How does 'Dune' work for newbies?

Going into Denis Villeneuve's sci-fi epic with no familiarity.

Spoilers for Dune follow. 

The worst marketing for Dune comes from fans of Dune. 

Despite the fact that I like this cast and I’m a fan of director Denis Villeneuve, I wrestled with whether or not to see the latest adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi/fantasy series. I haven’t read the novels. I never saw David Lynch’s film, the SyFy miniseries or the documentary about Alejandro Jodorowsky’s aborted adaptation. All I knew was that it had to do with spice and sandworms, which honestly could have made it an ad for Starbucks or a Beetlejuice sequel for all I cared. 

What I heard from fans of Dune over the years was that it was nigh unfilmable because of how psychedelic and dense the story was. There was no way a film could capture the shifting alliances, spiritual undertones and political allegory of Herbert’s tale. They made it sound like the type of pretentious, impenetrable science fiction that has historically turned me off on the genre. 

But whether I was sold on the prospect of seeing something new on a big screen or simple fear of missing out, I found myself at a local theater this past Friday afternoon to take in a matinee of the new Warner Brothers release. And this is one time when I’m glad FOMO won out; while I can’t say how the new Dune works as an adaptation, and I think it’s far from perfect, it is one of the most immersive and awe-inspiring things I’ve seen on a big screen in years. 

Dune 101

Although I braced myself for confusion, the biggest surprise about Villeneuve’s Dune is that I never felt overly lost. The story is undeniably dense; there are intricate histories of interplanetary alliances, futuristic commerce, mysticism and culture at play. But at the end of the day, the overarching story is fairly simple. There’s a planet with a valuable commodity, and a violent family has run it for years, building a profit while terrorizing the indigenous people. The empire running things pulls the brutal family out and installs another, which hopes to make a profit and mend relationships with the natives. But there’s betrayal and a massacre, as well as some interwoven Chosen One narrative and dream sequences. It’s a lot, but it’s not indecipherable. 

Having zero familiarity with the source material, I’m not sure whether Villeneuve oversimplified it or if his choice just to tell half a story — this is officially called Dune: Part One on screen and we’ll get to some of the drawbacks of that choice — allows him to take his time and build out the political intrigue and cultural details that are so crucial to making this an immersive experience. Speaking as someone with no investment in the novels or previous material, I found that whatever the reason for his choices, Villeneuve made something that was relatively easy to follow and just feels like a more richly detailed but somewhat familiar fantasy story; this isn’t too far away from the intricacies of something like Star Wars (the prequels leaned hard on political intrigue, of course) or Lord of the Rings (another franchise where I like the movies but have found the source material impenetrable). 

Villeneuve also makes the various factions and families easy to identify. The members of House Atreides (I had to look up these names) have a distinctive look, militaristic yet not too far removed from Star Wars. The bad guys in House Harkonnen dress in black, are bald (and sometimes tall and fat) and look like something out of Halo. The tribe of religious women look exactly like you’d expect space witches to, and the native Fremen with their flowing robes and striking blue eyes appear as if a Calvin Klein commercial was randomly spliced into the film. 

It might sound like I’m being snarky, but I think the distinctive visual palettes provide a shorthand for people like me who may not have time to keep track of who’s backstabbing whom or what religious prophecy is driving some people’s motivations. It also helps put any apprehensions about being unable to follow the story to rest; at the end of the day, this is just a slightly more complex mixture of space opera and Hero’s Journey, and it can be enjoyed as a rousing fantasy tale. 

Besides, the plot is far from the most interesting thing about Dune. 

If you’re enjoying this newsletter, can I ask a favor? Share it with a movie-loving friend of yours. I want to broaden this conversation and bring more people aboard, and would love to welcome new subscribers. 

A feast for the eyes 

Dune is now playing in theaters — including IMAX — and on HBO Max. And I think there are arguments for seeing the film both ways, particularly if you’re not previously invested in the material. 

On the one hand, I sympathize with those who feel the theatrical experience is the only ideal way to see Dune; it’s certainly how Villeneuve feels. This is a big screen experience; it’s one of the most immersive and large-scale films I’ve seen in years, and the visual and audio experience in a good theater is nearly overwhelming. If you want to see and hear everything the way Villeneuve planned it, and if you want future opportunities to experience films of this scale on a giant screen, the theater is the place. 

And it certainly is an experience. Villeneuve has a stark visual style that he’s developed over the years; there are similarities here to sights the director created for Arrival and Blade Runner 2049. There’s a brutality to the design of the buildings and spacecraft, and Villeneuve indulges a love for desert terrains that he’s previously shown in Blade Runner and Sicario. The film crosses planets and galaxies, and there’s a great deal on display to feast your eyes upon. 

One of the most enjoyable things about Dune is how immersive and tactile the world is, which partially comes from filming on location in the desert and not on a parking lot in Georgia (No Time to Die got a lot of mileage out of this as well). Although created with computers, the spacecraft and mining equipment of the film feels real and purposeful. There are small details that help sell the reality of the locations, from the glowing orbs that follow people down dark hallways to the practical “stillsuits” that help the characters survive in the harsh atmosphere. Great care has been made to make Arrakis feel like a lived-in world. This might be the most immersed in a fictional location I’ve been since Peter Jackson originally brought Middle Earth to life. 

And I can’t stress enough the power of audio here. Dune threatens to blow out the speakers and rattle the roof as spaceships careen overhead, giant sandworms swallow entire transporters whole and large-scale battles ensue. Hans Zimmer’s score is propulsive, droning and ever-present; I know there are some who tire of it, and people who mock Chris Nolan’s scores likely will snicker here. But I dug it; it underlined the grandeur and scale of the film and threatened to shake me right out of my seat. 

Dune is an overwhelming sensory experience, the first film I’ve seen in years where I don’t know how they pulled off some of the visual sights. It’s a reminder that while CGI can create entire worlds, it takes a visual master to make those worlds feel real. When we argue for the place that expensive blockbusters still have, Dune is the best-case scenario. It’s the most awe-inspiring theatrical experience I’ve had in years. 

All spice, no smiles 

Before I get into whether there’s a place for Dune on the small screen, I want to address a common complaint with Villeneuve’s work that I think is fair game here. 

Villeneuve is a director who is often derided for an unemotional approach to his films, valuing intellect over feeling. I don’t think it’s completely fair; Arrival may feel aloof throughout, but it ends on a giant emotional wallop, and there’s a sadness under Blade Runner 2049 that compliments its rain-soaked noir locations. But, like Nolan, I think Villeneuve can be a director who prioritizes ideas over character and who creates worlds that may be visually ravishing and yet held at an arm’s length. 

There is definitely some of that at play in Dune. This is a story that includes brutal betrayals, alluring visions and even a surprise pregnancy, but there’s no sense of romance, sexuality or yearning. Everyone, with one exception, is a aloof and withheld, as if Villeneuve stumbled on one of the rumored “no jokes” edicts from the DC movies on a WB soundstage and imposed it on his crew. One thing that kept me returning to Lord of the Rings or even the Marvel films is the sense of joy and camaraderie that develops among the characters, as if they all have separate lives in between adventures. Dune is all business all the time, although an argument could be made that in this brutal future there’s no time for love or frivolity. 

That type of coldness usually bothers me in films, but in Dune it didn’t. Part of that might be that, as a novice, it didn’t distract me from the larger story. But much of it might be that Villeneuve wisely uses his cast to create a shorthand that gives a sense of character that isn’t in the script. Timothee Chalamet is effective as Paul, a young man torn between duty and dreams, and I think both Oscar Isaac and Rebecca Ferguson give weight and dignity to the role of his parents. I like the forcefulness and command that Josh Brolin shows as Paul’s mentor. And while Jason Momoa may be out of his depth among such seasoned actors, I appreciated the levity he brought to a film full of stoics. Javier Bardem, Dave Bautista, Zendaya and Stellan Skarsgard also add texture in their small roles; I imagine they have much larger parts to pay in any eventual sequels, and while it was a bit disappointing to see how sparingly they were used, the inclusion of such notable actors added a sense of import and helped stoke anticipation for them being given more to do in future entries. 

An incomplete story

But I think there’s a place for Dune on the small screen too, one that comes from both its successes and flaws. 

For all its bombast and majesty, Dune tells a relatively familiar story about a potential Chosen One and sets up a larger story to (hopefully) be continued in future films. The story Villeneuve tells here is incomplete; it ends with a shift to one character’s arc, but it by no means feels like an ending (the final words are “this is only the beginning,” which is going to feel incredibly ironic if Warner Brothers doesn’t greenlight a part 2).

The lines between television and film continue to blur in a streaming age, and there’s something fitting about it also debuting on HBO Max, because there’s an argument to be made that Dune works best as a series or miniseries. Its story obviously doesn’t fit into one film, and there’s a sense in which this feels like the first two episodes of a space-age Game of Thrones. That’s not the damning statement it might have been 20 years ago; I bought this world, enjoyed the time I spent there and definitely would love to see more. This is a setting I want to explore more, and I’m game for whatever Part Two might have in store. 

But you can’t ignore the fact that it is incomplete. While Dune builds admirably for its first two hours, it begins to grind its wheels in the final 30 minutes as it becomes increasingly clear (to newbies like me) that there’s not a traditional end coming and it’s simply laying the groundwork for the next stage in Paul’s journey. I wish the Fremen we meet at the end of the film had been given more to do through than just appear in Paul’s dream; it would have made it feel more momentous when the hero and his mother meet them at the end. And for a film that has included several large-scale fight sequences, it feels a bit anticlimactic to end on a one-on-one brawl between Paul and a character we’ve never met. I understand it’s building to a new phase for Paul, who has never killed a man before, but the film doesn’t set that up as an obstacle for him, so it doesn’t have the dramatic heft Villeneuve seems to think it does. I’ll admit that I left curious about what Part Two might entail — and I’ll be frustrated if this is a box office disaster and never gets a sequel made — but I didn’t leave with a sense of “I have to see that.” 

In the end, Dune leaves me in a weird place. On the one hand, it’s one of the most sumptuous film experiences I’ve had in a long while, and I can’t imagine some of its images not rattling around in my brain at the end of the year. And I’m interested in seeing the rest of the story. But I remember sitting in a theater 20 years ago, as The Fellowship of the Ring — another movie I went into with zero familiarity — finished. I was upset when that film ended; not because I disliked the movie but because I had to wait a whole additional year to find out what happened to Sam and Frodo. With Dune, I’ll be happy to return to Arrakis, but I’m in no rush.

Agree or disagree? Comment! 

Chrisicisms features movie reviews and thoughts several times a week. Don’t miss a single edition. Subscribe for free!