I attempted to watch the 2021 (CE) ‘Dune’ last night and had high expectations. I was disappointed and gave up after an hour or so. However, I should point out I was of necessity watching it in HD rather than 4K on an 80 cm telly without surround sound, about which I was already trepid due to the fact that it seems to be very much a cinematic experience. The best, or possibly only, way to watch it is probably in an IMAX cinema.
I’ve been putting it off for a while. When it was first released, the Covid issue and other reasons why I’m tied to this house prevented me from going to see it as it was “intended”, but I heard good reports about it. Later on, the rental price was ridiculously high, at something like £15.99, which was also off-putting. I can understand the need to recoup costs in difficult circumstances, so I’m not just going to put that down, as many others have, to greed on the part of the studio. I do wonder if the strategy worked, since it’s now been reduced.
But then I ask myself, if a film relies on spectacle for its impact, is it actually worthwhile anyway? Sometimes I think it is. For instance, there’s an ’80s film I can’t track down about a woman going blind which is visually very lavish because it emphasises what she’s losing. I also understand that another SF film, ‘2001 – A Space Odyssey’, hugely benefits from being seen in its original form in Cinerama. Incidentally, a number of films made in the late ’60s and early ’70s have a “trippy” scene like the one in ‘2001’, such as ‘Charly’ and ‘Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory’, with the tunnel scene, which very much chime with the Zeitgeist and exploit the medium of cinema well. I’m not sure how the parents of the children watching ‘Willy Wonka’ would’ve felt about the likelihood that that scene may have packed the auditorium out with a load of long-haired smelly hippies, as they would’ve seen them, but there it is.
I actually feel quite strongly that science fiction cinema should be low-budget and have low production values. ‘Primer’ and ‘The Cube’ both have tiny budgets. ‘The Cube’ mainly involves a single set lit in different ways to make it look like different rooms and cost only $350 000. ‘Primer’ was much lower, at $7000. Even ‘Dark Star’ only cost $60 000, although that was mid-’70s so in 2021 dollars that would be 350,000 (I’m having trouble with the blog editor messing up number formatting here). SF is a number of things, but for me two aspects of it are crucial. One is that it’s a genre where ideas replace protagonists, or perhaps are the protagonists, as with the Big Dumb Object approach seen in ‘Rendezvous With Rama’ and ‘Ringworld’, but often in more abstract ways as in ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’. The other is that it has to be fiction whose plot depends non-trivially on the setting. I came up with this criterion specifically to exclude ‘Star Wars’, which I hate and despise, from the genre. The ‘Star Wars’ franchise has many issues, but a significant one is that it attempts to tell sword and sorcery fantasy tales in a space opera setting to demonstrate that certain aspects of the human condition are eternal and universal, and this means that the setting only exists to demonstrate that things are still the same, even though the characters don’t even share ancestry with Homo sapiens. There is nothing wrong in principle with fiction whose plot is independent of the setting or even trivially dependent upon it, although I suspect that the execrable ‘Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency’ is this so there is a risk of poor quality because of that, but it does place it outside the genre.
‘Dune’ was significantly heavily plundered by George Lucas for ‘Star Wars’ although the latter has many other elements which are not linked, such as Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, and probably Tolkien too. This is unfortunate for a 2021 film though, because it may give the viewer the impression that it’s derivative rather than ‘Star Wars’. It’s very like the tendency for children’s CGI films to be pre-empted by inferior copies being released earlier because they take less time to render than the better quality Pixar films, which happened a lot in the ‘noughties. Without the awareness that Frank Herbert invented a lot of the tropes which ended up in George Lucas’s films, ‘Dune’ looks like a rip-off of that franchise, when it very much is not.
The problem with big budgets in films is that they are often used to make them visually impressive while detracting from the quality of the script and plot. It would be unfair to accuse ‘Dune’ the film of having too many fight scenes because the book also has those, but I remember thinking that the film of ‘Prince Caspian’ was completely ruined by having a ridiculously long battle scene in it, presumably because it needed to compete with ‘Lord Of The Rings’. Herbert did take pains to force his future universe to behave as if it was like our world of a few centuries ago, by outlawing AI and contriving to make melée weapons necessary, so the presence of long, tedious fight scenes and a fair bit of associated machismo is at least in keeping with the tone of the book. This is also balanced by the rôle of soft power and women in the story, although to describe the manipulations of the Bene Gesserit as “soft power” isn’t really accurate. At the same time, there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with a film mainly being a spectacle, and it might even make sense to go further in that direction to keep cinemas alive.
One way in which ‘Dune’ bucks the trend, inherited from the novel itself, is its positive portrayal of Middle Eastern culture and the associations with Islam. Being written in 1965, Herbert’s story long pre-dates the resurgence of Islamophobia in the ‘noughties. That said, it does very much portray religion as primarily an instrument of social control, although there is also the apparent existence of psi abilities. In the film, the latter is clearly present. The author appears to treat Arab culture and Islam respectfully throughout the first novel (I say that because I haven’t read any further). It’s refreshing to see that done in a 2021 Hollywood blockbuster.
I’ve got this far without mentioning the David Lynch version! One of the many problems with that appalling version was that it had an all-White cast when none of the protagonists in the novel were White. This is addressed to some extent in the casting of Villeneuve’s version, although it would be difficult to portray the thorough mixing of ethnicities the novelist assumes to have happened in the many intervening millennia. Evolution has also altered Fremen physiology, so there are biological differences, some of which are genetically engineered, and there are also millennia-long breeding programmes which are supposed to reach their climax in the birth of Jessica’s daughter, but the problem is that she chose to have a son first.
One positive from the previous film is that it at least attempts to portray the space-folding technique used to travel between the stars, although in a very weird and off-putting way. This is completely absent from the new version, which is significant because Spice is economically central to the Imperium as a means of enabling interstellar travel. It would’ve helped to have shown that in order to emphasise the in-universe realities of its central position.
Herbert advocates a right-wing position in his novel, that the basic state of human society is feudal. He was also writing against Asimov’s ‘Foundation’ series, where sociological predictability is central and the emergence of a mutant who can influence society through their new abilities disrupts the plan for preserving civilisation. This was a quasi-socialist position, although Asimov was merely a liberal. Herbert’s reply to Asimov is to portray a society where an individual mutant, or at least a carefully bred sport whose existence depends on an individual decision to go against the plan, makes a huge positive difference to a society. The way Hollywood works is to have heroines and heroes struggle against enormous difficulties and achieve resolution through strength of character, although there is sometimes emphasis on teamwork and family values too. ‘Dune’ lends itself fairly well to this approach. The approach, however, seems to be carefully engineered to bring a situation which reproduces the social conditions of the European Middle Ages. The emphasis on families wielding power can be seen as arising from powerful companies, as it sometimes does today, but on the whole large capitalist enterprises are more democratic than that because of shares and floatation on the stock market. I don’t think it’s really explained how humanity ended up back in the position of having powerful houses, religious organisations and guilds controlling everything when it had become thoroughly capitalist by the twentieth Christian century.
All this, though, may be the reason I didn’t enjoy the film. It’s a bit like ‘The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe’ in a way. You get to the very end of the span of time during which intelligent life exists, and the economic system is still as it ever was, there has never been a utopia and so forth. Likewise, ‘Dune’ is estimated to be set something like 30 000 years in the future, which is a lot closer to the present day, but the basic social order is not criticised so much as taken as a given. I think I would prefer a world to be presented either as a utopia or dystopia. That said, it may be more realistic to recognise the future as neither, and again this chimes with what political conservatives would see as realism. Moreover, this was in the original novel. If it comes across in the film too, that would seem to be a successful adaptation rather than either a failing or a negative aspect of the work.
When it comes down to it, what I think has happened is that I haven’t really seen ‘Dune’ and may not in fact ever do so. In order to see this film, you have to go to the cinema, and possibly to an IMAX to watch it. I didn’t do this, so maybe I haven’t got any valid grounds for criticism. Nonetheless I did rapidly lose interest. My fault probably.
A Box Of Chocolates 