Retrospective: Dune (2021) (Patreon)

Pleasantly surprised by this one. A break from the worst conventions of recent blockbusters — it feels like a self-contained movie even as it paves the way for a sequel. It doesn't waste its runtime aggressively teasing future movies the way every Marvel movie does (or tragically, as Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes did). The result breaks with the rhythm of recent Hollywood movies in a way that's incredibly refreshing to watch. I didn't fall in love with it, but it's welcome in the same way that water is in the desert.

Dune is, naturally, dour and austere in that Villeneuve/Nolan/Snyder way that's getting a little bit tedious. We're ultimately looking at the rise of a miserable autocrat — there's usually going to be a touch of White Man's Burden to that story (and it's one that Frank Herbert, well intentioned as he was, never quite broke from). But the sense that being the Kwisatz Haderach is a horror is hammered home throughout the movie — there's rarely any sense that Paul Atreides' future is to be a badass. Dune is unsettling, almost pleasantly so, and unafraid to sit with the most uncomfortable aspects of its source material.

It also borrows one of the most interesting elements of the Star Wars sequels (particularly The Force Awakens and, actually, Rogue One), which is its sense of the sublime and enormous. Starships are gargantuan, croaking titans that leer over human beings. The sandworms feel less like monsters than an emanation of divine horror, and the best parts of the movie are all about that. Villeneuve may not be telling the kind of story I'd like to see, but you can't fault him for coherently and compellingly adapting one of 20th Century America's more interesting texts. That Dune does so without merely recycling the book is borderline delightful.