Last night I watched Part II of Denis Villeneuve's
Dune with my youngest son.
Dune was one of the key books of my adolescence, and I read it at least three times; he has never read it. We both thought the movie was excellent.
It is visually magnificent, the acting is good enough, and even the action sequences are ok. I have developed a strong allergy to dumb things in movie action scenes, so much that I can hardly stand to watch the average sci-fi thriller, but this movie was better and the dumb things mostly flashed by quickly. Enough of the plot was included across the two films (5 hours 21 minutes in total) for my son to follow the story and for me to reimmerse myself in it. I recommend it.
I thought the business of the Benne Gesserit and their prophecies was particularly well-handled. These witchy women have spread prophecies across the galaxy that they then use to reinforce their power, but the question of whether those prophecies are true seems to hang open; certainly characters in the book disagree about it, and when they seem to be fulfilled it is in a way no one expected.
Dune is just an awesome book for a certain sort of teenage boy. Whether it is for anyone else I couldn't say; there is some heavy gender weirdness that I imagine might bother some girls, and neither the story nor the mythos is robust enough to survive educated adult skepticism. But it completely drew in my 15-year-old self and resonated powerfully in my imagination for at least a decade. I was especially taken with the idea of a hero who is trained in both the feminine mysticism of the Bene Gesserit and the masculine ways of war and calculation, thus combining masculine and feminine powers. I think for me it ranked behind only the Lord of the Rings in captivating me and launching my reveries.
It pleases me that it has finally been put on screen in a version good enough that I can happily share it with my sons.
neither the story nor the mythos is robust enough to survive educated adult skepticism
ReplyDeleteI've bumped into a lot of Dune fans over the years, but I've never heard one admit that it's the sort of thing you need to get into when you're young - they always insist that it's great and mindblowing at any age, and try to convert people into fans themselves.
I never read the books, but hearing them described in detail - particularly the setting and plot details - always made me scratch my head.
"So it's feudalism in space... and the Emperor retains his power because he's the only one with an army of utterly loyal super soldiers... but he's worried one of his vassals is getting too powerful, so he tries to secretly sabotage that noble family... but he chooses to sabotage them by making them lords of the most important planet in the galaxy, a brutal desert world that is the sole location where the 'spice' that fuels all FTL travel can be found? What a terrible way to sabotage someone, no?
And also, apparently, the desert planet is so brutal a place to live that everyone who lives there naturally ends up conditioned to become utterly loyal super soldiers if given the proper leader to follow, somehow? But no one actually realizes that, despite it being the most important planet in the entire galaxy, the vital and irreplaceable lynchpin of the entire Empire, which can't exist without FTL travel? And also despite it being a brutal desert hellscape, somehow it support a secretly GIGANTIC population of these people, that is ALSO something no one actually realizes? Somehow?"
I used to think that it was a case of the Seinfeld effect - something that was genuinely new and interesting to people when it came out seems boring and stale to a person later on in a world where all the Big Ideas of the work have become commonplace tropes of media since.
But the more I kept hearing / being told about Dune's plot by the faithful over the years, the more I thought "No, it's not that - this really just doesn't make any sense." It feels like Herbert got so excited with his weird and flashy ideas about the 'spice', and the Spacing Guild, and kinetic shields, and sandworms, and conspiratorial covens of pseudo-mystic philosopher women, and drenching it all in a Lawrence-Of-Arabia-esque enthusiasm for Middle Eastern cultural qualities and aesthetics, that he didn't bother thinking through the actual plot of the story very much and mostly just focused on using it as a convenient way to loosely string together all flashy bits he actually cared about.
But every time I cautiously voiced that feeling to my friends / colleagues / etc who were fervently trying to make a convert out of me, they all insisted "It all makes sense if you just read the books" - to which I replied, "If that's the case, why can't you explain it to me, having read the books yourself?", and I never got a satisfactory answer.
So it's quite refreshingly to finally have someone who likes the books suggest that... just maybe... they don't actually hold up fully when viewed skeptically by someone who didn't read them growing up.
Sorry - I meant the "Seinfeld is Unfunny effect"; the mere "Seinfeld effect" is a related, but different, beast.
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