Lost in Spice

The Bad

The characters mumble. Not much of the book's "poetry" has survived. And in fact the film generally is altogether so artsy that a lot of it is literally too dark, too blurry, too indistinct and, quite simply, too cool.*

Conversely all the female characters seem to have been miscast. None of them is remotely so cool as in the book or, for that matter, as in the Lynch version. (The Spice Girls they ain't!) Obviously no actress has ever been so cool as Siân Phillips.  But Jessica has been reduced from being an elegant and invincible matriarch to being a scowling, whingeing Karen. And Zen-dire, who plays the same character she plays in the Spider-Man films, is never so cool as she thinks she is anyway.

The Fremen, meanwhile, are "diverse". No attempt has been made to make them into a realistic race of people, or indeed to subvert expectations. Why not have a black Paul Atreides and the Fremen all blond-haired and, er, blue-eyed? It could have been interesting, at any rate.

Duncan Idaho on the other hand is cool. (Jason Momoa is cool. Duh!) So why does he have a crap death scene? (Actually that whole subplot is fairly boring and could easily have been cut, as it was in the Lynch version.)

I never noticed the Atreides' hyper-masculine homoerotic thing before. But why don't we hear Gurney Halleck sing? (Can Josh Brolin sing?)

In fact there's actually too much prophecy in the film, so that by the end of Dune: Part One we already know what's going to happen in Dune: Part Two before it's even begun filming.

And the Harkonnens' "pet"? WTF? Is Villeneuve trying to make up for the lack of Guild Navigators, not to mention heart plugs and cat-milking?

Finally, the "voice" is realised on screen just as stupidly here as in the Lynch version. And in fact there's still too much of Lynch's Dune altogether. There's no real conflict between the "liberal" materialism of the Harkonnens and the traditionalist honour of the Atreides. There's none of the book's "Ruritania in Space", which even Lynch (and George Lucas!) kept a certain amount of. And yet, sed contra, Lynch at least made the effort to explain all sorts of things, such as the Mentats, and indeed why the spice is so valuable. This is crucial plot background that never so much as seea the light of day here. So the book's poetry has gone for a burton, but there's precious little of the book's "science" either. (Maybe there'll be more in Part Two!

The Good

The military stuff is all good, and in practice I quite enjoyed all the homoerotic hypermasculinity.

I loved the ornithopters.

All the goody male characters are actually well cast, including Duncan Idaho. Chalamet, strange but true, actually has a lot of youthful gravitas. 

Yueh is Chinese. WTF?

Hans goes Wagnerian in the final scene.

The sign language and the Fremen walk are well realised.

And whereas Lynch's worms were giant willies with giant foreskins Villeneuve's are proper trad vaginae dentatae again. Nice!

*Elizabeth Bachmann in Stranger First Things observes somewhat archly 'due to cool, blue-toned lighting, some unconvincing CGI, and the fact that the actors rarely broke a sweat, Villeneuve’s desert left me feeling rather chilly.' Touché!