"Dune"

Here's the really unusual thing about the new movie "Dune" -- when the Hero Paul goes on his Quest, his mother goes with him. This is an exceptional plot element in an otherwise not very exceptional film. Who takes his mom on a heroic quest? Most heroes in fact are orphans (like Luke Skywalker, Siegfried, King Arthur...)

If any of the characters in "Dune" ever smiled, I missed that moment. The hero of Dune is Paul Atreides (played by Timothée Chalamet). Paul is either brooding or resentful. In the very first scene, he's both, as his mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) wakes him up, gives him breakfast, and tells him what to wear to meet a visitor to the court of his father, Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac). At breakfast she also makes him play some sort of hypnotic mind game to force her to give him a glass of water. 

Paul Atreides is clearly being trained in military and mystic arts to lead whatever it is that his father is leading, and to be a successor to whatever witch-like tradition his mother belongs to. There's a lot of language that recalls Arab or East Asian mystic traditions (you can see it as Orientalism if you like). Also a bit of martial arts stuff, and a Dr. Yueh, who speaks Chinese. All this might make Paul a potential Messiah. Since his mother is with him throughout his quest, there is not much chance for romantic encounters, though he does seem sort of attracted to a woman, Chani (Zendaya). 

Visually, the movie offers lots of overpowering palaces and desert wildernesses, as well as space travel and a variety of ethnic groups with their own costumes, etc. These and the special effects seemed to me to me somewhat similar to those of other fantasy and sci-fi films I've seen. There are big space ships with imposing off-ramps on which visiting dignitaries can flaunt themselves. Big worms with icky, hairy mouths. Big sand dunes and sort-of quicksand traps. Big palace doors. Sort-of-Asian and Arab and military costumes in a movie-tradition kind of way. That kind of thing.

As you can tell, I didn't like the movie very much. Paul Krugman, the Nobel-Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist disagrees. In an op-ed titled "'Dune' is the Movie We Always Wanted," Krugman took all the elements that bothered me very seriously. (So I must be wrong). He wrote: 

"There’s a glittering, hierarchical society wracked by intrigue and warfare, a young hero of noble birth who may be a prophesied messiah, a sinister but alluring sisterhood of witches, fierce desert warriors and, of course, giant worms. ... What makes 'Dune' more than an ordinary space opera are two things: its subtlety and the richness of its world-building.... And the world Herbert created is given depth by layers of cultural references. He borrowed from Islamic and Ayurvedic traditions, from European feudalism and more — 'Dune' represents cultural appropriation on a, well, interstellar scale. It’s also deeply steeped in fairly serious ecological thinking." (source)

No smiles.

 

Blog post © 2021 mae sander. Movie posters from the movie.