Dune 2021, Revisited/Ranted

A formerly hot take, warmed over, lightly revised, of a film I hated, hated, hated.

Ranter’s Note: This hot take is a few years cold, now. As Dune 2 is in theatres, I’m throwing it up here, mostly for the sake of being able to point folks to a long-form, rant-based explanation of why I hate Denis Villenueve’s Dune.

1. There’s gonna be a lot of spoilers, below, so let’s just occupy some space at the top to say IT SUCKS! (Please Note: This is a finely aged spoiler warning concerning that which cannot be spoilt)

2. First, a caveat. I believe Denis Villenueve to be a terrible filmmaker, whose prior big genre hit, Blade Runner 2049, is a temple to heteropatriarchy and misogyny. In a movie where every female character is fascinating in their condition as an instrumentalized being, the film centers on a Pinocchio-like sadboy and his very banal insecurities. Yawn. It’s also a future that’s a strikingly hetero, exhausting vision, even as it contains both android and holographic sex workers and a visit to a future Las Vegas that is essentially a temple to “Things Boomers Like.”

3. OK. Spoilers commence. I’m a huge fan of Dune, and have spent too much time in the past two years making stupid Dune memes for Dune superfans, so...let’s just say that I’m an invested fan. FYI. Cards on the table.

4. GENDER: Dune is a flawed book. Frank Herbert, the author, treats women as incubators, as bodies to be possessed by their horny grandfather’s memories, and, in their most agency-equipped fashion, as powerful manipulators of men and politics - through sexual techniques that are laughable to read about, of course. So there’s a lot to work with in adapting Dune - ways to take flawed female characters and flesh them out.

Villenueve wastes this opportunity - and this obligation. He strips women down to the barest of lines, using them as even more instrumentalized bodies to serve his needs. In the books, The Lady Jessica, who is in a politically-arranged concubinage to the father of Paul, our protagonist, is a confident, capable woman with incredible responsibilities in an aristocratic societys. In the film, she cries a lot and a significant B-plot in which she is suspected of being a traitor to House Atredies - largely because she is a member of the Psychic Space Sex Nuns, or the Bene Gesserit, as they’re named in the canon, is excised. She’s still a Bene Gesserit, but she’s reduced to a sidecar. In scenes where she’s capable of violence and terrifying mind control in the books, she’s de-fanged, reacting to threats instead of being one.

Meanwhile, our protagonist, Paul, who is destined to become Space God Emperor Hitler, but is trying to use his emergent Godlike omniscience to guide the future so that *checks notes* fewer billions die in a jihad* in his name in years to come, is overcome with visions. SOFT FOCUS VISIONS of his TEEN DREAM GIRL. Zendaya, as Chani, who will be Paul’s future *checks notes* concubine/incubator/teacher/second mommy is on the screen a lot more than she should be, modeling enigmatic glances to Hans Zimmer’s score, before their final meet cute in the last minutes of the film, before Paul achieves manhood or something and caps the film by killing his first man with her knife. Young love…. Villennueve’s horniness is just oozing all over. Maybe it’s just his view of us, that we’re the horny rabble, and that the dusky, exotic skin of Zendaya, framed by scarves, will get us into the theaters for his AUTEUR VISION.

Oh, and they did the Shadout Mapes wrong. An OLD WOMAN? Get her off the screen as fast as we can, amirite! Also, while I think the gender and race flip of Liet Kynes is a lot of nothing - probably a safe move if you’re trying to diversify a very white story - now I get it. Villenueve needs a BLACK WOMAN TO TELL THE TRUTH TO THE WHITE BOY, like, you know, because that’s what Black women are for in your DEI initiative - they’re there to do work you won’t do yourself, unless you hire a mommy to shame you into doing it - while she also does the actual work of it, usually in addition to her job.

WOMEN! JUST AS INSTRUMENTALIZED AS EVER!

5. RACE: Before even touching on the reinvention of Doctor Yueh into “Yellow Peril Yueh” in Villenueve’s version, There are very few Black bodies in this “not as white” future vision. There are five roles of significance for Black actors. They are:

Number 1: Herald of the Emperor: A human instrument of the Emperor’s voice, a servitor.

Number 2: Thufir Hawat, The Mentat (something not explained in the film at all): Advisor to Duke Leto, Paul’s father. In the books, he’s a stressed and stern tactician who is managing an insane logistical and military operation. He’s not generous or kind, because he cannot afford to be. Black Thufir is a friendly grandfather figure who always knows the right thing to say to make Great White Hope Paul feel better. In the book, he’s captured by the Harkonnens and enslaved as their mentat, following that character’s death. In Villenueve’s vision, stripped of all meaningful contribution to the plot, I think he’s just killed off when they re-take the planet.

Number 3: Liet Kynes, The Imperial Planetologist: The Judge of the Change, she is in charge of the handover of the planet Arrakis from the Harkonnens to the Atredies family, which is a trap engineered by the Emperor who is threatened by the Atredies popularity among the “Great Houses,” basically oligarchic-monarchic families that own entire planets and are engaged in various aristocratic struggles and rivalries. Paranoid families that test every meal for poison and such.

Liet is the most controversial change in the film. Gender and race swapped, and given an expanded role in additional and unnecessary action scenes, she seems to exist to do two things. Make a brief - but strongly stated - critique of the aristocratic overlords of Arrakis, who come and go every few generations, but are always an oppressor. The film removes the internal dialogues that are critical to the book, so it’s one of the only times we get an idea that this film might contain some kind of social critique at all. Oh, and her usefulness exhausted, she dies.

Number 4: Jamis, a Fremen: His voice opens the film, and we only encounter him in visions and at the end. Basically, the film ends with Paul encountering the Fremen while he’s in a vulnerable state, and Stilgar, their leader, wants to take them in, but Jamis challenges his judgment, and Paul has to duel him with a knife, to the death. Our movie opens with the wisdom of his Black Voice, and then ends when our white savior literally stabs him in the back, killing him.

EVERY BLACK PERSON BUT ONE DIES. THAT IS ALL.

Number 5: Chani, Paul’s DREAM GIRL. Zendaya’s image floats throughout the film, a soft-focus promise of the love that Paul is entitled to. She encounters Paul and gives him her knife - to kill Jamis. Sigh….

On to Doctor Yueh. The trusted doctor to the Atredies family, and their betrayer (he has complex and sad reasons for this that is never really explained in the film, Yueh bears the mark of “imperial conditioning” on his forehead, making him someone an aristocrat can trust with their life. But he betrays them! How! Well, it turns out Baron Harnkonnen has his wife as hostage (she’s actually been dead for many years), and has broken his will. Okay, plot. But in the film, Yueh is cast as Asian, because doctor? No. Because betrayer! Wow. Even worse than I thought, because the whole reasons for his betrayal were excised from the plot and only mentioned at the last second.

DUNE IS RACIST AS FUCK!

Oh, and all the Fremen are dark skinned. Paul Atredies is gonna literally white savior them this time! But not after learning important lessons about humanity and honor from them and passing those off as his own! Jason Momoa, as a much expanded Duncan Idaho - a character who has a weirdly huge role in the books as a series of clones, like three books later - plays the part of adventurer, bridging the relationship between the Fremen and the Atredies family by presenting them as some kind of NOBLE SAVAGES.

David Lynch’s version - like all sci-fi of the 1980s - is an exceedingly white film. There are a few minor characters of color, none named, and I think only one speaks a throwaway line. And, most problematically, it seems like the Mexico City casting for extras and background actors was looking for white passing talent. And then if we go back to Herbert’s Dune books….

6. ORIENTALISM: A lot has been written on this, and by persons with literal skin in the game. Dune can’t escape accusations of appropriation but most science fiction is just contemporary or historical cultures with the serial numbers barely scratched off. I don’t think that the appropriation of Middle Eastern culture by Herbert feels like inclusion to anyone, either.

VILLENUEVE SHOULD KNOW BETTER

I’m not going to criticise the architecture. We use points of reference for a reason, and architectures exist in relationship to their environments and our historic aesthetic of those environments. It’s bland, but okay.

But, yeah, the Fremen and all the residents of Arrakis come off as a PARODY OF THE ISLAMIC WORLD, not an awkward, but sincere intepretation of post-Islamic culture 10,000 years in the future. Everyone is wearing something like a chador or the all-over robes of the Tuareg. And the Fremen are fanatical warriors - ready to die for nothing, chasing paradise, it seems.

The Imperial Saraudukar, the “terror troops” are no longer from a prison planet, but from an “army planet,” and they engage in terrifying rituals of execution and torture while a priest-like figure throat sings to them. Get it, they’re like the Mongol hordes? Terrifying monsters! Barely human (notably, a character describes a separate people, House Harkonnen, as “not human,” earlier in the film, when talking to his young charge, who is basically Future Space Hitler), they speak in a voice straight out of the Black Speech of the Orcs in Lord of the Rings. Oh, and they have the MONSTER ENERGY LOGO ON THEIR CHEST! Kind of fits in with the general white supremacist vibe of this movie, TBH.

Our protagonists all fight using eskrima, a Filipino fighting style. Now, on one hand, I’ve seen a lot of Filipino fans be excited about this, but, again, also, our Scottish-Greek protagonist family could very well have seemed equally exotic if their knife fighting techniques were straight out of historical European martial arts.

THE PAST AND PRESENT OF THE NON-EUROPEAN WORLD IS ALWAYS THE FUTURE OF THE EUROPEAN WORLD.

7. STOP TRYING TO MAKE X-WINGS A THING! Seriously. Does Villenueve or Warner Brothers have a relationship with an ornithopter startup? Like, there is no fighter jet action in the books, but I guess we had to give fanboys something to fetishize. They look great, but, like, you’re just trying too hard.

WHAT TOY COMPANY’S EVIL WORK IS THIS?

8. PLOT DESTRUCTION AND TACTI-COOL AESTHETICS: This film departs wildly from the themes of the book -  I’m not sure it even has a theme, aside from SHE WILL LOVE ME, I’VE SEEN IT, SHE WILL BE MINE. Every B and C plot is surrendered to endless action scenes. Whole characters are gutted. It’s a fucking disaster. I don’t know where to start, but it’s embarrassingly bad.

What’s sad is that it’s clearly in competition with Lynch as a production design extravaganza, and it has so little to offer that doesn't feel absolutely recycled or bland. I suspect Villenueve changed or avoided things so as not to have to compete with the weirdness of the David Lynch version. Well...LYNCH WON, DUDE. The whole movie looks like it was ordered out of the Amazon paintball department, with the filter set to look for “ANYTHING BEIGE.”

ULTRA-REALISM IS FUCKING DUMB, AND IT’S NEVER REALISM, ANYWAYS.

9. MY FAVOURITE HANS ZIMMER SCORE! It’s actually not his worst work! But, also, it’s borrowing that horrible “Wonder Woman Whaaa-aaah” noise for scenes involving the Fremen. Please. Please.

STOP WITH THAT ANNOYING SOUND. I AM SO EMBARRASSED FOR YOU.

10. WHITE SAVIOR! Dune is, over the course of numerous books, a critique of white saviors and power, among other things. Dune 2021 is not. Will the next movie get made? Will it contain any critique of power? Or will it just have MORE ORNITHOPTER ACTION?

Seriously, I’m all for radical reimaginations of material, but this is just sad. Like, maybe make a wildly different version where the Fremen are introduced at the beginning and their story advances alongside that of Paul’s? The movie ends on Paul’s destiny, when it should have ended on Arrakis’ destiny - a reveal that the Fremen are a desert people who have stockpiled trillions of gallons of water in a generations-long effort to build a green belt - a literal paradise - for their descendants.

DUNE IS ABOUT ENVIRONMENTAL ECOLOGY AND POLITICAL ECOLOGY!

DID YOU MISS THE FUCKING MEMO?

11. WORM! They’re well done, I guess. It’s interesting that the worm rider view we get is of a solitary rider, surfing the worm, dude, instead of the hint we get first in the books - a Fremen Reverend Mother’s palanquin-tent, being borne deep into the desert on a worm. One of the bigger flaws of the book is how little attention is given to the Reverend Mothers of the Fremen, when they’re clearly important leaders in a different way than the Bene Gesserit of the empire.

SPACE WITCHES RIDING WORMS = ABSOLUTELY COOL¹

12. THINGS MISSING: Feyd, The Emperor, Princess Irulan, spice smugglers, the Orange Catholic Bible, Gurney Halleck’s singing and baliset playing, 90% of many characters, 90% of the motivation for almost any action, any semblance of worldbuilding, an epic scene containing the Litany Against Fear, one bloodied crysknife, Jamis’ coffee service, the Spacing Guild, the CHOAM Company, any mention of the Laandsrad (the Great Houses), etc…

NO BATTLE PUGS!?!?!

13. BARON VLADIMIR HARKONNEN: Did someone just tell Stellan Skarsgard to phone in Marlon Brando’s iconic performance in Apocalypse Now, complete with borrowed hand gestures? Because the Emperor is excised from the movie (along with Paul’s future wife, Princess Irulan), the Baron is the “big bad,” but he has woefully little screen time. He’s supposed to be this calculating genius, and we are shown little of that. We should be alienated by his cruelty. Instead, we’re just supposed to feel crept out by his corpulence. Everything about it is lazy.

Also, DAVE BAUTISTA IS WASTED IN THIS MOVIE. He’s a solid actor - he’s one of the best parts of Blade Runner 2049². He’s condemned to stand still and deliver monosyllables. It’s a bummer.

14. DUNE IS EVERYTHING I EXPECTED IT TO BE! It’s racist, tired, boring, misogynist, too long, you name it. Villenueve got his desire - to play auteur with a quarter billion in budget, when a better director would have given us a season of prestige television that would make you FORGET GAME OF THRONES EVEN EXISTED. It’s an exercise in the same bland, hetero-patriarchal storytelling that he’s done in the past. Maybe he’s just a cynicist, devoted to serving an audience of MAGA had-adjacent dudebros, knowing that if it makes its money back, he gets to keep fattening his resume on the bloated corpse of their dead worldview?

CAN ONE BE DISAPPOINTED WHEN SOMETHING IS EXACTLY AS DISAPPOINTING AS YOU KNEW IT WOULD BE?

1. Don’t even get me started on how Star Wars needs more Force Witches of Dathomir, riding rancors, but I digress….

2. The opening scene of BR2049 with Dave Bautista was, notably storyboarded by Ridley Scott for the original, but not used. It’s one of the best scenes in a film that I also found disappointing, largely on feminist grounds.