'Dune' Spectacular and spectacular spice opera

Most of us who've read Frank Herbert's 1965 novel Dune have experienced it in the form of mass-market paperbacks so thick and dense they could double as wheel chocks for a Cessna. If you've made it all the way through even once, the spine on your personal copy will have been battered into submission such that it takes on the appearance of the Bonneville salt flats — rough, faded, riddled with spidery cracks.

This has less to do with any degree of ardor you may or may not have brought to your experience of reading the book, and everything to do with the sheer number of times you found yourself shuttling back and forth and back again between your current place in the proceedings and Herbert's extensive glossary in the back.

The world of Herbert's novel is made up of many worlds, many ruling galactic Houses, many competing infrastructural interests working to seize power through means both overt and skullduggerous, to say nothing of the thousands of years of interstellar intrigue and bloodshed that take place before the book opens.

And, of course, all of those planets, Houses, institutions and historical events have names — names that Herbert drops often and with a kind of blithe ferocity. Those drops soon become a firehose-torrent of exotic names, italicized terms and inscrutable acronyms. ("CHOAM!!??" I distinctly recall 10-year-old me thinking to himself in dismay, before resigning himself to yet another trip to the back of the book. "I was really making headway there for second, then boom: goddamn CHOAM.")

That density of reference and cross-reference is, of course, a contributing factor to the novel's enduring appeal — the sense that Herbert did the hard work to fully imagine both his characters and the forces that shape them, and place them into the deeply stratified society of the worlds he depicts. It's also a major reason why efforts to adapt the novel, and its sequels, have confounded directors from Alejandro Jodorowsky (whose aborted attempt is the subject of the excellent, if unimaginatively named, documentary Jodorowsky's Dune), to David Lynch (who actually made a deeply idiosyncratic and profoundly muddled film version in 1984), to John Harrison's straightforward yet undercooked 2000 Sci-Fi Channel miniseries.

Spice World (2021)

Any successful adaptation of Dune must strike a fine balance, nodding toward Herbert's densely interwoven galactic network of competing and overlapping interests without letting all those voices subsume the surprisingly clear, even archetypal, reluctant-hero narrative at the work's center.

Any adaption attempted today must also deal with something no previous version has had to address as directly: our growing, long-overdue contemporary cultural skepticism towards Chosen One narratives, particularly those of the White Savior variety.

Make no mistake: Dune is a Chosen One narrative writ galactic — a White Savior story on an epic, sweeping scale. Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet, who spends much of the first hour or so of the film brooding Byronically in long frock coats on windswept promontories overlooking the sea) has been genetically engineered to be a leader known as the kwisatz haderach. (Yep, an italicized term already, in the first sentence of the premise description; if that concerns you at all, this movie will not be your jam.)

His father, Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac), and his mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), have been tasked with taking over the desert planet Arrakis (aka Dune, keep up), the sole source of a mind-altering spice that makes interstellar travel possible. They are taking the planet over from the vile Harkonnens, a House led by an evil Baron named, it may not surprise you to learn, Vladimir (Stellan Skarsgard, getting a second use out of his Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again fat suit). During its reign over Arrakis, the House has cruelly dealt with the planet's indigenous population, known as the Fremen — humans perfectly adapted to harsh desert life.

Paul keeps having gauzy, prophetic dreams featuring a Fremen named Chani (Zendaya) that director Denis Villeneuve shoots as if they're the world's most arid Dior commercials. Over the course of the film, young Paul starts to come into his power, reluctantly realizing that he may in fact be the subject of not one but two prophecies — the powerful kwisatch haderach forseen by the shadowy space-witches known as the Bene Gesserit, and the religious savior called the Mahdi by the Fremen.

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