“Dune” is the culmination-to-date of Villeneuve’s “simple/gigantic” phase. The story of House Atreides is a tragedy that becomes an underdog revenge-and-reinvention story, while at the same time plugging into mid-century Western pop culture’s fascination with hallucinogenic drugs, altered states of consciousness, a substratum of Orientalism, and what’s now called a “white savior” narrative, in the tradition of Tarzan, Doc Savage, and the real life T.E. Lawrence, the blond, blue-eyed Englishman who helped unite the warring tribes of “Arabia” against the Ottoman Empire. Parts of the first novel seemed inspired by the 1962 film “Lawrence of Arabia,” based on Lawrence’s memoirs.
Villeneuve summons Lean’s movie again here, not just in his elegant but unfussy framing (by Greig Fraser) of the young messiah-to-be (Timothee Chalamet), his mother Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) and the still-suited Fremen roaming the dunes, but in the approach to characterization. The movie sketches supporting characters vibrantly, with an old-movie sense of lived-in, grizzled-character-actor vitality (especially Josh Brolin as Gurnee Halleck and Jason Momoa as Duncan Idaho), while depicting the more powerful and cautious central characters (including Oscar Isaac’s Duke Leto) as internalized, somewhat enigmatic people: tough nuts to crack. Even the interior monologues and moments of thought transference don’t explain or simplify motivations. They are as unknowable to us as people in a history book. We can empathize and understand, but we can never really get into their heads.
But we’re watching people do things, often the thing we know they have to do because of how they’ve been conditioned. And so the result is a story that has a pre-novelistic, even pre-Shakespeare sensibility. The Old Testament, the Greek myths, the Mahābhārata, the “Godfather” saga, “Game of Thrones”: that’s the mode of Villeneuve’s “Dune.” You’re not sitting there in the dark because you’re expecting to see a world that perfectly jibes with your own contemporary sense of what’s acceptable and what makes logical sense so that you can congratulate yourself on being a good and consistent and advanced person. You’re here to enter into a world with its own codes, rules, and internal mechanisms. “And Cain talked with Abel, his brother: and it came to pass when they were in the field that Cain rose up against Abel, his brother, and slew him.” “You lose yourself, you reappear/You suddenly find you got nothing to fear/Alone you stand with nobody near/When a trembling distant voice, unclear/Startles your sleeping ears to hear/That somebody thinks they really found you.”