Sand, Spice, and Half a Movie: Dune Review

Let me just come right out and say it: If Dune had not gotten approved for a sequel and just remained as a single, giant half-told story, that would have been a major case of blue balls.

Hi.

It’s me, your Below Average Blogger who hasn’t posted in about a month and is belatedly talking about Dune.

But that’s okay. My Below Average Blog, my Below Average rules.

If you don’t want to read any more about Dune because you haven’t seen it yet, all you need to know is that it is very much made for Dune fans. It’s also made for fans of sci-fi films that focus on atmosphere, i.e. Blade Runner or 2001: A Space Odyssey.

That’s not to say it isn’t a fairly nifty experience for newcomers, but this is clearly the Dune movie that fans of Frank Herbert’s novel have been waiting for for decades.

Spoilers ahead!

(Even though the movie came out, like, a month ago, and god, I am so sorry for covering it so late, I shouldn’t apologize, but I can’t help feeling guilty, work has been piling up and now the holidays are here, but I still feel so ashamed for not keeping up with my blogging, guilt is my ever-present companion in life.)

I summarized the first Dune novel pretty concisely (i.e. not concisely at all) in my post about the book a few months ago. So I’m not going to waste anybody’s time in summarizing the plot here. However, you should know that the movie only covers half of what’s in the book. It covers the events from the beginning to right after Paul has his duel with Jamis.

And then it just ends.

This is by far the movie’s biggest flaw. If you were following the sinister plots of the Harkonnens and hoping to uncover the mystery of Paul’s burgeoning powers, then the manner in which this movie ends will leave you reeling. It doesn’t feel like a cliffhanger a la The Empire Strikes Back, so much as it feels like someone cut The Empire Strikes Back in half and said that the movie ends right when Luke has that vision in the tree-cave thing.

It’s strange because the movie covers so much. It has to. World-building, galactic political maneuverings, and genetic manipulation take time to properly explain to an audience. But even though the movie is jam-packed with this kind of exposition, the way it ends leaves the whole thing feeling unfinished.

The second flaw of the movie in my Below Average opinion is how little time is spent developing characters. (Yikes, doesn’t that sound like a dime-store critic’s opinion?) So much of the movie is spent showing the world, which is great, because the world of Dune is so mesmerizing, but it comes at the cost of character development.

For example, Gurney Halleck is this gruff soldier type who stands alongside Duke Leto during the move to Arrakis, but you actually don’t know much about him beyond that. In point of fact, he disappears halfway through the movie and is not seen again; you don’t even miss him when he’s gone.

‘But wait!’ the angry Dune fan might shout at me. ‘Gurney’s a side character. He’s not meant to be developed.’

All right, angry fan. What about Jessica, Paul’s mother? She’s a pretty pivotal character. Would you say you know her motivations?

Of course, if you’ve read the books, you know that Jessica is an ambitious woman who hopes to see her son become the Kwisatz Haderach. She does a lot of things most would consider unseemly in order to achieve this goal.

The movie follows this same plotline, but your understanding of what she gains from it is dramatically lessened.

And Jessica and Gurney are not the only ones who get shafted when it comes to development. Thufir Hawat, who played a prominent role in the book, is largely absent from proceedings. Dr. Yueh, a key player in the fall of House Atreides, only pops in a couple of times before this betrayal. And Rabban’s job in the film, apparently, is to just walk around menacingly without actually doing or saying much.

All of this character development is sacrificed at the altar of sci-fi world-building, and while I do miss it, I’m not actually too torn up about it. Why?

Because the world of Dune is just that fucking cool.

The intricacies of Landsraad politics, the dark training of the Sardaukar, the spice harvesting on Arrakis, the mental powers of the Bene Gesserit, these are all things that interweave to make Dune’s universe a fascinating place. And say what you will about the lack of time spent on character motivations, the clear investment in creating a riveting atmosphere is well worth it.

From the visual designs of hard-to-imagine objects from the books to the musical accompaniments to mostly silent scenes, everything in Dune harmonizes to make you feel like this place exists. It’s not just some fantasy story created in someone’s overactive mind. It’s a real place somewhere out in the unknown reaches of our universe.

And what makes the whole thing even more staggering is the fact that Dune is one of the forefathers of the sci-fi genre. Frank Herbert created concepts that might seem like par for the course these days, but you have to remember that he wrote Dune in 1965. So even though we lucky audience members are seeing Dune realized in all of its glory, we’re reaping the benefits of Herbert’s creativity.

The first half of this post might make it seem like I abhorred Dune, but I actually loved it. It’s one of those movies that makes you forget you’re watching a movie. All too often, now that I’m an adult, whenever I watch a movie, I am laser-focused on the fact that this is a narrative product that someone is trying to sell me. It has become rarer and rarer that I can truly sink back and forget that fact while sitting in a theater.

Dune immersed me more fully into its world than a sandworm immerses its prey into its mouth.

The ending left me hanging so badly because I wanted to stay immersed for a while longer.

I worry a bit that non-Dune fans will be left scratching their heads in puzzlement after the credits start rolling, wondering what on earth they just saw and if they even want to return for a sequel. But I went to go see it with two of my D&D buddies, one a die-hard Dune fan, the other a complete newcomer to the series. Both of them adored it, so I have hope.

I rate Dune a mind-blowing-sci-fi-experience-that-feels-more-immersive-and-astounding-than-a-half-finished-story-ought-to-feel-and-it’s-all-worth-it-in-the-end.

Doing Dune Justice

Dune is an epic adventure that I’m a bit ashamed to admit I read rather late in life. While I read The Lord of the Rings when I was eight years old, I read Dune when I was already in my twenties.

With the Dune movie coming out soon, I thought it would be the perfect time to recommend this classic to my favorite Above Average readers, i.e. all of you.

Dune is a sci-fi book that combines high-tech escapades and ideas with a mystical flavor. It does so with dense political history, religious ideologies, and risky thematic overtones.

I’m usually hesitant to recommend hefty sci-fi tomes to people because there is so much diversity in the genre. Even if someone says they like it, there’s no telling what part of it they enjoy. For example, someone who enjoys a realistic tale like The Martian might not like the zany humor of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

In addition to that, sci-fi books are usually a huge time investment to read, and they’ll put forth downright weird notions that can prove difficult to swallow.

So when I say I recommend you read Dune, know that it will take a decent time investment to read it (especially if you want to read its sequels), it has an occasional bout of weirdness (like strange marital practices and cannibalistic tendencies), and it focuses on a mix of predestination, heightened mental awareness, ecological consciousness, and space politics.

The story follows the young Paul Atreides as his family moves to the desert world of Arrakis. They have been relegated there from their lush homeworld of Caladan thanks to the political maneuverings of the Emperor. Different families rule the galaxy, like a sci-fi aristocracy, together under this one Emperor, and the Emperor is not supposed to show favoritism to one family over another.

Unfortunately for the Atreides, this Emperor has decided to ally with the Harkonnen family in an attempt to eradicate them from the galaxy. (The Harkonnens and the Atreides have this epic feud going on between them.)

Paul and his family have to contend with this betrayal while trying to survive on Arrakis. While Arrakis is a dry dump of a place, it is home to a valuable spice that is worth a lot to the ruling families of the galaxy, including the unaffiliated Guild, who needs the spice for their trade.

Arrakis has a population of native Fremen who protect and harvest the spice, but the Fremen are hiding a secret that Paul must uncover if he hopes to have the Atreides line survive. Not only does he have to deal with this, he has to contend with these amazing mental powers bestowed on him by his mother’s Bene Gesserit training. (Think something like telepathy plus hyper-analytical thinking, bordering on precognition.)

The whole book culminates with a revolution on a planetary scale.

I’m rather fond of sci-fi stories that don’t hold your hand. Dune is that kind of book. While it does come with a helpful glossary at the end, it does not do much to introduce you slowly to its world. It just dumps you into it and you have to get used to using context clues to figure out what’s going on.

I have to be in the mood to read these kinds of books, so be sure you’re up to it yourself if you pick up Dune.

The book strikes an awful middle ground with its female characters. Most of the ones you meet are all incredibly powerful in their own way, especially those who have been trained as Bene Gesserit. This group of women has intense skills when it comes to controlling their minds and their bodies, so much so that they can easily manipulate other people.

However, even the most powerful female is subservient to men. Influential Bene Gesserit exist to serve male leaders. The most prominent female character is Paul’s mother, and she is a concubine to Paul’s father because he has to remain marriageable if he wants to continue to negotiate with other ruling families. The whole system of every society we encounter in Dune is patriarchal in nature. This is something I sincerely hope they change in the new movie.

In addition to that, it sometimes seems like emotional moments, moments that would make for a deeply impactful, character-development kind of scene, are just skipped. For instance, there is a death of a person whom you would assume is very close to Paul, and in the book, you don’t even see it. It’s told to you that it happened.

These leaps in time can be confusing if you’re trying to follow the emotional beats of the story, but Dune seems to prefer to focus a hell of a lot more on the aspects of fate and precognition that it sets forth from the very beginning of the novel.

But when it comes to detailing mental processes, Dune excels. There is nothing I like more than reading through Paul’s thoughts before he makes any decision. It makes you believe in the power of positive thinking, if that makes sense.

I rate Dune a decent-read-that-was-groundbreaking-in-its-day-for-its-ecological-themes-and-is-still-fantastic-even-though-it-is-showing-its-age.