Dune (Part I) Review
It was far too beautiful an afternoon to spend in a movie theater, but I did spend it anyway because my wife has been longing to see this new movie for months. The novel at least is something that has meant a great deal to me; I read it each time before deploying to Iraq, because its intense politics of assassination was a great way to get into the mindset of the business at hand.
Many people have long desired a new Dune movie. The 1984 adaptation is a better movie than it often gets credited for being, and comparisons with this movie make that clear. This new movie, like the deplorable recent Hobbit adaptation, has decided to spin out into multiple movies what was done in just one in 1984. Perhaps because they thought all that extra time would give them time to spare, they edited with much less care. Every minute of the 1984 movie is spent telling the story; this one spends a lot of time playing out visual spectacles (even repetitive ones, like multiple landings of spacecraft when one would have done, or when it might have been omitted).
Yet the 2021 movie ends up leaving out a lot of the story that the 1984 film conveyed in a shorter time frame. One now never sees the Emperor or hears of his court, nor meets his daughter -- the ultimate political object of the action of the film being her marriage to the protagonist and its subsequent conveyance of the throne onto him. One does not meet several other major characters. Exactly what the order of Bene Gesserit women is up to is spelled out in sketch rather than detail. It's quite surprising how deficient the storytelling is given that they had a lot more time.
The characters, mostly, are not as well portrayed. The exception is the Harkonnens, who are definite improvements over the clownish 1984 villains. These are much more believably malicious, though again important details are left out, as are major characters.
In especial the film completely misunderstands the Lady Jessica, who is portrayed here as emotional, weak, and brittle. I cannot understand how anyone read the novel and came to the conclusion that this was the right way to portray her. Perhaps they meant to give her a longer character arc, but that was an error if so. Her character arc was long enough even starting as a master of politics and her arts, of extreme personal discipline that gave way only occasionally out of her capacity for deep love. This version of her is vastly less admirable, which diminishes the whole.
Paul's arc always started weak, but this Paul is especially weak. Weak men seems to be the style of the era. The Duncan Idaho character (very well played by Jason Momoa, as was Duke Leto by his actor) even mocks his lack of muscle in lines the film added to enhance his pathetic stature. This is a model well-familiar to audiences of contemporary movies; it was the one used for Hiccup in How to Train Your Dragon. It is not quite right for a story set in a world as harsh as Dune's.
Thurfir Hawat is depicted as a fat clown in a swollen uniform who fails at everything. This is entirely a betrayal of the logician and mathematician who is also a deadly Master of Assassins. Hawat was one of the strongest characters in the novel, and is almost a nonentity here.
There are the usual irritating submissions to the idol of diversity, including turning the planetary ecologist and Judge of the Change into a black female for no other reason. The Fremen, being the good guys, are depicted as a relatively diverse coalition of Africans and Arabs. This is an attempt to portray them as if they were contemporary Muslims -- who really are diverse -- rather than as the novel's intended aboriginal population of a desert planet, whose faith is not Islam but a future creation inspired in some ways by Islam and in some ways by Bene Gesserit manipulations (again, only hinted at in this film).
So, for the most part, this was an inferior production even compared to the 1984 rendition that is often panned for its cartoonishness. Where it excelled, very much, was in its visuals and audibles. The Voice is conveyed well using improved audio technology; the visuals are often quite stunning. The shields used in the sword and knife fighting are much improved over the silly CGI of the 1984 edition, and the depiction of weapons technology also very much better. It definitely does not come off as cartoonish; it's just not good in many important ways.
The sandworms are, I think, a kind of draw. The new ones move more like living beings, and have their own plausibility; but the 1984 sandworms remain very strong characterizations.
Worth watching to see the visuals; quite disappointing on substance.
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