Dune
published by Warner Brothers
2021 (Part 2) 2024
The most beautiful science fiction films I’ve seen recently are these two films. Based on books by Frank Herbert, they tell a story of extractive settler colonialism, in which one feudal family is assigned by the emperor to rule a colony, but this leaves them vulnerable to the jealous emperor’s sabotage. Instead of being fully destroyed, the survivors foment an uprising that takes control of the substance that makes intergalactic travel possible, which threatens to undo the emperor completely.
Dune (part 1) shows the fall of that sabotaged feudal family, House Atreides. Dune Part 2 shows the beginning of uprising against the emperor’s go-to saboteurs, House Harkonnen, which will lead to war for the galactic empire itself.
The architecture is striking; the scale of it, the focus on shade and shelter, the efforts to shape the machine-like city to withstand sandstorms… The vehicles are impressive, with the vast scale that space would logically lead to (though landing such craft on planets with gravity seems less practical from an engineering standpoint, and more as a display of power toward unwilling subjects). The dragonfly-like craft are especially pleasing…
The acting is GOOD. If you’ve seen prior versions of this story on tv or film, you’ve seen both sincere efforts and cartoonish camp. This story plays it straight; the actor playing Paul Atreides is young enough to pull off the role of a conflicted youth persuasively, rather than being played by a full adult with painted rosy cheeks who is bigger than the people referring to him as ‘the little one;’ the villains remain over the top, but in a properly menacing way, more as plausible abusers of power than merely as monsters in appearance.
There are many things to admire, including the scale and pomp of many large gatherings, and the parts of the story that are simply about a boy and his mother trying to survive. The story scales up and down without losing the narrative. Technology scales from space weapons to knives, and still works seamlessly.
It’s really lovely to watch. You’ll need time – these are long movies – but there is a lot of story to cover in these books, and it never hurts to spend time looking at the beautiful patterns wind makes on sand – or how spaceships look when they explode in flames.