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By George Hornby
In the year 10191, Dune follows the son of a Duke who has been entrusted with protecting and producing the most valuable element in the known galaxy. The long awaited adaptation of Frank Herbert’s science fiction book of the same name, Dune (2021) delivers a slow, complex political drama with betrayal, drama and a giant worm. Likened to Game Of Thrones in space, the film is difficult to be disappointed with. After David Lynch’s attempt to adapt Herbert’s work in 1984, audiences were left disappointed, and Lynch’s work was mostly forgotten. Ever since, the demand for a successful Dune adaptation has been left unanswered, until 2017, when French-Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve confirmed he would be partnering with Legendary Entertainment to produce a Dune adaptation. Known for incredible science fiction films like Arrival, Blade Runner 2049 and Enemy, Villeneuve promised to deliver the film that audiences wanted. The first glaring highlight in Dune has to be the cinematography. Cinematographer Greig Fraser (The Batman, Rogue One) paints a picture in every single frame. From giant desert landscapes to industrial urban environments to burning buildings in a brutal attack, not a single frame is wasted in Dune. The beauty of the visuals in the film heightens the experience and needs to be seen in a cinema, or an exceptionally large TV. Every frame helps tell the story, and even if you aren’t enjoying the film, at least the visuals are nice to look at. Hans Zimmer’s score is exceptional. Blending perfectly with the environments, it creates senses of awe, curiosity and unease on command. As is the case with the rest of his work, Zimmer makes every scene better with his score and increases the intensity of some of the more tense scenes expertly. The arrival of the infamous sandworm, Shai-Halud is accompanied by a terrifyingly tense soundtrack from Zimmer, which, combined with Fraser’s cinematography, creates the awe and fear that the sandworm commands. Every actor in Dune delivers perfectly, and there are quite a few. Almost every character is a known actor, including Rebecca Ferguson, Jason Momoa, Josh Brolin and David Dastmalchian. The lead, Paul Atreides, played by Timothee Chalamet (Call Me By Your Name, Lady Bird), is perfect in his cold and quiet demeanour. Duke Leto Atreides is expertly played by Oscar Isaac (Ex Machina, Inside Llewyn Davis), as a good leader and strong figurehead, but still a kind person. Stellan Skarsgård (Chernobyl, Thor) is completely transformed into the terrifying Baron Harkonnen, and combines his own performance with the incredible prosthetics work into a fearsome
screen presence that steals every scene. Audiences might be disappointed with Zendaya’s (Euphoria, Spider-Man: Homecoming) role, Chani, not for performance reasons but rather because of the creative strategies that Dune’s marketing team used to imply that she had a larger role in the film than she did. In other words, she’s only in it for about 10 minutes. However, the 10 minutes that she is on screen are still immensely enjoyable, and she performs well alongside Chalamet. One of the weaknesses that could be brought against Dune is that in terms of overall story, there is little by way of a climax, and that the film was intentionally left in order to get a sequel, which has led some people to label the film as boring or dull. While the campaign for a sequel is true, and the film does only cover about half of the first book in the series containing mostly setup for a sequel, Dune is still immensely enjoyable and has enough going on to keep you interested, even though you will have to wait until October 2023 to see Dune: Part Two. Overall, Dune manages to make political discourse, galactic trade and space-fuel production incredibly interesting, while delivering a captivating story about invasions, rivalries and a secret order of priestesses and witches, all surrounding a young man lost in a desert. Rating: 10/10
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