Villeneuve has always shown Wagnerian tendencies and Dune allows him to indulge these to his heart’s content. Sweeping battle formations, caricaturesque villains, titanic scale, finely moulded body armour, sacred swords. All these boxes and many more are ticked. I realise that this is an adaptation of a novel, but the directorial thumbprint is all over it.
A few random thoughts:
Iraq
Villeneuve has turned Dune into an allegory for the US imperial adventures in the Middle East. The references are not subtle, down to the interpolation of the Mahdi myth into the narrative. This world with its palm trees, its shifting sands, its veiled women, feels like it could be one of those slightly abortive Iraq films from a decade ago. Having said this, the message surrounding these signifiers remains confused. Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys? Because Chalamet’s princely Paul has a definite gringo feel, but he’s also the heroic epicentre of this narrative. In fact all the heroic characters have a gringo air to them, with Bardem’s maverick rebel commander being the strangely accented exception. Meanwhile, the lead villain is resurrected as a pool of oil. The point of this is that the film offers no clarity on its take on late imperial USA: it just throws a few semiotic signifiers into the mix and lets them stew.
Global Warming
There’s much made in the film about the way in which the Dune planet might have been a paradise but has been turned into a desert hell by the quest for spices (ie oil - the actual process of extracting oil along with the demonic worms seem redolent of fracking). Sous la pavee la plage, or, under the sand, the green. Chalamet and famille live in a verdant, Atlantic land, which they give up in order to pursue the riches inherent in the spice trade. What all this means is anyone’s guess and it there is an eco-parable lurking here, it’s also buried beneath the sands of its Wagnerian hero-worship narrative.
Desert
One of the strongest aspects of Dune is its realisation of the desert, with some remarkable cinematography by Greig Fraser. However, the one thing that I felt on emerging from the air-conditioned Cinemateca into the hottest day of the year, was that the film never succeeded in conveying the claustrophobic, stifling sensation of pure heat, which is fundamental to the idea of the desert and the narrative itself. There’s too much going on for this sensation to ever emerge and seize the audience in its grip. Again this speaks of the use of image and signifier over any real immersion in the film’s professed themes. We can see that we’re in the desert, but it never really feels like a desert, because on the whole this film feels more like walking through a tastefully designed shopping mall full of beautiful customers.
Infantilisation
“I’m all lost in the supermarket”, they sang once upon a time. That song, it seems now, feels like a lament for the way that the commodification of life seeks to strip it of meaning. Dune is a well executed piece of cinema, with some splendid design work and 3D effects. The post production budget must have made the execs’ eyeballs swim with the kind of fear the film never really conveys, for all of Zimmer’s intent to ramp up the tension with his score. However, in the end, what does all this money and glitz actually buy? The reference to Wagner made me think of the finest use of that composer’s music in modern US cinema, in a film that was also about US imperial adventures, but one which actually sought to comment on the reality of the Vietnam war, a gruesome, absurd reality that reflected the dark side of modern USA. Dune just uses these notions as wallpaper to cover the empty cinema wall. Content has been Baudrillarded, it has been stripped of any intent at meaning. We are all children, waiting for the next thrill. Personally I blame George Lucas.
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