How Denis Dumbed-down Dune

Reducing an intelligent novel exploring complex themes into "Pocahontas in the space-desert"

WARNING: This post will contain spoilers for the films Dune and Dune: Part Two, as well as the novel, and later novels in the series. If you have not read at least the first novel, you should, and you should read it before reading this. I suppose I should also make clear that I understand that Denis Villeneuve is not directly responsible for every nitpick I present in this essay, but he is the director, co-producer, and co-writer, so it’s fair to put a good bit of it on him, and more importantly, it makes for a snappy title.

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune film series was certainly an ambitious project: the first big screen Dune adaptation since David Lynch’s bizarre 1984 attempt, which, in the wake of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s aborted effort in the ‘70s, had given rise to the idea that the source material was cursed and impossible to adapt to the screen. Villeneuve succeeded in creating something much more watchable and coherent than its predecessors, but failed to capture any aspect of the novel that elevated it so far above the standard for its genre.

Direction

On a technical level, the direction and production were competent, with plenty of grand, sweeping shots and visual spectacles that the modern audience has come to expect from sci-fi blockbusters. The costumes are mostly pretty good, and the settings all look really cool, so it definitely looks much better than any previous adaptation. The action is propelled along by a driving but somewhat overbearing Hans Zimmer score, replete with the comically overused BWAAAAMM movie trailer sound effect every time the film feels the need to beat the “epic-ness” of a moment into our eardrums rather than just letting it be epic on its own—but alas, Villeneuve and Zimmer are far from the only Hollywood figures guilty of this aural excess.

The script itself leaves much to be desired, with the pacing alternating between an appropriate slow-burn, and a confusing rush that I suspect would leave brand-new viewers unfamiliar with the source material struggling to follow along. Perhaps this is inevitable with the sheer amount of worldbuilding needed to capture even a fraction of the essence of the novel, even when its runtime is spread over two films of two-and-a-half hours each. I can well imagine that the amount of exposition necessary to make any of it make sense must be extremely difficult to implement smoothly on screen. The script does a good enough job that the uninitiated could probably follow the gist of the plot and background for the most part, but it does not leave enough time to develop a reason to care about any of the characters, or even the events, and at the same time it skimps on the geopolitical (galacto-political?) plotting and goals of the various factions. I think if I had seen the films without having read the novel, I would find the action and the high-strung reactions to it tiresome—a bunch of people whose characters, allegiances, and motivations I can barely keep straight in my head, running around the dessert and fighting each other over a MacGuffin substance whose power is hinted at in dramatic whispers, but never really explained.

One particular change from the novels that seems poorly thought-out is the prevalence of ranged weapons, a lot like today’s firearms, in combat, making the spectacle of armies fighting each other with swords a bit nonsensical. The only ranged weapons mentioned in the book are las-guns and artillery, both quite rare and not carried by the average soldier, and rather primitive dart launchers. The absence of firearms in a future setting already strains belief in the books, but can at least be explained away by the fact that they have been rendered largely obsolete due to the proliferation of “shield” technology. The films, on the other hand, portray machine guns and rifles that seem to shoot bullets exactly like today’s firearms, and are effective against soldiers who are shown in other scenes to be wearing shields. In several scenes the Fremen even use what appear to be sniper rifles against the Harkonnens to great effect, only to then inexplicably close the distance and engage them with knives. If the book asks you to suspend disbelief in this regard, the film asks you to suspend all logic and simply not think about the fact that entire armies are fighting each other with swords when firearms are readily available and shown to be perfectly effective.

Casting

In general the cast ranged from decent to quite good, if not particularly memorable, so I’ll only mention the ones that stood out to me.

Sharon Duncan-Brewster as Dr. Liet Kynes is a decent enough actress I suppose, but a deliberately jarring choice. The gender swap makes no sense with regard to Chani’s parentage, as in the book Kynes is Chani’s father, but the film glosses over any mention of Kynes’ relationship by marriage and family into the Fremen, and Chani’s family is never mentioned. The striking gender and race swap doesn’t seem to serve any particular purpose other than just being the done thing in Hollywood lately.

Rebecca Ferguson’s turn as Jessica was just okay. Ferguson, in my opinion, failed to capture the grace and poise of the novel’s Jessica, frequently appearing short of breath and on the verge of tears in stressful situations. She is certainly a beautiful woman in her own right, but in my opinion does not match the appearance of Jessica as described in the novel. Given the time this was made, though, I suppose I should be thankful that at least what is meant to be one of the most beautiful women in the universe wasn’t cast as a plus-sized body of colour.

I found Timothée Chalamet as Paul irritating and effeminate. I get it, he’s a very popular actor and you needed some big name value to sell this thing, but I just don’t think he was right for the role. Sure, the character in the novel is moody with teen angst and somewhat navel-gazing, but he is certainly not a whiny emo femboy.

Chani’s film character was scripted in a somewhat annoying way, but Zendaya turned in a competent performance of the character as written. Likely she was cast for the role because casting Zendaya seems to be the trendy thing to do right now. Her race was not really distracting, since she is racially ambiguous enough to not especially stand out among her people, but it does tie in to a broader point I’d like to make about race in the films.

In the novels, the Fremen are racially ambiguous, obviously MENA-coded, but also frequently mentioned as having blonde or even red hair. Most of them in the film are racially ambiguous, perhaps loosely Middle East-coded (though Javier Bardem kills it as Stilgar, and he’s Spanish). I think it is fair enough and a perfectly understandable decision to portray them on screen as non-white, but what makes no sense is the presence of many sub-Saharan “black” Africans. The Fremen are said to have lived on Arrakis for thousands of years, as an isolated population hostile to outsiders, meaning they have intermarried thoroughly and almost exclusively with each other for many generations. Even if they came from diverse racial origins prior to Arrakis, they would have undergone an ethnogenesis and racially homogenised over millenia of isolation and intermarriage. Are we meant to infer that there is some sort of racial segregation among them that prevents black, sub-Saharan Fremen from intermarrying with the brown, racially ambiguous Fremen, so that the black Fremen remain black and the brown Fremen remain brown? Of course not. We are simply not meant to notice it, and certainly not to think that deeply about it, but if you stop and consider the implication for even a second, it becomes distracting enough to break immersion.

Love and Romance

In the films, Chani is much more salient in Paul’s prescient vision, even in the pre-Arrakis dreams he has before arriving on the planet. I don’t see any clear reason for this change in the film other than perhaps to foreshadow a romance and keep a certain segment of the audience interested. The film implies a sense of world-changing significance and foreboding to their love. This would have made some sense in the novels, in which their marriage results in the birth of Leto II, who becomes God-Emperor of the known universe, but the second film ends with Chani refusing to bow to Paul and walking out on him, which suggests their relationship is over. If, then, theirs was just a brief desert fling, then what really was the cosmic significance of it? It makes me wonder whether Villeneuve will make such drastic changes to the plot that she will return as an opponent of Paul in the Dune Messiah adaptation he has hinted at.

And that brings me to my next point. The film’s Chani is much more skeptical of Paul, even standoffish. This does provide opportunity for a somewhat cheap tsundere love arc between them, but in my opinion it detracts from the tenderness of their relationship. In the novels, their love is actually quite uncomplicated, at least compared to everything else going on. If anything, their love is a reprieve from the myriad other issues weighing on them. It takes Paul until deep into the second film to win her over, and then by the end of the film she has turned on him again to go her own way. The strong independent girlboss who don’t need no chosen one feels like a tiresome trope. Dune is a series of novels of incredibly powerful women with diverse and complex characters, none of whom are girlbosses. Herbert managed to write strong female characters who were believable (in the context of a science fiction novel, but still) and generally not irritating, even when they were villainous. It’s a skill that is rare enough to begin with, and as far as I can tell has pretty much vanished from today’s Hollywood.

Environmentalism

There is a scene in the first film when Duke Leto and his court first meet Stilgar; the Duke suggests that his people and Stilgar’s have much to offer each other, which Stilgar scoffs at, dismissing the Atreides as outworlders who come to Arrakis, exploit it for the spice, and give nothing in return. Numerous other small moments and lines of dialogue contribute to an impression that the Fremen are concerned with the exploitation of the spice. This motif seems intentioned to call to mind environmental issues of the moment, the Fremen struggle against Harkonnen spice extractors echoing Native American tribes’ struggles with oil companies. But the modern left-liberal flavour of environmentalism and guilt over resource extraction were totally absent from the novels. The books give no indication that the Fremen cared at all about outworlders extracting spice or had any concerns for its impact on the planet, as long as they left the Fremen alone.

This is not to say that the novels had nothing at all to say about environment and ecology. On the contrary, the interplay between environment and human cultures, and how changing one affects the other, was one of the key themes of every novel in the series. Indeed, when the greening of Arrakis dreamed of by the Fremen under the influence of Liet Kynes eventually comes to fruition and replaces the planetary desert with lush forests, grasslands, and waterways, it also results in the total degeneration, decline, and eventual disappearance of Fremen culture. Environment makes man; man remakes environment; new environment remakes man. What, if anything, this has to say about current concerns surrounding pollution and resource depletion is open to interpretation, but it is certainly a far cry from the politicised environmentalism of today. The films reduce their environmentalism to a sort of Pocahontas (or Avatar) tale of a foreigner helping the natives fight off other, more oppressive, resource-exploiting foreigners. Like every other aspect of Herbert’s original work, the “environmentalism” of the Dune series is simplified and present-ised for the screen, the mass audience, and the tastes of the taste-makers in Hollywood.

Messianism, and Conclusion

There are several interviews with Villeneuve floating around out there where he states that Paul Atreides must not be seen as a hero, and that the whole point of Dune is a warning about charismatic leaders and messianism. He seems genuine in his belief that this was in line with Frank Herbert’s intentions. But I contend that he is wrong.

To be sure, there are lessons about messianism to be found in Dune. Contrary to the ubiquitous midwit take that Paul is a villain because the “whole point” of the series is a warning about the danger of charismatic messiah figures, however, the lessons are much broader and more nuanced than those which the films seem to be pointing to. Rather, the novels explore the very notions of leadership and duty, the nature of knowledge, the ways politics shape religion and culture, and vice versa. Perhaps it is partly the nature of the medium—certainly, it is the nature of the blockbuster—to reduce all this abstraction to something much simpler and more concrete. Moving the focal point of the drama from the abstract and impersonal to the personal and emotional is much easier to portray on screen, and Paul’s “anti-hero’s journey” still seems as though it has something important to say—enough to give the films a certain air of self-seriousness anyway. But in a somewhat ham-fisted effort to maintain some of the moral ambiguity of the novels and emphasise that things are not black-and-white, the films end up making things much more black-and-white than the books.

For example, in the films, the Missionaria Protectiva is strongly implied to have intervened on Arrakis to benefit Jessica and Paul directly when the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam tells Jessica they have done all they can to prepare Arrakis for their arrival. In the novels, the Missionaria had planted religio-cultural seeds millenia prior that had grown and taken their own course over time, according to the planet’s ecology and the free will of the native Fremen, but were still recognisable to Jessica as fitting a general loose framework of Bene Gesserit-sown religious ideas. A slight difference at a glance, but the directness that the film implies strikes me as more clearly cynical and manipulative. In the novels, the folkways that sprouted from the Bene Gesserit seed seems more organic, more loosely-controlled, and thus in a sense also wilder. This also gives Jessica’s character more of a challenge, and thus an opportunity to showcase the creative mental aspect of her training by agilely navigating herself and her son through the demands and deep religion of a truly alien culture, whose deepest patterns have only the faintest familiarity to her, and only in an academic sense. It increased the sense of danger during early contacts with a true other. Her adroitness and her co-operation with Paul to navigate these delicate and dangerous situations was what impressed me most about her character.

In the films, Jessica deliberately and dishonestly manipulates the Fremen to worship Paul for cynical and pragmatic purposes. In the novels, Jessica becomes fully embedded in Fremen culture, the other-memory she gains after transforming the water of life brings her fully into the fold, aware of all aspects of their culture, able (even forced) to empathise, to remember their triumphs and tribulations through an unbroken line of Fremen Reverend Mothers whose memories she inherits. But her Bene Gesserit training and her more cosmopolitan awareness, having been off-planet and being tuned in to the politics and culture of the broader imperium, also puts into perspective the intergalactic significance of her and Paul’s quest, compared to the relatively parochial goals and needs of the Fremen. She is neither ignorant nor uncaring about the culture and desires of the Fremen, but for the sake of humanity at large, she understands that she and Paul have a larger part to play than living out their lives as Fremen. This gives more context to her apparent “use” of Fremen religious belief.

Besides this, almost all of Paul’s actions are borne out in the series to be essentially morally justified. When he transforms the water of life and fully develops his budding prescient vision, he foresees the eventual doom of humanity, almost no matter what choice he makes, except for a narrow set of choices that give humanity a chance to survive, which he calls the Golden Path. If he is not a hero, it is because he fails to pursue his Golden Path to its end, the decisions he has to bear weighing too heavily on him, and he forsakes his ability of prescient vision. He walks into the desert, away from his responsibility, and even then does not have the decency to die in obscurity, but hangs around, his specter haunting Arrakis as a bitter preacher railing against the degeneration of the planet and the imperium. Paul hides from his destiny due to the unimaginable weight of the choices the Golden Path demands of him, but only after already becoming emperor by unleashing the Fremen Jihad across the known universe in an unprecedented orgy of conquest and slaughter. This context is only developed fully in the third novel, Children of Dune, and even the fourth, which I don’t expect to see adapted to film to complete the series.

The bloodbath of the Jihad is an example of the terrible choices Paul never wanted to make, but seem almost predetermined for him. From early in the first novel, seeing visions of the Jihad, he insists to himself that it must not come to be. This is portrayed in the films as well, to be fair, but the novel gives a better sense that the choices that lead up to it are almost made for him, because it is either that or the extinction of humanity, whereas in the films we are left to fill in the gaps as to why he apparently changes his mind. Without the context of the book, what would seem to fit best is assuming that he cynically takes advantage of the Fremen beliefs and uses them to take revenge for his father and the betrayal of his house. This motive is much pettier and more personal than what the novels reveal, and it does make Paul more of a straight-up anti-hero, or even, as Villeneuve insists, a villain.

The novels also explore the ways in which knowledge (exaggerated here in its more powerful forms, prescience and ancestral memory) changes our understanding of morality. Throughout the latter half of the first novel and the rest of them that he appears in, Paul questions the nature of prescience, feeling trapped and constrained by it. Indeed, in the second and third novel, he proves several times that what is seen in visions is not written in stone, and that free will can still change the future within certain parameters. This adds yet another moral dilemma to the choices Paul and later his son Leto II make: were the manipulation of the Fremen, the bloodbath of the Jihad, the millenia-long repression and dictatorship of Leto II’s reign, really necessary?

The “warning” concerning Paul then, is less a concrete lesson about charismatic leaders, and more an exploration of the immense responsibilities that come with leadership and with knowledge. Paul and Leto’s actions are mostly moral on an extremely macro level in light of the knowledge they possess, but for this exact reason seem grotesquely immoral on a personal—shall we say, human—scale. The sacrifices they make are unimaginably terrible, and most are not personal sacrifices, but sacrifices of the freedom, well-being, and lives of others, even entire peoples. Paul’s hero’s journey has terrible consequences, but they are almost inescapable, and ultimately lead to Leto II’s Golden Path, ensuring the continued survival of humanity—that is, if we believe that Paul and Leto’s prescient vision was entirely accurate and would have come to pass if they had not acted accordingly.

And that is the real complexity and intelligence of Dune: it asks us these questions, gives us hints to guide our thinking, but does not spoonfeed us the answers. This is the level of philosophical complexity and comfort with ambiguity that elevates Dune so far above any other science fiction series I’m familiar with, and that is conspicuously absent from Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation. For the time being, it is also unfortunately not technically, let alone financially, plausible to bring something this thoughtful and complex to the screen in the auspices of a sci-fi movie. That being said, I do share some of Frank Herbert’s optimism for human ability and the future of our species, and I believe that one day it can and will be done; indeed, Herbert’s magnum opus must even be surpassed—the Golden Path depends on it.