Dune

David Lynch’s 1984 Dune is a great movie and don’t let any­one tell you oth­er­wise. Its gar­ish opu­lence, and a self-destruc­tive insis­tence on favour­ing eccen­tric micro-tex­tures over basic coher­ence, means that the door has always been left ajar for some­one else to sneak in and take anoth­er crack at Frank Herbert’s mind-expand­ing 1964 opus.

As a result of a since-child­hood crush on the book, Cana­di­an film­mak­er Denis Vil­leneuve has decid­ed to up sticks and decamp to the desert hellscape of Arrakis in search of the spice mélange. From the reams of back­room intrigue, unscrupu­lous pol­i­tick­ing and dense­ly-wrought pan-glob­al mys­ti­cism he has pro­duced a film which does jus­tice to a hal­lowed text while retain­ing the slick for­mal shape of a pop movie. And that, in itself, is no small achievement.

Where Villeneuve’s pre­vi­ous film, Blade Run­ner 2049, too often embraced soporif­ic longueurs as a short­cut to pro­fun­di­ty, here the sheer meati­ness of this rip­ping yarn is always vis­i­ble through the porous skin of the film’s immac­u­late form. The director’s now patent­ed land­scape tableau style – in which small fig­ures are engulfed in epic, painter­ly vis­tas – helps to cre­ate one of the most visu­al­ly breath­tak­ing and bold­ly idio­syn­crat­ic block­busters to drop down the chute in a long while. Indeed, this is a hard sci-fi movie rather than a tra­di­tion­al block­buster, and heed­ing this in advance may help to enhance enjoyment.

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Con­dens­ing a book that is stuffed with detail was always going to be a ques­tion of what stays and what goes. As an adap­ta­tion, Vil­leneuve has man­aged to retain a lot, and doesn’t have to sprint through it all like Lynch had to with his trun­cat­ed the­atri­cal cut. Thank­ful­ly, Dune isn’t just a rush of infor­ma­tion and vac­u­um-packed sto­ry filler. The impor­tant scenes are allowed to play out in a way that allows for a slow­er, more sat­is­fy­ing reveal of char­ac­ter moti­va­tion, as well as adding nec­es­sary bal­last to the emo­tion­al foun­da­tions for lat­er in the saga.

While there’s a huge cast of char­ac­ters, Vil­leneuve has been fair­ly ruth­less in slic­ing things back to essen­tials. Fan favourites such as Dr Yueh (Chen Chang), Dun­can Ida­ho (Jason Momoa) and Piter De Vries (David Dast­malchi­an) are giv­en short shrift, and Dune­heads may feel a lit­tle crest­fall­en by these omis­sions. (Momoa, admit­ted­ly, does a lot with lit­tle.) The focus, instead, is trained on Tim­o­th­ée Cha­la­met as Paul, heir to the duke­dom of the noble House Atrei­des, and Rebec­ca Fer­gu­son as his moth­er, a tele­path­ic Bene Gesser­it sis­ter named Lady Jessica.

Cha­la­met excels in the lead, bridg­ing the gap between effete roy­al rough­neck-in-wait­ing to elbow-fight­ing war machine with con­vinc­ing cer­ti­tude. In many ways, Paul tra­vers­es a sim­i­lar arc to Elio from 2017’s Call Me by Your Name, mak­ing the hero’s jour­ney from juve­nile con­fu­sion to tem­pes­tu­ous adult­hood with a sud­den jolt from invad­ing des­tiny. Fer­gu­son, too, is no slouch, bring­ing the ful­ly round­ed anx­i­eties of moth­er­hood to a role that is key to the book. The film is quick­ly boiled down to this essen­tial moth­er-son rela­tion­ship, which is ced­ed on from Paul’s appre­hen­sive­ly ador­ing rela­tion­ship to his father, Duke Leo (Oscar Issac, again doing a lot with a little).

As this grand tale of war­ring fam­i­lies and inter­galac­tic trade feuds plays out, Vil­leneuve takes time to empha­sise Dune’s mal­leabil­i­ty when it comes to its alle­gor­i­cal poten­tial. For every view­er who reads it as a film about the futil­i­ty of war and the dam­age it wreaks on all sides, oth­ers will see a care­ful dis­man­tling of cap­i­tal­ism and a cri­tique of the ways in which it can be exploit­ed. It also offers a refresh­ing­ly ambiva­lent atti­tude towards colo­nial rule, as even the good guys can’t help but fall into a posi­tion of unchecked cul­tur­al plunder.

Anoth­er nice touch: this ver­sion of Dune does away with com­put­er effects as a form of emp­ty spec­ta­cle, eschew­ing touch­screens and tired holo­graph­ic imagery in order to embrace a refresh­ing­ly ana­logue design schema. This ranges from the expan­sive hand­made art­works which adorn the ducal palace on Arrakis, to the sight of a very old school con­trol set-up in the ​’thopters (bug-like heli­copters) which includes an altime­ter that appears like it was snagged from a car boot sale in the ​’80s.

Be warned: this is only part one of Dune, and it takes us to the rough­ly mid­dle of the book. Some may find its set-up a lit­tle too omi­nous, even though there are a cou­ple of excit­ing late game action set-pieces designed to get the heart pound­ing. But in the main it’s a state­ly film, exact­ing and ellip­ti­cal, more in the slow-release tra­di­tion of David Lean than the can­dy-coat­ed ins­ta-high of the MCU. Go see it on the biggest screen pos­si­ble and let’s nail down part two quick sharp.