Dune

Paul AtreiDes (timotheé Chalamet) and Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) encounter a sandworm by night in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune

Here’s a movie review I didn’t expect to write. I read Frank Herbert’s novel Dune a few years ago, and while I enjoyed it and it impressed me with its mass of involving detail, I honestly didn’t see what all the fuss was about. When news of Denis Villeneuve’s film adaptation arrived, I was interested—I’ve liked all of Villeneuve’s movies that I’ve seen so far, especially Sicario—but not at all eager. I’d catch it eventually.

Fortunately for me, a good friend insisted we see it at the first available opportunity, and in IMAX. That was last night. Here I am the morning after to tell you to go see it.

Dune depicts the travails of House Atreides, a noble family in a galactic empire 8,000 years from now. The Atreides have been mortal foes of House Harkonnen, a family of sybaritic grotesques who combine love of power with ruthless self-interest. As Dune begins, we learn that the Atreides, led by Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac), have just been given the planet of Arrakis in fief by the emperor, ousting the Harkonnens after generations of monopoly control of the planet and its single valuable resource—spice, a substance with medicinal and hallucinogenic properties that also enables intergalactic space flight. Leto and his wife, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) and son Paul (Timothée Chalamet) are unhappy with the move but answer the emperor’s call.

Arrakis is an all-desert planet, hot, inhospitable, and lethal without careful and precisely calibrated technological controls in place. Not only its climate but its native life post a threat, specifically the Fremen, hostile tribal bands that have somehow found a way to eke out a living in the desert, and—towering above all in size and significance, and the source and guardian of the precious spice—the sandworms. Leto’s task now, as the newly appointed lord of Arrakis, is to harvest the spice, defend the harvesters from the sandworms, and defend everything from the attacks of the Fremen. His solution is to adapt his noble family’s traditional techniques to a new environment—rather than the air and sea power they enjoyed on their homeworld, they will develop desert power by gaining the trust of the much-abused Fremen and allying with them.

But despite their best efforts, the Atreides and their followers catch on quickly that they’ve been presented with an unmanageable situation, trying to meet quotas with outdated and poorly maintained equipment and with assassins secreted in the walls of their palace. The Harkonnens have a long reach and clearly want Arrakis back, and, worse, it appears the Emperor is on their side, having set the Atreides up to fail and provide a pretext for a Harkonnen strike. The clash that comes midway through the movie is the beginning of a breakneck series of attacks, flights, and attempts merely to survive that culminates in Paul’s duel to the death with a Fremen challenger.

Does that sound like a lot? It’s the simplest I could make it, and my summary still obscures the fact that it is Paul, the teenaged scion of House Atreides, who is the main character. There is also the forbidding all-female Bene Gesserit cult to which Lady Jessica belongs, a sort of Goddess Illuminati manipulating the noble houses of the empire according to plans of their own; a band of savage imperial mercenaries hired on by the Harkonnens; and Arrakis’s resident ecologist, who is legally obligated to remain a neutral functionary of the empire but chooses to take sides.

And more. And more. And more.

That’s the greatest accomplishment of Villeneuve’s Dune—taking a vast world of intricate politics, religion, trade, ecology, and mythology and making it comprehensible. I had to explain all of that background. In the film, most of it is shown; we pick up on it just by watching, the way movies are supposed to work. While in a few places the filmmakers do cave and have a video lecture instruct Paul directly on particular aspects of Arrakis’s zoology or culture, those places are few and far between. Furthermore, even as we’re learning about this strange, fantastical, and complicated world through the first half, the story keeps moving. This is a two-and-a-half hour movie that, despite the weight of weird information it has to convey, never slows down and goes by in a flash.

It’s also well-cast and acted, with an especially strong supporting cast. My favorites among those were Jason Momoa as Duncan Idaho, Paul’s tutor in the arts of war, and Javier Bardem as the weary but canny Fremen leader Stilgar. Stellan Skarsgard’s obese voluptuary Vladimir Harkonnen is legitimately scary and revolting, a hard combination to pull off. (Near the end I told a buddy in the theater with me that if we got one more scene with the Harkonnens I just might puke.)

Furthermore, the leads are all very good. Oscar Isaac and Rebecca Ferguson, one of my favorite actresses, are excellent as an oddly matched pair of nobles united by their love and duty toward their son. And Timothée Chalamet, an actor I’ve never, ever liked in anything I’ve seen him in (recall that he gave us a “punchable” Henry V in The King), is outstanding here—naively eager, devotedly learning from his father and tutors (when was the last time you saw a kid learning from his elders in a movie?), and rising to the occasion when the crucial moment arrives. He was very good, buoyed by a terrific supporting cast, and actually made Paul more likeable, to me, than the cipher in the book.

Dune is also technically brilliant, with a rich variety of exotic but believable sets, amazing but not impractical costumes and props, and an attention to detail, protocol, and ritual in the way the characters interact that made this feel like a real, lived-in, limitless world. Herbert’s novel accomplished this total immersion cumulatively—by the time you reach the end, the wealth of detail and brilliantly evoked locations and events make you feel like you’ve spent years in this fictional world. The film accomplishes this through texture. All of its visuals are brilliantly tactile. It all feels so real and so right that, near the end, I had grown intolerably thirsty, felt like I had grit in my clothes, and had a nagging worry about inhaling the spice that drifts sparkling through the frame whenever the characters enter the desert. I haven’t felt this physically involved in a movie’s images since Saving Private Ryan.

If I have any complaints, they’re relatively minor. The film is heavily frontloaded with exposition, but gets moving immediately and levels out in the first ten minutes. Zendaya felt out of place as Chani, the Fremen girl Paul has visions and dreams of. She works well enough as the subject of a vision or dream, staring ethereally at Paul just before he wakes, but once she arrives in the flesh her line delivery sounded stiff and forced. Hopefully she’ll be better in the sequel. Also, while the movie looks stunning and is mostly well-shot, night-time scenes near the end are entirely too gloomily lit by cinematographer Greig Fraser, with faces sometimes entirely in shadow and the iconic sandworm in one scene (see the screenshot above) hard to make out. I had a hard time even telling who was who in one crucial scene.

I’ve also heard one complaint elsewhere that I’ll push back on. The title card at the beginning of the movie reads, pointedly, Dune: Part One. The movie gets us about halfway through the book. At least one critic has complained of the abruptness of the ending, but I actually found the place and the moment in the story where the filmmakers chose to leave off appropriate and satisfying, a natural break in the story. I certainly left looking forward to part two.

There’s much more I could point out—the excellent score by Hans Zimmer; the eerie sound design; the skillful use of IMAX for particular scenes; the stunning real life locations, including Jordanian desert where parts of Lawrence of Arabia were also shot—but what I intended as a short review has gotten long enough. (Addendum: I will also point out that, if intense, Dune is refreshingly clean. This is a brand new sci-fi epic you could watch with your kids.)

Dune is a well-crafted, well-acted, thoughtful, and exciting movie that takes place in a fantastical but grounded and believable world, and takes its time to tell a story and tell it well. And not only that, but the characters, plot, and themes all have substance. That makes a film like Dune vanishingly rare nowadays, and I was heartened not only to be surprised by it, but to watch it in a theatre full of other people who also clearly enjoyed it. Whether you’re an old fan of the books or just like good movies, Dune is well worth your time.