Spiced Out

So, what, on reflection, can one say of Denis Villeneuve's second Dune film?

Well, the good news is that the very worst Lynchisms are now gone. There are no sound weapons, no heart-plugs, no magic water powers for Paul at the end, and no cats being milked. But other problems remain. Lynch's version of the Voice and his take on the Harkonnens' home world (such as the Baron bathing in black goo in Villeneuve's version, just as he enjoyed showering in it in the Lynch version) have now been canonised forever. Moreover, virtually all the problems of Villeneuve's first film are back again, and then some. It's still slow, but now it's also so confusing as to be mesmerizingly soporific. And at the same time there's precious little world-building (at which Lynch, in retrospect, was surprisingly good). In fact there are almost no explanations of any sort, of setting, character, or plot. What is the Water of Life? What is the connexion between the worms and the spice? Does anyone even remember what the spice is for? A triumph of style over substance is normally still a triumph, but this feels like a Pyrrhic victory at best. (One of the most noisily quietly disappointing fails of the new films is Hans Zimmer's music: on the 'bus home after the most recent one I was humming Toto's theme from the original.)

In the last film, no attempt was made to make the Fremen look like a real people. Here there's been hardly any attempt to make them feel like a real human society. How exactly are there so many of them, for example, if their women are all feminists? The Fremen we learn are now divided into "religious" Fremen from the south of Arrakis and "secular" Fremen who live in the north. (Or was it the other way around?) So, do they have some sort of Israeli-style system whereby the secular Fremen fight the Harkonnens and the religious ones stay at home and have kids? We're not told. We see some "vulnerable" wives and children, but they are not allowed any agency or sympathy - let alone the capacity to kick Sardaukar ass that even Fremen old women have in the book. The secular Fremen meanwhile are of course a moral disaster - unless there's a point to be made that even modern "Islamic" terrorists are at base really just nationalists nursing standard national grievances but clothed in the hypocrisy of religious piety. (See Ireland for the "Catholic" equivalent.) Because supposedly all the Fremen are great fighters, but why are they better fighters than the Sardaukar? Obviously, a modern filmmaker will want to avoid anything that smacks of a white saviour narrative. But it's still not clear what Paul actually does to help them, apart from being able to see into the future. The Weirding Way is not mentioned. And they use energy weapons at the end.

Zendire of course ruins virtually every scene she's in, having completely replaced the mumsy, wifely ("I shall make thy breakfast.") Chani of the book with little more than a scowl and an eyeroll in search of a character - who has no connexion with Paul other than that they like doing it. She certainly does not grow as a character who - perish the thought - gives him a kid. And it's not at all clear why. After all, it's literally been two years since the last film. So why did the second film have to follow straight on? The decision to condense the timescale of the book frankly seems perverse - if only because Villeneuve's cast have visibly aged two years since the last film was made. Once again, one can only imagine his new version of Chani would have made a terrible mum - reflecting a broader Hollywood taboo against young parents, large families, and so on. Harah is another victim of the same agenda, and in her place, for no apparent reason, we have a gender-swapped Shishakli, who is even more forgettable than Kynes was in the last film - who of course having been both sex-swapped and race-swapped went from being the real hero (along with his father) of the books into being just a random one-dimensional angry black woman. St Alia of the Knife meanwhile doesn't get to have any of her funny moments from the book, let alone dispatch her grandfather with a Gom Jabbar, because she appears only as an unborn baby. Admittedly, that is an interesting tweak, and Ben Shapiro has made the point that all of Villeneuve's films, perhaps even despite himself, have ended up being quite boldly "pro-life". But it's still a choice that's been thrust on the adaption by the decision of the filmmakers not to allow enough time to pass for Paul and Chani to start a family.

Thematically things aren't much better. The "anti-religion" message of the book is even worse here. The new Chani is very much on the side of the cool hip cynical northern Fremen. On the side of "religion", meanwhile, we have Stilgar, who is played almost exclusively for laughs. The hugely charismatic and highly intelligent (and sexy!) leader from the book is nowhere to be seen. But maybe that's just modern Hollywood. (Harry Potter's witty, intensely loyal, beloved west-country best friend from the books - explicitly identified as the thing our hero values most in all the world - was replaced in the films with an obnoxiously moronic cockney clown.) Villeneuve's take on the Harkonnens, on the other hand, is similarly misguided. In the book they are beings of unbridled greed and lust - not to mention cowardice and idleness - who have overexploited and over-industrialised their own planet. The politics are crude, but implicitly the Harkonnens are everything that's wrong with "soft", selfish, bourgeois liberalism and post-industrial liberal "capitalism". So, portraying them as some sort of ultra-Spartan society fuelled by cruelty and sadism feels very strange. The leftist imagination of course can conceive of no such contradiction, but personally I cannot reconcile the neoliberal/anarcho-capitalist Harkonnens of the book with the goose-stepping collectivists of Villeneuve's vision. As for the Baron himself, there is no connexion whatsoever between the subtle, sybaritic patriarch of the books and the grunting, oafish space monster of the new films.

Finally, most of Villeneuve's changes to the plot make little sense, though they do give a vague sense of building towards a sequel - or even a series. Why does Lady Fenring do the box and Gom Jabbar test on Feyd-Rautha? Jessica goes from being unsympathetically angry, grumpy and weepy to full-on villain. Why? Halleck gets a revenge scene, but it's poorly set up and poorly foreshadowed. Much of Villeneuve's padding is actually enjoyable: we see Paul getting his new names, we see the Fremen mounting terrorist attacks on civilian infrastructure, we see Rabban hunting for Muad Dib, and we see the Harkonnens bombarding a sietch. But Paul's plan to "nuke" the spice makes no sense. Towards the end of the film he orders prisoners of war to be murdered - though this parallels his becoming more ruthless towards human life and less Atreides-like in the book's final pages. (And, for what's worth, Chalamet absolutely nails the part, completely owning the film and capturing Paul's transformation from whiney teenager to hollow-eyed fascistic fanatic with an unnervingly creepy realism.)

When the end arrives, to be fair, it's just as much of a rushed mess as it is in the book. In fact, Paul's gambit of goading the Emperor into visiting Arrakis in person works well (though it's less dramatic than the unwanted visit the Emperor gets from the Spacing Guild in Lynch's version). But what happened to Thufir Hawat? Admittedly, now that he's not played by Freddie Jones it's not so easy to care. But even so! His heart-breaking reunion with Paul at the end of the book is nowhere to be seen. And in fact many of the most touching scenes in the book - Paul making Stilgar a "knight", the reconciliation between Jessica and Gurney - are missing from the film. Seeing Butler and Chalamet fighting in their shorts would at least have added some of the same frisson of excitement ("Have you been shriven?" teases Feyd-Rautha in the book) as Sting afforded back in the Lynch version (and before him it was going to be Mick Jagger); but even that's not allowed in our drearily mainstream modern Hollywood culture of today. (Maybe Chalamet's agent finally put his foot down. May Villeneuve wanted to avoid all the pederastic vibes of Chalamet's earlier work. Or maybe Chalamet himself has been quietly porking out. Who knows?)

And then of course the credits rolled to the sound of millennials clapping for jihad.

Except of course this is now secular jihad.

So that's alright then.