Author has not read the book. Author will not be reading the books until Villeneuve is done with them or dead. All reflections here are a product of the movie, and are not intended to incorporate book knowledge or, indeed, anything non-cannon to the movie. The movie as advertised is “Part One”, and will be treated as such; the first segment to a wider forthcoming story.
Dune (2021) lives the moment when history pivots, and all its characters are caught unaware. It is that second when your foot first slips, a sudden, dreadful weightlessness. Dune is about feeling the falling, before you’ve registered that the ground has given way.
Do not mistake Dune (Part I) as a realised story of change. There is no loop of plant and payoff. But that does not make it unfinished. The story is incomplete, but the movie is an atmospheric whole.
Quelle atmosphére, you ask?
Being unanchored from the stability of the past, as yet unsure of how you will hit the ground. Where change is too rapid to be fully grappled, yet too demanding for us to remain the same.
Hold that feeling. Dune is the lurch, not the landing. It is that breath of accelerating inertia, drawn across 155 minutes, taut and shivering. The beginning is the unnoticed, ever-so-quiet tilt as the rug pulls beneath our feet. The end catches that briefest moment, where a hand might touch the ground before the whole body makes impact.
Emotion in the Human Ties
From here on, fully, FULLY spoilered, do NOT pass if you have not seen the movie.
I have been bemused to hear people say, in its praise no less, that Dune is an unapologetically unfriendly film. In terms of world-building, it’s certainly rapid, and requires your full attention. But emotionally, Dune quietly sets you up, and draws you in. It’s an unapologetically melancholy film, singing with understated somberness. But we are grounded, continually, in interpersonal ties. I have watched two other movies of Villeneuve’s: Arrival and Blade Runner 2049. BR2049 remains one of the most emotionally devastating movies I’ve ever experienced. Arrival had me in tears. Dune is certainly not the apex of Villeneuve’s quiet emotive resonance; it’s journey is much more limited, and its relationships are the most weakly executed of all the movie. But they are weakly executed, not weak. And there is a difference.
Dune is (as far as I can tell) an essentially feudal universe. The emotional landscape of such a world is very different. The strings that bind House Atreides to its vassals are far more powerful than we are used to reckoning with. They are foreign to us. More than that, they do not occur to us. House Atreides is sovereign ruler over their world. Every person on Calladan would grow up under the banner of Atreides. The Atreides family answers to the Empire, but the citizens of Calladan rally first and foremost to their Duke.
Feudal networks of patronage breed very strong loyalties. Elevation, service, reward – this is all deeply personal. The knights, the generals; the members of the household; they are those most personally attached to the Atreides. Gurney Halleck, Duncan Idaho – these are not just professionals who have developed some affection for their charge along the way. They are most likely Calladan-born. They see themselves as small parts of House Atreides. Paul is their future. A whole satellite family of orderlies, servants, and military men orbit this line of succession. He is a child they have all helped raise, that they are all invested in. He is the future of his family, but also the future of his House, and that is a network of men and women whose lives and circumstances will be dictated by his decisions.
Notice that there are no other children around. Notice that Gurney, Duncan, and Hawat all act as fathers, elder brothers, uncle figures. It’s impossible for me to know if they have families off-screen. But at least on first brush, it appears that they have all been brought into the Atreides satellite family; and that they all lack their own. That Paul is the only son they have. In addition, if everyone seems a bit ride-or-die for a main character that you think is a little bland, consider that they, personally, stand and fall with Paul Atreides. His success is their success. Atreides predominance is their predominance. Combine this deeply woven feudal social fabric with a planet-level patriotism and culture loyalty, and you’ll begin to understand the place that Paul is embedded into.
Now personally, I think this is all pretty clearly shown, but a) I come from pretty communitarian cultural background where everyone is your aunt and uncle regardless of actual relation, and b) I read the really good epic fantasy and historical fiction as a kid, and I still read dusty old boring history for fun. So this social context? Makes perfect sense to me.
I realised that was maybe not true for everyone, which is why I’ve come down believing that the relationships are weakly executed. People still import modern assumptions into ancient contexts (especially with Jason Momoa “m’boy”-ing around the place), and Villeneuve needed to bring out these feudal networks and feelings into much more relief, if people were going to get it. But the cues to those kinds of feudal relationships are there, once you see the context. The unhesitating loyalty and respect of the Atreides high command is impressive. Paul’s open cheeriness and tactility with just about every high-ranking servant of his family (jokes with Gurney, tagging along everywhere with Duncan, running out to hug Hawat) is a dead give-away. Every member of the Atreides camp is unhesitatingly familial, unhesitatingly on-side. Every outsider is viewed, without exception, with suspicion. Consider Paul’s interaction with his family’s doctor, Dr. Yueh, before he’s taken to the Bene Gesserit. It’s personal; I’d term it vulnerable if he wasn’t so matter-of-fact about his trust in the midst of a tense, politically treacherous, uncertain situation.
Dune doesn’t build more than surface-level emotional ties between its people. Each main character (apart from Jessica) gets maybe one solid scene with Paul. Everyone wishes that their favourite character had more time. But it does a stellar job of building the loyalty of the Atreides network. That loyalty demands Paul’s loyalty in return. The biggest relationship isn’t between individuals. It’s between Paul Atreides and the House of Atreides; all the satellites that orbit him, all the satellites that put their lives in his and Leto’s hands.
And yes, this is an over-idealised view of feudalism. It’s fiction. It happens. Distressingly often, too. Like I said: the respect that the Atreides men have for Leto? How good a Duke he seems to be? His remarkable humanity towards the Fremen, and gentleness towards his son? The existence of any level of competence in an arbitrary system of power passed on by bloodline? We wish. Look at any monarchy and see how many generations it could go without breeding power-drunk idiots. But regardless – this is fictional feudalism, and these are the good guys, so they do it right. Privileges are weighed with responsibilities, loyalty begets loyalty, all people are fairly rewarded, etc, etc.
And then those satellites die for him. Duncan and Jessica formally recognise the handover of power. Duncan bows to the ring on Paul’s finger, and dies for him. Paul sees visions of the bodies of presumably-Atreides soldiers heaped in mounds and burning. Every city on Arrakis was hit. He has to assume that Gurney, Hawat, Yueh – everyone who ever raised him or looked upon him with pride as their future – is dead. The high command is wiped out. As Atreides predominance was their predominance, the fall of the Atreides was also the fall of all their men.
Leto said: “A great man doesn’t seek to lead. But he is called to it. And he answers.”
Now, setting aside the context of leadership being hereditary and this therefore all being merely an excuse to conflate blood-rights and meritocracy in a truly implausible fashion (i.e. feudalism) – all those deaths? They serve as the call which Paul cannot refuse to answer.
That’s why we see Paul in such a wide web of different relationships. The House of Atreides and their beloved son. We need to learn the entire edifice upon which his power rests, but also his whole emotional world. Then the story can destroy it in a single sweep.
So, yes – the relationships in Dune are fairly strong. They’re just mostly made of subtext, which is a problem when it’s written in a language that your viewer can’t see. They’re strong relationships, built into the fabric of the world-building itself, but weakly executed.
However, once you see those relationships – and you can’t unsee them afterwards – the slo-mo implosion of House Atreides is sorrowful. And Paul is still frozen on that sand ridge, watching the smoke plumes, still caught by the lurch, the weightlessness, the incomprehension, yet forced to keep running, shell-shocked by the invasion, reeling from the deaths, assaulted by visions, pursued by assassins, falling through sandstorms, running from the sand worms of hell, and finally being required to kill a man: and something cracks out of that frozen shock. The same proud, controlled otherness that came so furiously to prominence facing torture under the Reverend Mother emerges again, wearier, but steeled, and here to stay. We see, for perhaps half a minute at the end of the film, the first touch of the hard landing that started all the way back at the beginning. We see what Gurney so emphatically demanded from Paul as they sparred on Calladan: that he understood the severe gravity of his situation; and that we should see it in his eyes.
Emotion in the Quiet Immersion
It’s probably pretty obvious by this point that I’m a big fan of the acting in this film. Man, does everyone in every single role absolutely commit. And Chalamet somehow does so much with his eyes, from the limpid boy on Calladan, to his mildly ridiculous puppy-dog crush on Chani, to the solemnity of the final scene. But the emotional suspension across the entire movie owes enormous amounts to Villeneuve, and to his style.
This, I don’t quite know how to explain. I don’t know if there are particular words for what Villeneuve does. But for every movie of his that I’ve watched, I’ve found myself emotionally empty by the end. Not in the sense that the movie lacked emotion; but that it had somehow dug into me while I wasn’t looking, pulled something out and left a bone-deep absence. I sank into BladeRunner2049, and found myself breaking the surface at the end, sapped and wrecked and exhausted and somehow, undeniably, transported. I finished Arrival to nothing but an utter, heightened, stillness (and a rabid desire to go read about linguistics).
They still make me melancholy; I’m incapable of not being exasperatingly fond of their characters as people; I’ve never watched a movie where the people felt so real. Which many people would probably account as strange, considering how externally calm both of those protagonists are for most of their runtime.
But Villeneuve doesn’t just rely on his actors to show you what they’re feeling (though they have, each and every one of them, done extraordinary jobs). Villeneuve positions the entire narrative through their perspective. You dream when they dream, the music feels what they feel, their world, and their perspective, is inescapable. Villeneuve has a gift for picking the moments that matter; the ones that we would repeat to ourselves when thinking over the story of our life. You are there, for the construction of who they are, of how they will remember this story. There are no wasted moments. Every moment is weighted, sliding into the next, throwing you forward into the unwrapping narrative. You watch them, and you are them, at the same time. It’s…empathy, pure and distilled. Maybe that’s the difference. You don’t feel for characters, their pain and struggles. You feel it as yourself.
Dune, in many ways, lacks an emotional journey. It is the beginning of a change; it is the upswing into an arc. It lacks completion, it lacks fulfillment; it lacks reflection, and payoff, and the consequences of Paul’s emotional metamorphosis. We are suspended in a moment – we are waiting in the wings. And we will be, until at least 2023 (if you couldn’t tell, desperation for more Dune content drove this dissertation). Dune 2021 isn’t going to stick around my emotional subconscious like the other two (we’ll see about Part II). But I still felt. The music, the vast and empty landscape shots, the quietness and the stillness of the world within the movie; it fed into Paul Atreides, and it fed into us. The chaos of flickering perspectives and straining clashes of sound threw us into Jessica at the Gom Jabbar; the triumphant ululations as Paul stares down the Bene Gesserit pulled us inexorably into his moment. It’s an upswing – but a mesmerizing one. We didn’t go anywhere. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t feel anything.
The Common Beats
Dune is a visual feast. The aesthetics of the film are convincing and considered and immersive. The costuming is gorgeous, whatever CGI there might have been was seamless – you name a visual consideration, and Dune nailed it.
That said, a lot of things that actually made this world feel real, and part of broader context that we simply weren’t seeing at the moment, were small, perfect details. Paul and Yueh talking in Mandarin, ever-so-casually, and Jessica’s fluent, sharply-articulated sign language. The positively adorable floating light-Roombas tagging along with their masters; the disorientation of the insult/greeting culture clash between the Fremen and the Atreides.
It did feel like you could push through this film into its world. Like the movie was, above anything else, a living biome. It felt like a world that people lived in – we just happened to be following the Atreides boy.
I did have problems with the film, but I’ve also been inescapably captured by it. I promised an uncritical exploration of what there was, and I’ve held true to my word, so I will simply have to bid adieu and talk about Duncan Idaho another day.