The tone may have been monotonously grim, the sound mix was murder on sensitive ears, and if I never hear another Hans Zimmer score, I'll consider myself lucky. But with his new film, Denis Villeneuve has succeeded where Frank Herbert and David Lynch have failed: he made Paul Atreides come across as a human being and Dune as an epic narrative. In my experience with the first three novels and Lynch’s film, Paul was a name attached to an archetype, and Dune an impenetrable treatise on politics, religion, imperialism, and ecology, thinly dressed as a sci-fi yarn loaded with jargon I could never remember. Villeneuve and his co-writers pared much of that away in adaptation. Thanks to this, and excellent casting in the form of Timothée Chalamet, Paul’s struggles and development into a nascent messiah are tangible, emotional events in a young man’s life, not theoretical dictates. And the plight of his family on the desert world, Arrakis, finally seems something more immediate than a Machiavellian chess game: a human story.

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This is not to say it’s a story I’m particularly enamored with. Paul might finally shine as a character, but he’s a very cold one. Except for Duke Leto and Duncan Idaho, everyone in this cast is cold. That’s one element of the novel Villeneuve captured faithfully, and it’s one of the chief reasons I’ve never been able to engage with Dune the way I have with comparable literary works. But Villeneuve’s film does slip occasionally as an adaptation. As with many a two-part film made from a single book, the first entry ends up feeling like an extended trailer for the meat of the story. It’s tempting to argue, despite Villeneuve’s insistence otherwise, that one three-hour film could have done the job, but the example of 1984 urges caution. David Lynch didn’t quite get three hours (and infamously, no final cut either), but his film’s handling of the back third of the novel was quite rushed. And if the Lynch film erred in attempting too much exposition, this new Dune has the opposite problem; I’ve met just one person who could follow the movie from beginning to end.

Sharing the same basic problem – committed two different ways – is one of the few things the adaptations have in common. Critics, fans, and Lynch himself have not been kind to his Dune. Yet it does have its virtues, as an adaptation and on its own terms. For one thing, it isn’t relentlessly brooding in the way the new film is. According to the biggest Dune fan I know (my dad), many members of Lynch’s cast are a better fit for the characters as described in the book (though Kyle MacLachlan’s Paul isn’t one of them; I rather like him myself, but Dad says he looks too old). Lynch’s composer wasn’t Hans Zimmer, a blessing on any movie as far as I’m concerned. But the aspect of Lynch’s Dune that shines brightest compared to Villeneuve’s is, ironically, a point of strength for both films. Lynch and Villeneuve have shown mastery of many filmmaking’s crafts, but one that’s readily apparent is their abilities as visualists. Both their Dune movies boast beautiful compositions, excellent photography, and remarkable set and costume design. But the aesthetic sensibilities of the two films are nothing alike.

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Image Via Universal Pictures

Lynch’s Dune has been described by some as “noir-baroque.” It makes heavy use of color, detail, and texture through every element of design, with strong contrasts between the various peoples in the story. Everything to do with Emperor Shaddam IV is in gold. His Golden Lion Throne room on Kaitain is like a gilded nautilus, the abstract carvings on the walls even suggesting an organ. The immaculate uniforms of Shaddam and his entourage are a throwback to the dynasties that ruled Europe before World War I. The dark color of their wardrobe is akin to the dress of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood and the Spacing Guild, but the groups are differentiated by texture; rich embroidery adorns the gown of the Bene Gesserit’s Reverend Mother, while the Spacing Guild’s matted robes were literally made from body bags. The prewar costume sensibility continues on the Atreides homeworld of Caladan, but the setting is a less hermetic one. Something of the planet beyond castle walls is seen, and the castle itself is only a slightly futurized take on a traditional European manor decorated with bronze, carved dark wood, and rich carpeting. It’s a much darker dwelling than the emperor’s, but a more earthy and hospitable one as well.

Alike and yet unalike are the aesthetics of Houses Corrino and Atreides, underlying the relationship between the houses. But neither has any such connection to the look of Giedi Prime, homeworld of House Harkonnen. There, industrialization has gone mad. Every scrap of the planet shown is littered with the pipes and crossbeams of superstructures. A massive carving of a bloated human head spews pollution. Within this mess are oversized cubicles of stained green walls, and down at the level where human beings live is oil, steam, and slime: filth presented as decadence, populated by sociopaths in clinical dress. And opposed to them all is the dry orange desert world of Arrakis. Sparse on the surface, its people clad in light robes or black stillsuits, Arrakis gradually reveals that the culture of the Fremen is as textured as the rest. Multicolored tiled mosaics, embroidered ceremonial cloaks, splashes of paint among warriors and musicians all imply a long and emergent people ready to strike out at the universe.

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Image Via Warner Bros. Pictures

Villeneuve’s Dune could never be called baroque of any kind. It’s not that intricate detail is nonexistent in his film, but it is much more selectively applied: the murals on Caladan and Arrakis, for example. Modernist and minimalist don't feel right as comparable reference points for the new Dune’s aesthetic, but they do feel appropriate. The most eye-catching element of the new Dune is not detail or texture, but shape and scale. The film is spoiled for silhouettes. Juxtaposing light and dark – sometimes in stark focus, sometimes diffused by the atmosphere – delineates many a well-defined form for spaceships, buildings, and characters. Except for the harvesters and insectoid thopters, many of the vehicles have round or oval shapes, compared to the strong vertical and horizontal planes that make up so much of the architecture across planets. Contrast between the various worlds, while present, is less extreme. Color is most natural on Caladan and Arrakis, most theatrical on Giedi Prime, but it’s rarely vivid. The film isn’t as desaturated as some recent blockbusters, but the palette from beginning to end is subdued.

These visual elements are easily read, and the light touch on texture and ornamentation lets the main elements loom even more prominently as forms. And many of those forms look absolutely massive on-screen. Even in an age where digital technology allows filmmakers easy cheats to sell scale compared to the days of miniatures and matte paintings, I can’t think of a director who can present the illusion of massive size as well as Villeneuve. For that reason alone, Dune is best experienced in a theater, not HBO Max.

The new Dune’s distance from Lynch’s sensibility was by design, understandably so. It’s not the first time Villeneuve has made a sci-fi film with a 1980s antecedent either. The first, of course, was Blade Runner 2049. That was a very different production; a sequel rather than a fresh adaptation, a less sprawling narrative. But the original Blade Runner had a comparable level of detail and intricacy in its texturing to Lynch’s Dune, and Villeneuve’s was similarly pared back to simple graphic shapes at an impressive scale. Neither is a case of one approach being good, the other bad; both make for stunning visual experiences. The question becomes, which best serves the story?

Dune is many things – arguably too many. But a portrait of an imperial dynasty in decline is one of them. Frank Herbert’s prose details various excesses of Shaddam IV’s court and the fragile balance of power spread between the throne, the noble houses, the Bene Gesserits, and the Spacing Guild. All the components of this collective have storied legacies of intrigue, betrayal, and self-serving that culminate or crumble during the events of the novel. Historical empires that have accumulated such power and reached such a state of terminal opulence are not subtle. Pageantry and grandeur in dress, architecture, and conduct flaunt wealth and power and help to retain both. Apart from any utilitarian purpose, empires and the peoples under their thumb develop tastes and appreciations that ebb and flow with time, vary from place to place. Centuries, millennia in Dune’s case, of history are reflected in these developments. And there is a wide range of form, texture, color, and costume.

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Image Via Warner Bros. Pictures

The aesthetics of Kaitain, Caladan, and Gieti Prime in Lynch’s Dune present three distinct expressions of the same idea: ancient nobility projecting its status, saddled with legacy and ambition. The Bene Gesserit and the Spacing Guild, just from the clothes they wear, are marked as members of orders with intimate and elaborate codes and rituals, but also beneficiaries of the same obscene wealth as the Landsraad (noble houses). The film’s exposition about the Fremen is some of its clunkiest, but the flashes of design and construction of their culture that we see do more to suggest a long-lived people than any dialogue. Influences from our Earth, be they pre-war Europe or the Middle-Eastern cultures that inspired Herbert, are plain to see, but the final effect is a universe that is nothing like our world. It is, however, recognizably a world, fully inhabited by myriad groups of human beings with a very long history reflected in their dwellings and dress.

Villeneuve and his production designer, Patrice Vermette, sought a grounded, plausible look to their Dune, and they too reached for influences from Earth’s past. But the final effect of their efforts is contemporary. It would be wrong to say that I’ve seen 21st-century dwellings that look like the locales of Villeneuve’s Dune, but simple graphic shapes are used in the trendy design of today in a similar manner to the film. The architecture of the universe isn’t cookie-cutter, but there isn’t the same sense that individual planets have built distinct identities over thousands of years. The scale that Villeneuve creates so well can project the power of a feudal empire, but with such limited specificity to its works, that empire is more abstract in the new film than it is in Lynch’s or even in Herbert’s novel. It’s a collection of design elements, well-executed and unified by the director, but more akin to a display than a lived-in world. Even the wardrobe has that vibe; I’ve seen outfits for sale at unjustifiable prices that are close cousins to the minimalist dress uniforms of 2021’s House Atreides. There are flamboyant cuts and select use of garish color and jewelry in the costumes of the universe, but they are the stuff of the fashion runway, not longstanding civilizations. Add in the depressing color palette and the film’s persistently somber tone, and the whole thing feels even more artificial.

The ironic result is that, while Villeneuve managed to make the characters and the narrative of Dune more tangible than they have ever been, he made the universe they inhabit seem more abstract and theoretical. It isn’t a fatal flaw; the coldness inherent to the material, the awkward division of the novel, and the assaulting sound mix did much more to alienate me than sterile yet captivating imagery. It does hurt the piece as a film, however, and the fact that Lynch’s film, for all its faults, did achieve some verisimilitude that the new one missed is one reason I find it unfairly maligned. Blade Runner 2049 was similarly criticized for lacking a tangible quality in its design, though not for the reasons I outlined here. None of this is to put down Villeneuve’s abilities as a visualist or a director, but it does suggest some hard limits to what his minimal approach to science fiction can achieve.

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