That story about George Lucas writing ’Star Wars’ as a Vietnam analogy, everyone likes to repeat it. Except, come on, we know it’s not actually true. I suppose it’s possible he believed it himself, perhaps as a alibi against accusations he was selling out. There may even have been earlier version of the many redrafts which actually had some of that in them. But none of it’s up on the screen, is it?
Except it is there in ’Dune: Part Two’. The scenes where the monstrous black machines churn their way through the desert, to be defeated by tiny human figures literally rising up out of the ground, David slaying MechaGoliath, is very much Revenge of the Third World. The feeling is very much like the ’Hunger Games’ sequel where a character ups and says “remember who the real enemy is”, and everybody then does. It’s not exactly going to change anything. But highly welcome. If there currently seems no viable way of fighting back politically, we can at least do it culturally. Give us culture wars, we’ll fight culture wars.
Even now there are snobby film critics who disdain anything Science Fiction as ‘mere spectacle’. As if there’s some innate dividing line between spectacle and imagery. While the appeal of Science Fiction, at least good Science Fiction, is that it can let imagery run riot. Much of the meaning of this film is there in those scenes, stuck up on a big screen, captured in such an arresting way I think it’ll stick around in my head for some while.
Another example would be the distinction between the three worlds - Arrakis, Caladan and Geidi. There are those of us old enough to remember how SF was restarted in the cinema with ’Star Wars’ and ’Alien’. Films which came out two years apart but were chalk and cheese, one SF as Fairy Tale, the other as Gothic Horror. Then the surprise when we discovered they both sprang from the same source, Jodorowsky’s unfilmed (and entirely unfilmable) version of ’Dune’.
In particular he had wanted the sections devoted to the different Houses to have their own entirely different styles and aesthetics, even down to different soundtrack composers. They shouldn’t look like different stopping points in the same universe so much as different reality systems. Smartly, that’s what director Villeneuve takes up here. Which means the effect of ’Dune’ spread so far that eventually it even went to ’Dune’.
So in short this is a great, truly great, achievement. No-one was ever likely to actually make a better ’Dune’ adaptation than this.
However…
There’s two main plot themes. Paul, our protagonist, gets the gift of prescience. Except in time-honoured fashion the gift turns out to be a curse. Seeing Fate coming towards you, like a hurtling train, turns out to bestow on you no ability to step out the way. You know its going to hurt, and then it does. It’s not original, it’s somewhat reactionary in its assumption there’s no real agency in life. But that’s extrapolation. What you’re supposed to dwell on is the taste turning sour.
But there’s also the White Saviour narrative, foreigner as Messiah. Paul looks to be the One sent to rescue Arrakis, the prophet he is here and all that. Only for us to discover this isn’t indigenous notions but a cargo cult seeded by the Bene Gesserit (galactic Macbeth witches who are also the Secret Services). Paul’s mother immediately cashes in on this, while he rows with her and tries to dodge it.
Both of these are in themselves pretty good narrative arcs. But how do they fit together? They don’t at all. First it becomes Paul’s role to not fall into that role, not the natives to resist their programming. (Or at least the narrative weight falls heavily on Paul.) Paul is gap-yearing as the Messiah, and the fact he feels bad about this doesn’t undermine but underline the problem. It becomes reduced to a plot obstacle, the Campbellian Refusal of The Call.
The film rather schematically divides the natives in two, more savvy Northerners and “fundamentalist” Southerners, which allows them to act as objective-correlatives of Paul’s journey, maps of his mind. The South is the one place Paul cannot go without them all doing his bidding. (Even as he bids them not to do his bidding.) So of course he keeps saying “I must not go South”, shortly before going South.
It’s not so much there’s no realistic prospect of his avoiding any of this. It’s that the audience is put in the position of not only expecting but wanting this to happen, so the Plot can take place. And this in the same film so keen to convey to us the Revenge of the Third World?
We are not obliged to take a film’s protagonist as the hero. And in fact this film’s heart lies in Chani, who constantly says the right things, and mostly goes out and doing them. So its strange to note that film ends with her walking off in disgust. (Okay, riding a giant sandworm off in disgust. This is Arrakis, same thing.)
Can any of this be brought together in the mooted third part? I read the books in my early teens, which is possibly a longer time gap than between the second and third novel. But the internet seems strangely agreed that author Frank Herbert was aghast to see so many siding with Paul, so turned the sequel into a corrective, underlining the fact he decidedly wasn’t. “Now here’s another clue for you all, the head of the messianic death cult was Paul”. Such a thing is depicted in this handy internet meme. Though the cynic in me suspects this was a flaw in the book itself, which the author then projected onto the audience.
Conceivably then, the film has run into the same problems the book faced, despite knowing them in advance. So it shares the fate of its lead. It sees it coming up and takes steps to prevent it happening, which prove useless.
So what next? My somewhat weak memories are of a second book much bleaker, much less action-adventure than its predecessor. So whether that could either resolve any of this or even be made into into a viable big-budget film… such a thing remains to be seen. To all of us except Paul, anyway.
A more sensible review of this film lies here.
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