10 minutes of Dune: An intriguing glimpse of Denis Villeneuve’s 'unfilmable' film
By Liam Lacey
This week, Warner Bros. invited film press to see a new IMAX trailer and first 10 minutes of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Dune – or rather, what will be the first of a two-part treatment of the Frank Herbert sci-fi novel.
The film - which will have its premiere at the Venice film festival, and its IMAX debut at the Toronto International Film Festival (opening in October 22) - stars Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin and Rebecca Ferguson. Whether or not another movie about a boy hero, intergalactic battles with space monsters, and chivalric codes, meets your standard of “hotly anticipated,” Dune is kind of a big deal, perhaps the future of movie-going.
The “Dune-iverse” of Herbert’s fiction, is the leading candidate for the next big movie franchise, the economic model for the global movie industry. It’s no stretch to say Dune, along with a handful of the year-end blockbusters (No Time to Die, The Matrix 4, West Side Story) are going to test whether theatrical movies have a future since locked-down audiences have been re-programmed for small-screen bingeing.
For his part, Villeneuve’s commitment to sculpting stories on big screens is a passionate cause. He went so far as to bite the hand that feeds him, lambasting Warner Bros. in an opinion piece in Variety last December, for the studio’s decision to release the film simultaneous in theatres and on the streaming service, HBO Max.
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The challenge is whether Dune can awaken its fan base, and expand it to another generation. In the film’s favour, the story of a messianic hero in an intergalactic world, is pretty familiar even to those who don’t know the original. The novel had so much influence on the Star Wars films that Herbert said was going “going to try very hard not to sue.”
If this first film gets off the ground, there’s probably enough material to extend the franchise to the middle of the century. Herbert’s followed his massively successful 1965 novel with five sequels. After Herbert’s death in 1986, his son, Brian Herbert, along with Kevin J. Anderson, wrote two more to complete the series, as well as several prequels.
In the negative column, there are the cautionary tales of previous adaptation attempts. In the 1970s, maverick Chilean director, Alejandro Jodorowsky struggled and failed to make his Dune “the most important picture in the history of humanity,” with Salvador Dali, Orson Welles, Pink Floyd and Mick Jagger.
Ridley Scott tried but ended up giving the project a pass. David Lynch managed to make the 1984 version, widely derided. Lynch himself called it the worst film of his career, and disowned it (many cuts of the film have had the official Director’s Guild fake-name Alan Smithee).
First impressions of Villeneuve’s version? Precise and extremely large. On the five-story IMAX screen, everything looks massive - although, after a year of squinting at small screens, even a sports bar TV screen looks profound. But the combination of sheer scale and precise visual detail is hypnotic (cinematographer Greig Fraser shot Rogue One and Zero Dark Thirty). The look also feels impressively faithful to Herbert’s future-feudal aesthetic and tone of dark pomp.
I mentally groaned a bit at the opening slab of voice-over exposition. (“My planet Arrakis is so beautiful when the sun is low,” a woman murmurs.) The speaker is the protagonist’s eventual love interest, Chani (singer-actress Zendaya), who introduces us to desert scenes of indigenous Fremen battling the dark-bundled Harkonnen soldiers, before the overlords, in vast numbers, ship out in their transport ships.
Thus, a lot of backstory is covered fairly efficiently, before we segue to a domestic scene with Chalamet’s princeling protagonist, Paul, waking from one of his prophetic dreams. He’s in the palace of his father, Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac). And over breakfast, he practices telepathy with his mother, Lady Jessica (Swedish actress, Rebecca Ferguson), who’s a graduate of the all-female Bene Gesserit order.
Chalamet, with his androgynous looks (he hasn’t bulked up) is well-cast here, as a stripling who has inherited gifts from both his man-of-action father and mental discipline of his mother. By the end of the segment, the Duke and his family have accepted their new assignment, to assume control of the planet of Arrakis.
As well as the opening, Villeneuve also introduced what he said was one of his favourite sequences in the film, when Duke Leto, Paul, and the minstrel-warrior Gurney (Josh Brolin) first encounter the new planet’s desert, via their insect-winged copter, and watch the massive caterpillar-like spice harvesting machine in action.
After Paul has some sort of mystical/brain-freeze moment, he has a too-close encounter with one of the train-length “sand worms” that writhe about the planet sucking anything that moves in their gaping mouth tunnel.
Either I’d forgotten how chilly they keep the theatres, or I was having some kind of scary fun.