Hugo 22 BDP-Long: Dune

Or ⊃⋃⋂∈ if you prefer.

It took me a long time to see this, especially as it was a film I was eager to see on the big screen. Those plans failed and I finally watched a streaming version of it on a small telly. I did make use of a public holiday to get an uninterrupted watch.

This is tricky to review. I know the book very well and re-read it relatively recently. The film is about as faithful an adaptation as you could make without the story grinding to a halt visually. Special effects have advanced that the epic scale of the story is easy to convey visually but there is no getting around that there is a lot of info that needs dumping. The wheels within wheels plans of the Harkonnen, Emperor and Bene Gesserit are given just enough detail to make sense with more emphasis given on the nature of Arrakis and the Fremen.

The biggest and unavoidable loss is the interior thoughts of key characters. The book spends a lot of time in the heads of Jessica, Paul and others. The film often retains key dialogue but without an internal explanation. For, example the point where Jessica accidentally uses the term “maker” to describe a sandworm to the Fremen house-keeper Shadat Mapes is retained but obviously the film doesn’t have a way of showing what she intended to say. It’s a nod to fans of the book I suppose but the impact is different, illustrating how a “faithful” adaptation leads to presenting subtle differences in a story.

This is Dune: Part 1 and we get the first half of the book more or less. The conclusion is Paul’s adoption by the Fremen after a personal and bloody duel in the desert. It’s a natural point to split the story but Denis Villeneuve uses it as the culmination of a visual and dramatic arc in which the scale of everything narrows and narrows. The massive spaceships, imperial politics and crisp uniforms of the earlier part of the film are boiled down to a few people in desert gear and a knife fight on some rocks. It is very well done and the use of Paul’s visions emphasises that this one brutal fight is the point at which history turns helps retain the epic quality established by the earlier grand visuals.

The militarism and uniforms and even the spaceships have a sinister fascistic quality even in how House Atreides is presented. Oscar Issac’s Leto is so thoroughly doomed that he cannot understand that the Harkonnen cruelty is the point of the system that he upholds even as he attempts to politic his way through the crisis. The Atreides cannot win by playing a game built on cruelty — an element that is present in the book.

For the Hugo Awards, I think this is the strongest contender. A critically acclaimed adaptation of a beloved science-fiction classic? That will be hard to beat but there are some wild cards in the mix