Space Truckin'

 “Dune”Part 1, film by Denis Villenueve, 2021

Dune is based on the 1965 book by Frank Herbert.  Watching this version switches you back to other sci-fi films, until you realize Herbert wrote this before all of them, and the director Villenueve watched all of those!

Fremen and heroes in their still-suits, which recirculate body fluids.

At first it seems like you are in another Star Wars film.  There is ‘the Empire,’ the space-ships, the black-armored soldiers and warfare, the creepy large interiors, the ‘family’ story.  It is based on exploiting the magic ‘spice’ of the planet of Arrakis, mining it out from under the oppressed inhabitants, the Fremen.  This is an exact rip-off of Avatar’s cruel colonial mining operation – but it’s not.  It’s the other way around. Then the ‘Houses’ come into play – the Atreides, the Harkonnen and various other royal outfits, reminding one of Game of Thrones’ seven kingdoms, while the Fremen play the role of GoT’s Wildlings.  Even Black Panther gets its due, as the key character has to kill someone to prove his royalty in Dune, just as happened in Black Panther’s Wakonda.   Or the powerful magic women in Wheel of Time copied off the Bene Gesserit.  Most humorously, the giant Dune sandworms are a lot bigger than their Arizona counter-parts in Tremors.  Dune, the book, seems like it inspired parts of all of these later films.

Herbert wrote a seminal text of U.S. science fiction.  It is the ‘ur’ version of a medieval social structure piled atop a high-tech, even magical, exploitative economic world – an anti-democratic fantasy that appeals to geeks and reactionaries yet with an anti-colonialist rebellion. Hey, you even have cool, creaky helicopters that lift off using the metal equivalent of dragonfly wings.  It also has a heavy dose of well-known desert religions.  This is ‘the future’ according to scribes imbued with unequal ideas.  It reflects the nostalgia for royalty within capitalist society.  As a parable of society in the 1960s, Dune replicates the ‘good capitalist / bad capitalist’ comparison between the enlightened but still colonial House Atreides and the uber-fascistic House Harkonnen.  Over them all is the Imperium.  Both 'parties' have their problems. Notice the Germanic slant of the last one.  Harkonnen's leader is a 'baron' named Vladimir, which might remind us of something else.

The spice mélange allows pilots to accurately find their way in space travel, and so is immensely valuable.  It reminds one of oil or copper or coltan or water or coffee or any other valuable here on earth.  Drill, baby, drill.

Filmed partly in Abu Dubai

Paul Atreides, the young and handsome son of the family, has been trained by a secret society – the Bene Gesserit, reminding one of the Jedi in Star Wars -  “to bend time and space with his mind” or some such triumphalist hokum.  He is or will be the ‘Mahdi’ – an Arabic term for a savior who will lead his followers to paradise.   Shades of the Christ or Mohammed figure. Of course Paul is European and he goes native with the blue-eyed and robed Arabic Fremen like some star-struck and magical Lawrence of Arabia.  In this film, many of the Fremen are dark-skinned, which should ring some identity and exploitation bells.  But they have a Euro-savior to lead them against the criminal Empire.

Visually, this film does not rise above other ‘space operas,’ even on the big screen.  It's full of emptiness, bad lighting and whispered, incomprehensible dialog. As sci-fi Blade Runner 2049 was actually far more visual and beautiful, done by the same director.  Politically it might jog some people’s understanding of the oppression of people in the global south subject to various capitalist mining, oil grabs or ‘empires,’ but don’t bet on it.  The original predates several invasions of the Middle-East, home to oil and Arabs. That is why Dune is safely medieval and magical – to distance the viewer from all that reality.

Story-wise many viewers will already be familiar with the plot line.  I read the book many years ago and saw the boring earlier 1984 version by David Lynch.  This one is filled with familiar actors – Stellan Skarsgaard, Charlotte Rampling, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Zendaya and Jason Momoa – but the star power doesn’t seem to help much.  The heart-throb kid at the center - Timothee Chalamet - seems to be a dull light-weight overwhelmed by being in this film.  He's supposed to grow into his role as leader, but it's not convincing.  Remember to say that with the authority of ‘the voice,’ as he can’t.  He unaccountably defeats a far more experienced dark-skinned Fremen in a quick duel – evidently with some kind of Mahdi magic. 

The mainstream critics on Rotten Tomatoes wet their pants over this one, especially the wooden characters.  What?!  Many die.  Worth taking in but not getting taken.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left to investigate our 14 year archive using these terms:  “Blade Runner,” Game of Thrones,” “Black Panther,” “The Road”(McCarthy); “The Dispossessed” (Le Guin); “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” (Dick); “Red Star” (Bogdanov); “Furious Feminisms,” “War For the Planet of the Apes” or the word ‘dystopia.”  

The Cultural Marxist

October 23, 2021