Dune (Denis Villeneuve 2021; David Lynch 1984; Frank Herbert 1965)

Done

(Warning: plot details for the 2021 remake the 1984 adaptation and the 1965 original discussed in explicit detail)

Denis Villeneuve's long-delayed Dune (initiated 2016; shot in 2019; released 2021) does this much right: it tells Frank Herbert's story-- the societal complexity (Great Houses and Guilds), the skullduggery (plans within plans within plans within plans), Paul Atreides' meteoric ascent-- coherently. Villeneuve carefully hands over with both hands what Lynch in his 1984 version threw at us wholesale, not so much an info dump as explosive diarrhea. With Villeneuve you feel a touch overwhelmed; with Lynch it swirls past your eyebrows, climbing. 

Villeneuve is a self-professed devotee of Herbert's science fiction epic but cannily reworks the material for today's sensibilities: where Herbert starts with a quote from Princess Irulan (the Padishah Emperor's daughter) and Lynch opens with Irulan's face huge onscreen (a very young Virginia Madsen), Villeneuve begins from the Fremen point of view, with Chani (Zendaya) taking over the task of opening narrator. Where Herbert implies that the Baron Harkonnen is an evil degenerate imperialist (because gay) and Lynch doubles down on the implication with a jawdropping scene involving bloodletting and rape, Villeneuve sidesteps the issue by having Stellan Skarsgard channel Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now down to the massive bald pate rubbed smooth by fat fingers. Villeneuve's casting is more inclusive, with authentically Middle Eastern faces populating the screen, albeit at the margins; he even flips Dr. Liet-Kynes' sex by choosing Sharon Duncan-Brewster for the role (Lynch had Max Von Sydow-- yes Jesus Christ and Ming the Merciless and Arrakis' planetologist).  

Villeneuve takes the time to tell a human story, inserting early on a little Vito/Michael Corleone tete a tete a la The Godfather (for all I know tapping Robert Towne for the rewrite); at one point Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac) discussing succession with his son Paul (Timothee Chalamet) generously declares "-- if your answer is no you'll still be the only thing I ever needed you to be: my son."

Well maybe not Towne; only the writer of Forrest Gump can come up with that kind of overripe cheddar (and even if I'm wrong it's still the kind of dialogue Eric 'Life is like a box of chocolates' Roth would write).

More moving in my book is when Jamis (Babs Olusanmokun) challenges Paul to a duel to the death and Paul slips a knife in his liver. Herbert has Jessica mocking her son Paul to deflate any pleasure he might feel from his first kill; Villeneuve plays the scene wordlessly, cutting from Chani's mournful face to Jessica's (Rebecca Ferguson) watchful eyes to Paul, stricken, stretching out a hand to Jamis-- no enjoyment in the man's passing here. The two look at each other and a connection is forged before Jamis' eyes turn away to gaze at a vaster mystery.

You see the skill and care with which Villeneuve has fashioned his tribute, the affection for a book he has loved since he was fourteen. As an action movie an epic production an adaptation of a complex novel, Villeneuve's is so clearly superior to the 1984 misfire the difference is like noirish night to desert day. So why do I insist on preferring the Lynch?

Because Lynch is the last person in the world one can imagine adapting Dune (well there's Jodorowsky, but we only have a documentary suggesting what might have been). Because Lynch in taking on what is so clearly a science-fiction reworking of Lawrence of Arabia (or rather its source material, Lawrence's autobiographical The Seven Pillars of Wisdom) tosses out practically everything suggesting the Middle East and fashions his own more gothic world. Lean captured heat haze and pointed his camera lens straight at the sun; Lynch gives us a baleful moon and slow-motion footage of waterdrops plunking in a pool. Villeneuve shoots in the UAE and the Wadi Rum in Jordan (where Lean shot his film and Lawrence himself visited); Lynch shoots in elaborate studio sets that don't just look dark but subterranean-- Alan Splet's sound design suggests the distant hum of large machinery, of a network of ventilation ducts exhaling cold air. When Lynch's film does go reluctantly outdoors-- the Samalayuca Dune Fields in Mexico-- the desert light has a burnished copper glow as if filtered through a sandstorm, or lit by Vittorio Storaro sunlamps. 

And the little touches-- ornithopter cabins lined with tacked leather, spice factories that resemble giant Egyptian scarabs, Jessica's rubber bondage mouth gag. Villeneuve sends sleek glowglobes gliding across a room, his spaceships and equipment a careful selection from the Black & Decker website; Lynch tips those same globes with gilded wings, the combination of giddy camp and baroque intricacy keeping you humming with pleasure.

Heartplugs that when pulled cause the body to bleed out; poisons that corrupt the flesh and need freshly milked cat (strap-on rat included) to obtain the antidote; a sonic weapon turns spoken words into ammunition that burst your organs and break your bones. Lynch stuffs his picture with so much demented details Herbert's imagination feels a little cramped by comparison; you find yourself gawking, almost not caring that the characters are paper-thin, the plot densely opaque.

Arguably Lynch's worst stumble involves his hero-- as Kyle Maclachlan plays him, Paul is as straightforward as Jeffrey Beaumont or Agent Dale Cooper but infinitely more powerful, more potentially destructive. Lynch even blesses his ascension with a rainshower-- never mind that there hasn't been precipitation on Arrakis in centuries, Paul needs the miracle to confirm his messiah status (and kick the film's genre from science fiction into interstellar fantasy). Chalamet's (and the book's) Paul loudly reject the offer of jihad; if Lynch nurses any doubts as to the righteousness of Paul's cause he only gives us visual cues-- the demented gleam in Paul's eyes matching the gleam in the Baron's; the Fremen assembled before Paul in perfect array a la Triumph of the Will; Paul's younger sister Alia (Alicia Witt) standing in the midst of a massacre knife in hand and writhing in slow motion, her expression one of utter ecstasy. 

Villeneuve's movie stays faithful to an important science-fiction novel, perhaps the most popular to ever evoke the science of ecology (tho not the earliest-- that honor arguably goes to George Stewart's monumental Earth Abides). It's a fun read, not quite profound-- the character of Paul Atreides is basically T.E. Lawrence with the rough edges sanded away. Paul feels ambivalent about playing savior and liberator (not to mention exploiter and mass-murderer); he admires the Fremen's fighting skills, the purity of their spirit. Lawrence felt similarly about the Arabs, only he expresses contempt for their tribalist tendencies ("-- they were a limited, narrow-minded people"). 

I miss the rough edges; I find Lawrence's contradictory self-portrait more fascinating than Herbert's more conventional hero. Also a writer who can turn out a passage like this (a description of the aforementioned Wadi Rum): 

The crags were capped in nests of domes, less hotly red than the body of the hills; rather grey and shallow. They gave the finishing semblance of Byzantine architecture to this irresistible place: this processional way greater than imagination. The Arab armies would have been lost in the length and breadth of it, and within the walls a squadron of aeroplanes could have wheeled in formation. Our little caravan grew self-conscious, and fell dead quiet, afraid and ashamed to flaunt its smallness in the presence of the stupendous hills.

-- cannot be easily dismissed. Lawrence's prose-- the distinct cadences, the precision, the poetry softly singing throughout-- makes Herbert's 'classic' read like a "What I Did Last Summer" essay.

Also miss what I feel is a crucial quality when writing great science fiction or even great literature: the stench of genuine madness*, the reek of ambition breaking boundaries to achieve a new truth or failing precipitously in the attempt.

*(Yes there's a lot of drug use and rather creaky dream imagery in Herbert's book, used mainly to advance the plot; give me the hallucinations of Philip K Dick in A Scanner Darkly or Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said or The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch anytime)

That's what Lynch brings to the party, that stench; he may fail at breaking anything (well the rules of epic filmmaking) but he fails spectacularly. And watching his version for the umpteenth time I can't help thinking his attempt wasn't a complete miss-- that interiority, the characters talking to themselves as much as to others, the sense of claustrophobic intimacy enforced not just by sets (that Riefenstahllike crowd of Fremen crammed into a hallway narrower longer taller than Albert Speer's wettest dreams) but by the film frame squeezing faces together, by images linked through associative editing (repeated and superimposed imagery; synchronized nosebleeds; the very fabric of space torn apart). Lynch in his own lunatic way realizes Herbert's subconscious aspirations better than most book fans realize, better I'd say than the book actually deserves; Villeneuve has everything else-- ho hum-- covered.