objects moving at high speeds, like bullets, but allow in slower objects like air or swords (which is why all the combat is sword-oriented). This sort of special effect is difficult to pull off in a movie, but the team here have done a good job if the trailer is any indication.
All in all, while the trailer shows some redeeming qualities, it doesn’t inspire much confidence for the film and it leads me to worry that this latest Dune adaptation, like the others before it, is doomed to failure.
