The trouble begins in Dune—which premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Friday—just about immediately. In the opening credits of Denis Villeuneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s seminal 1965 sci-fi fantasy novel, we see the title of the film and then an ominous “Part One.” So what we’re seeing is not a complete story—it’s the kick-off to a new franchise of two (or more) movies. Not a second of the sequel has been shot yet, so we will just have to hope that the box office gods (and the streaming ones, as the film will also premiere on HBO Max) are kind enough to this first foray that subsequent installments will be deemed worth it.
If not, Dune will live on as a turgid preamble with little payoff. As he often does, Villeneuve has crafted a mighty aesthetic symphony, images looming epically as a Hans Zimmer score keens and brass-braaams around them. Herbert’s novel—which has been adapted by Villeneuve, Jon Spaiths, and Eric Roth—offers plenty of occasion for such maximalist finery. The story journeys to several exotic planets and introduces us to the dynastic pageantry of humanity’s ruling class some 10,000 years from now.
Villeneuve is no stranger to this kind of high imagining, or perhaps re-imagining. He applied his signature gloss onto the Blade Runner universe with 2017’s Blade Runner 2049, a gorgeous but frustratingly thin continuation of a narrative well established before him. With Dune, Villeneuve has the chance to right the wrongs of David Lynch’s 1984 misfire (a misfire according to some, anyway) and truly honor Herbert’s text. But Villenueve can’t help but lacquer it all up into something hyper polished and hard to the touch. Even Arrival, his most successful big-budget film, groans under the tremendous onus of his construction. He’s an overloader, and only the keenest and most urgent of scripts can survive beneath that weight.
Dune, unfortunately, is not one of those. Maybe the source material, with its unending glossary of terms describing places, peoples, religious traditions, and political systems, is just too dense to hone into something cinematically agile. Villeneuve’s film is somehow plodding and hurried at once, flurries of exposition and table-setting ringing around set-piece monoliths.
The general idea is stated plainly enough: a noble family, House Atreides, is enlisted by the galactic emperor to become the new stewards of the fearsome desert planet Arrakis, home to a sort of silt deposit called spice that’s valued across the universe for its use in medicine and starship navigation. This angers the despotic House Harkonnen, who long ruled over Arrakis and its precious resource. There is also, of course, a prophecy about a messiah who will deliver the natives of Arrakis, the Fremen—and perhaps the entirety of humanity—to freedom. Is that special boy the young prince of House Atreides, Paul (Timothée Chalamet)?
All this palace intrigue and generational history is interesting, playing as a kind of spacebound Game of Thrones. (I know Dune long predates that book and TV series, as well as Star Wars, but I’m sure there is some studio marketing department wish that those parallels will be drawn by contemporary audiences.) What is less compelling is the Chosen One mythology, laid out confusingly to mask the simplicity at its core. Visions and murmured warnings and oracular epiphanies abound, all working to convince us that the hero of the film is, in fact, the hero. Perhaps a surprise is coming in a subsequent Dune film, but at present it all feels like a fait accompli that the handsome, noble prince standing before us is destined to be the thing everyone is so worked up about.
That the film is ultimately a long and overwrought prologue—a prelude to action rather than its own autonomous story—renders Villeneuve’s robust theatrics flimsier than they should be. What’s all this ado about something we know is coming but just won’t be shown yet? Chalamet strains to assume the mantle, but he’s swallowed up by the halo hanging around him. Rebecca Ferguson, as Paul’s mother Jessica, who studied under an order of shifty priestess called the Bene Gesserit, fares better, holding firm against the movie’s stylistic onslaught and making an impression.
Other talented actors drift in and out of the picture: Oscar Isaac as Paul’s dad, Leto; Josh Brolin and Jason Momoa as military men who help train Paul in combat; Stellan Skarsgård as the monstrous Baron Harkonnen; and Zendaya as a Fremen who appears to Paul in dreams, luring him toward ruin or glory or both. No one has much time to distinguish themselves, all functioning as mere fleshy cogs in Villeneuve’s churning machine. We don’t really learn much about individual characters in the film, making it hard to grasp or care about the stakes of the story. That’s not for lack of trying on Villeneuve’s part, who aims to fill just about every moment of the film with a towering import.
At times, his aggressive approach works. There are scenes when the film’s relentless rumble reaches heart and mind, and truly connects. The immensity of the film can probably only be experienced properly in a theatrical setting—making Warner Bros.’ decision to drop the movie on streaming that much more dismaying. But even in the dark, sans phone, a gigantic screen and sound system blaring away at you, Dune slips through your fingers like so much sand. And then it just ends, as a character has the gall to tell Paul (and us) that this is just the beginning.
As a general rule, we should embrace grave and complicated blockbuster films like this, as they’re in such short supply in our age of comestible whizbang and synergistic packaging. But Dune lumbers with such aloof, uninviting self-seriousness that it’s hard to love, hard to even celebrate as an assured piece of tentpole authorship. In all its marvel, Dune forgets to do basic things like give us someone or something to root for, or feel for, or think about for longer than the stretch of the film.
Some vexing, inscrutable mystery and preening opacity can be fun. But there ought to at least be a big, central Why animating a film. Otherwise, it’s all just a bunch of pretty shots of sand and fire and lavish costumery with no guiding spirit. By the end of Dune (Part One), I was ready to leave the whole thing to the enormous worms who move through Arrakis devouring all the little things that matter to us petty humans. Watching as Villeneuve’s film eats itself up, those beasts started to seem pretty familiar.
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