Dune vs Dune
Frank Herbert’s Dune is famous primarily for being the permanent favourite book of the r/books sub-reddit, but it’s also gained a minor reputation as a seminal sci-fi classic.
A few years ago I read it for the first time and didn’t really like it all that much, so when the new movie was announced I didn’t pay much attention. Until, that is, I found out it was being helmed by my boy Denis Villeneuve, director of Enemy, Sicario, Arrival and Blade Runner 2049. Those last two happen to be among my favourite movies of the last ten years, so I was willing to sit through a story I didn’t much care for if it came with some of that patented Villeneuve visual flair.
In this post I’m going to briefly go over why I didn’t like the book, then review the movie to compare and contrast.
The Book
Dune is a sci-fi epic on the more fantastical end of the grand space opera spectrum. It’s some time in the very far future and the galaxy is under the control of an empire with a vaguely feudal setup, which means you’ve got a collection of great houses who all swear fealty to the space emperor but also are free to war amongst themselves for power and riches, as long as doing so doesn’t directly contravene one of the emperor’s orders.
The story concerns itself mainly with the fortunes of house Atreides, whose patriarch Duke Leto Atreides is having some problems with his son, Paul. Between the prophetic dreams and the attention from the mysterious Bene Gesserit order, Paul is showing worrying signs of becoming the protagonist in a fantasy novel. Before the Duke can put a stop to this irresponsible behaviour, house Atreides is unexpectedly granted stewardship of the desert world Arrakis, source of the psychogenic “spice” that allows for interstellar navigation. This seems like a major coup for the family, both because control of Arrakis brings in mad bank and also because the planet had up until this point been owned by longtime Atreides enemies house Harkonnen, but the Duke and his allies suspect–correctly, it turns out–that the appointment might be some sort of trap.
Unable to turn down an order from the emperor no matter how strong their misgivings, the family decamps to Arrakis and is almost immediately thrust into a war whose outcome will decide far more than just the fate of house Atreides–because Arrakis is the staging ground for a centuries-long plot by the Bene Gesserit to reshape the entire empire, and young Paul is right at the center of it.
Looking at Dune this far after its release, it can be difficult to appreciate what made it so popular at the time. The story is a very standard bildungsroman fantasy yarn that just happens to be set on a desert planet instead of a medieval kingdom (and even then, the distinction isn’t that concrete–the book goes through some elaborate worldbuilding twists to explain why everyone is still fighting with swords in the far future), and which pulls some clever dickery with the “chosen one” narrative instead of playing it completely straight. To a modern audience it’s not doing anything at all new (and might not have been so new when it came out: the aforementioned clever dickery around the prophecy was already a known trope in 1965).
But on the other hand, it feels that way largely because we’re on the other side of sixty years of later Sf and fantasy bildungsroman, many of which were inspired directly by Dune. It’s a difficult situation to be in as a critic, because while I can acknowledge on an intellectual level that many of the book’s plot elements only feel derivative because of the passage of time, that doesn’t change the fact that they feel derivative. Maybe other people can make themselves forget all the more recent books they’ve read that did this same shit and approach a work like Dune as though they’re time-traveling back to the date of its publication, but I’m not one of those people.
Not that I’m giving Dune a pass due to its age. In fact, my biggest problems with the book have nothing to do with its publication date and would have been just as jarring today as they were when it first came out. Chief among these is the way the book completely falls apart in the last third. After taking its sweet-ass time to set things up and tell its story–not necessarily a bad thing, mind–the last third suddenly barrels forward at lightning speed, as though Frank Herbert realized he was coming up to a publisher-mandated word count limit.This rush to finish the story as fast as possible leaves behind a trail of unfulfilled character arcs and clumsily discarded themes, as the book’s concluding chapters frequently seem to have little connection to the ones that came before them.
But the biggest problem with Dune is its protagonist, Paul Atreides, who is a very special magical destiny boy and as such is extremely similar to all the other special magical destiny boys, even if his magical destiny boy status is caused by eugenics and a self-fulfilling prophecy engineered by a coven of space witches instead of, like, the Force or something. He has essentially no character whatsoever, until he takes an extra-large hit of the good spice and then suddenly he develops one, more or less out of nowhere. Most of his character development consists of him acquiring information from psychic visions, or doing things that he has no real reason to do (but which conveniently gets the plot moving in the direction Herbert wanted it to go in) at the behest of those same psychic visions.
Because of its sloppy third act and the vacuum that is its protagonist, I walked away from Dune feeling sour on the whole book despite actually quite enjoying most of my time with it. Let’s see if a big heaping of Denis Villeneuve visuals can help remedy that.
The Movie
…Up to a point, that point being more or less halfway through the book, because that’s all this movie covers. This isn’t like the Harry Potter, Hunger Games or Twilight two-part finales where they tried to massage the first chunk into something resembling a stand-alone story; the movie gets to a certain point and then just stops.
It’s not entirely arbitrary, since Paul makes an important decision and makes a firm transition from one stage of his Hero’s Journey arc to the next, but even going into this knowing it was intended as the first part of a duology, I was still startled when I realized the end was approaching. There’s a character arc there, but the actual story is left without anything even remotely resembling a resolution.
The big challenge with a Dune movie isn’t how to handle its ending, but how to handle its beginning. The book is somewhat infamous for being dense, and most of the worldbuilding, back story and terminology that trips people up is front-loaded into the opening chapters. How to deal with this in a movie where people can’t pause and re-read a paragraph or go back a few pages to double check a name is a bit of a daunting task.
Dune the movie takes a double-pronged approach to dealing with this. Sometimes it smartly prioritizes the information the viewer needs to know while not being afraid to leave extraneous details on the cutting room floor, trusting in the viewer to assimilate the important information and figure out what isn’t stated directly. That’s the first prong. The second prong is when the movie completely fucking gives up.This is most evident in the very first scene, which is a clunky montage/infodump by Chani setting up the situation with Arrakis and the departure of house Harkonnon. Even accounting for the fact that the movie’s two and half hour runtime was probably already pushing it with executives and that this whole thing might have been studio-mandated, I refuse to believe there wasn’t a better way to handle the book’s opening chapters.
In fact the entire first act or so of the movie is choppy and clumsily-paced, to the point that I was having grave concerns about how the movie as a whole was going to pan out, but things both slow down and improve considerably once Paul and the fam arrive on Arrakis. It’s here that the movie makes its biggest improvements over the source material: Paul’s visions work better in a visual medium than they did on the page, the movie makes the link between spice and the visions clearer, some storylines that felt like padding in the book are either removed or tied better into the rest of the story.
Unfortunately, the movie can’t overcome the book’s biggest flaws, at least not without making the kinds of major alterations that Villeneuve and crew were clearly not prepared to make. To wit, Paul discovering that his current course of action is going to result in a galactic holy war in his name that he’ll be unable to stop still, like in the original story, feels like a completely arbitrary factor that comes out of nowhere via psychic vision. In fact it’s kind of worse here, because at least the book had established the fact that a galaxy-wide “Jihad” (a term avoided in the movie for obvious reasons) is a thing that’s happened before in the past; in the movie, it comes completely out of left field.
But the book’s biggest hurdle is Paul Atreides himself, and the movie fails to clear it. Paul is if anything even more of a wet noodle here due to a very wet and floppy (and frankly just not very good) performance by Timothee Chalamet that doesn’t at all get across Paul’s transition from personality-free little lord boy to fierce, half-crazed desert prophet-king. I don’t think post-epiphany Paul in the book is a particularly interesting character either, but he’s at least got something going on under the hood.
Still, Villeneuve’s Dune does succeed at being a faster, more accessible way to digest the first half of the original story, and you get tons of trademark Villeneuve Sci-Fi Weird Shit that wasn’t in the book, which is a delight (except for the sand worms, which kind of like look giant buttholes). I’m curious to see what Part 2 is going to be like, as I’m hoping another two and a half hour runtime will give the book’s second half more room to breathe than the original novel did.