Reading Frank Herbert’s genre-defining science-fiction epic for the first time as a teenager, I often found myself out of my depth. But the images it conjured in my head created a sensation of mystery and dazed disorientation that was wholly appropriate to any venture into uncharted landscapes. Like navigating the labyrinth of a dream, it felt right to feel lost. The thrill takes hold when we willingly trust great artists to show us where we’re going.
Paul Atreides in Dune is plagued by dreams that anticipate fearsome realities, and to read Frank Herbert’s novel is to feel the same sensation of hallucinatory dread. Remarkably, director Denis Villeneuve says when he was 12 or 13 years old he and a childhood friend began sketching storyboards for Dune.
More than four decades later, the dreams of his youth have been made manifest by a visionary adaptation of one of the most visionary science fiction epics ever written. Rarely are movie-lovers lucky enough to witness a 40-year creative convergence like this come to such splendid fruition.
Above all, Dune is an exceptional visual experience. Sand and dust swirl with such ferocity that the shifting layers of restless alliance and betrayals on Arrakis feel forever ready to spontaneously combust. This is world-building at its most majestic, and its the result of a dedicated team of supremely talented filmmakers.
The muted palette of grays and earth tones is nonetheless dazzling because it’s all so ornately detailed. Although the planet Arrakis is bleached with drought, somehow the barren landscape looks as ravishing as the austere but magnificent palace interiors. Within minutes of the opening credits, we realize Dune is much more a work of art than any hardcore science fiction film in recent memory.
Credit for that all-encompassing awe goes to the extraordinary imagination of the film’s collaborators across every branch. Greig Fraser’s cinematography serves up an endless procession of perfect shots with stark and arid imagery that makes Dune’s otherworldly vistas feel so real. Few cinematographers are able to create memorable cinematic moments across so many genres, and yet every movie he shoots carries his unique artistic thumbprint.
Patrice Vermette’s majestic production design manages to be baroque and minimalist at the same time, and pulls off the difficult trick of creating settings that feel both ancient and futuristic. The sophisticated and surprisingly witty costume design by Jaqueline West and Bob Morgan nimbly envision the fashions of distant galaxies with their high-tech haute couture. The makeup and hairstyles devised by Donald Mowat, Love Larson and Eva Von Bahr are equally adept at enhancing a character’s beauty or encapsulating their evil. Dune’s incredible visual effects team pull together each of these eye-popping elements and seamlessly integrates them into sweeping panoramas. Interior details seem to draw on artistic legacies thousands of years older than humanity has existed. Mammoth interstellar transports throb with ponderous bulk, soar with foreboding grace, and the entirety of all this lavish imagination never ceases to astonish.
The complex knots of Dune’s monumental saga are more than any stand-alone movie can untangle, so the screenplay adaptation by Eric Roth, Villeneuve, and Jon Spaihts grants this tale of intergalactic royal rivalries a stately pace, giving it ample time and space to unfold. In the process it pulls off the near-impossible feat faced by every multiple-part film series: its faithful yet daringly unorthodox narrative structure manages to satisfy audience expectations while arousing our appetite for more.
As one of the few directors working today who manages to bridge the gap between big budget crowd-pleasers and the critically acclaimed art house fare that typically garner awards attention, Villeneuve once again gives us the best of both worlds. Dune is a sprawling epic enormous enough to fill an IMAX screen, sensational enough to bring movie-lovers back to theaters, and artful enough to elevate and reinvigorate the very idea of literate franchise filmmaking.
Never a director afraid to explore extremes, Denis Villeneuve has an eye for ethereal beauty and an equal relish for the grotesque. Dune, like most of his films, insinuates a cautionary warning for mankind without ever clanging the alarm too hard. His massive adaptation of Dune honors the message of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel about the catastrophic folly of exploiting a home-world’s resources, as well as illustrating how blind faith in any messiah is a fast path to exploit society’s most sinister tendencies toward madness.
Beneath its awe-inspiring vistas of a future that stretches the boundaries of imagination, Dune offers more grounded, profound and timely lessons about how any culture, no matter how powerful, can be undone whenever humanity sacrifices sanity to the worst impulses of misguided or megalomaniacal leaders.
“Dreams are messages from the deep”
Those words serve as an onscreen preamble before the dream of Dune begins. They do not appear in the novel, but they serve to reinforce the scope of Denis Villeneuve’s intention from the outset. Each of his films have an uncanny way of fully immersing us in their near-virtual worlds, and they all share the same dreamlike qualities that deftly lift us aloft as we cling to the edge of our seats. We never really know what to expect from one scene to the next, but we’re never disappointed when we find out. Villeneuve’s films hold onto us until the very last second, when he finally releases us back into the real world. A world no less wondrous and sadly no less treacherous and destructive than the galactic tragedies that Dune first envisioned for humanity nearly 50 years ago.
