Re-Reviewing "DUNE Part 1" ahead of this weekend's "Part 2"

I didn't like this film at first, but now? I've got some new thoughts

Okay, fine, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is pretty great. 

I’ve been resistant to that conclusion since seeing the movie in theaters back in 2021, not because the film isn’t an incredible triumph of special effects and production design and sound and music – it absolutely is all those things, and a balm for the soul in the Marvel-inflected age of video wall backgrounds and CGI costumes – but because I found Villeneuve’s vision of the story structurally misshapen, a little too cold, and somewhat excessively expositional. And the film is all of those things, too; but having let the movie settle in my mind for a few years before watching it again ahead of this weekend’s Part Two, I’ve come to see at least two of those three qualities not as bugs, but as features, and it’s really turned me around on the whole thing.

Let’s start with the idea of “coldness.” It’s there, and it’s deliberate, and it’s a part of all Villeneuve’s movies to varying extents; in Arrival, that chilly atmosphere just barely covers an incredibly compassionate, deeply-felt narrative about loss and acceptance; in Blade Runner 2049, it reflects the mechanical exterior of its android protagonist, cold to the touch but bursting with fiery passion underneath. Both films bowled me over. Dune, it turns out, has a longer fuse. There are absolutely rich veins of emotionality and color here; they just run deeper under the surface than in Frank Hebert’s book or in David Lynch’s earlier adaptation, and they’re more on the level of shape, texture, and sound than in the performances or human-to-human interactions. The worldis what emotes here, what moves, what feels. It is an ecological, textural, and spiritual narrative more than it is an embodied personal one. And the world moves in such amazing ways. The shots of the sandworms traveling like waves in a sandy ocean, for instance, are awe-inspiring, their actual bodies rarely seen but their presence giving the surface of Arrakis its awesome, horrifying, beautiful rhythm; I find those images deeply emotive, lyrical even. If Terrence Malick shot Dune, I think this is what the sandworms would look like. I think he’d focus on the weird little space mouse living in the sand outside Paul’s tent, too – these alternatingly vast and minute pieces of the living world the characters inhabit. That’s the kind of thing Villeneuve is more interesting in us empathizing with than the specific characters who are, in their own way, as small and insignificant to the rumbling sandworms and the torrential sandstorms of Arrakis as the mouse itself. Timothée Chalamet doesn’t fully work for me as Paul – it’s a casting choice that’s obvious, but uninspired, and he’s directed to be too one-note dour for too much of the run-time – but I also don’t think it matters all that much because Villeneuve’s vision of the character is of a person being moved by giant external forces he can barely understand and trying to feel his way through the world. He doesn’t matter all that much as an individual with interiority. The worldemotes so perfectly and fully and expressively that I find myself not being bothered, in this telling, if Paul doesn’t. 

As for the structure: Dune Part One is, indeed, weirdly shaped. There is no denying that. You could cut at the scene in the tent where Paul sees the vision of his bloody future conquest, berating his mother for turning him into a pawn of this fundamentalist religious sect, and it’s a structurally perfect three-act movie with a really compelling and provocative ending that sets up more stories to come. But the movie instead goes for another hour of mostly falling action and ends on a relatively quiet note. That frustrated me the first time, and to some extent it still does; it feels like there should at least be an intermission there between the movie’s two halves, because they are so starkly separated. But I saw the logic this time. It’s not just that the ending is Paul making the choice to go into the desert; it’s that throughout the film, we watch him seeing multiple possible futures, including one where the man he kills in the final scene becomes his friend and mentor, and another where he dies in that fight and removes the possibility of his terrible universe-conquering future from the world entirely – and instead, he succumbs to ego (literally, in the Freudian sense, the ego of the self and its need for preservation) and lives, taking his first steps towards armageddon. It means the film plays out in miniature the tragedy that is Dune on the whole: Paul meaning well, but ultimately unleashing damnation upon the universe in the name of his family. (It also provides a neat mirror to the next film, which, assuming it follows the book, will also end with a one-on-one knife duel in which the stakes are epochal for the future of creation). 

Finally, on the matter of excessive exposition, I do still have a problem – but it’s one of me wishing the things I loved in the film were foregrounded even more. This Dune is so good and adept at audiovisual storytelling, and there are stretches worthy of that overused description ‘tone poem,’ and they are, unfortunately, sometimes bogged down in narration that gives us more expository detail, but nothing in tone or feeling the images aren’t already showing us. The film’s very first scene is the best example here, where you could strip out Chani’s narration entirely and the striking cinematography and production design and montage editing tell you everything you need to know about Arrakis and what has been done to it. I’m also not a fan of the clumsy handful of scenes where Paul literally watches “Dune Lore Explained” videos on his space phone in his room. This is indeed a complex story dense in detail for first-time viewers, but it’s sort of like learning a language: Newcomers don’t have to have all the grammatical details explained to them if they immersed in it – they’ll pick it up through osmosis as they go along. The movie is absolutely capable of that, because the world it has built feels so real, so three-dimensional, so lived-in; I don’t need someone to tell me what the spice is. I can see it sparkling above the surface of the sand, and see the gluttonous lust in the Harkonnen’s eyes, and see the trance state it sends Paul into. The movie teaches us just fine through immersion.

In my not-bestselling book 200 Reviews, I wrote a piece comparing David Lynch’s Dune and Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, venting my frustration with the latter by praising the former. And I do still love Lynch’s misshapen oddball adaptation, and prefer how it handles certain things to Villeneuve’s more full-throated take. But finally watching the Villeneuve version again, I realized the two don’t have to stand in any kind of competition. There is no ‘definitive’ Dune except what Frank Herbert wrote on the page, and everything else is an interpretation. Villneuve’s is a good one, and most importantly, it’s an ambitious one, in a time when ambition is in short supply among big-budget Hollywood tentpoles. This is probably the first Hollywood epic since Lord of the Rings that’s tried to do something on that kind of enormous scale, with this level of intentionality and mastery of craftsmanship. As just one film, it doesn’t rise to the level of Peter Jackson’s film for me, yet, but who knows – Part Two is just around the corner and Villeneuve intends to make an entire trilogy. I am eager to see where the road takes us.

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