Some thoughts about Dune: Part 2
In which my head sides with Fictional Bernie Sanders but my heart sides with Fictional Biden
Someone who knows what a dork I am forwarded this meme to me three years ago, a bit before “Dune: Part One” hit theaters. Yes, reader, I laughed. I still laugh. There’s Bernie with the complicated literary analysis that brings ecology and imperialism into the mix. And there’s Joe Biden with the visceral "Dune is about worms.”
I must have read Frank Herbert’s original Dune novel 15 times as a teen and in college. I’m not sure what I would have answered back then if you’d asked me “What is ‘Dune’ about?” I would not have had the experience to say “well if you like stories about A Very Special Boy, have I got the novel for you!” (Also I did not, and do not, have contempt for the genre.)
I might have attempted something like the Sanders explanation, a kind of “well it’s about interplanetary great power politics around a vital resource that makes space travel possible, all allegorically tied to the Middle East and oil and featuring a Chosen One who…” and here my answer, like Fictional Bernie’s, would bleed into the next page while my interlocutor’s blue-in-blue eyes (IYKYK) glaze over.
I just saw “Dune: Part 2” and, dear readers, I’m still closer to Fictional Bernie but oh my goodness THEY NAILED THE WORMS. Stop reading here if you want to avoid spoilers.
This movie is visually glorious. Just gorgeous and inventive.
I’m hard-pressed to think of sound/music in a recent movie that sets the mood(s) more completely.
Boy, they made some major changes from the book.
Zendaya spends an awful lot of her screen time looking like a very disapproving cat. Grumpy Cat, really.
Is Denis Villeneuve angling for a Dune: Part Three? [A reader informs me that, yes, in fact, he plans to make a third one.]
If you don’t know the story, one key plot point is that the hero leads a fighting force that travels their home planet of Arrakis on the backs of skyscraper-sized sandworms (and riding your first worm is a critical rite of passage). The Dune movie you might remember from the 1980s didn’t do a bad job of showing them. But Dune: Part Two gives every fan of the books the worms as they should be: Huge, loud, crashing through sand dunes the size of mountains. And here Fictional Biden comes into his own. There might be something a little sad about 53-year-old me being exhilarated, but, well, I was. THEY NAILED THE WORMS.
The onscreen action is thrilling if you like Great House Politics swordplay and large-scale battles, even if you may need a dork (hello, it is I) to explain why they use swords in some settings and ranged energy weapons in others, and why there are no computers or satellites. There’s an internal logic, I swear.
I’m still puzzling out what I think about the changes to the story. Zendaya gets a lot more agency than her character in the book, and it makes her — and the story — a lot more interesting, in my opinion. The novel is too complicated to summarize here, but not having the hero’s sister born and playing the role she plays in the book was disappointing (she’s a tremendously creepy character who, as a young child, wanders a battlefield finishing off wounded enemies). And while religion — and growing fundamentalism and even extremism — is central to the book, what with the main character being a prophecy-promised messiah, the movie dug into the themes more aggressively, with Zendaya’s character resenting and opposing it rather than getting swept along by love. What improvements were made to her character were offset by turning Javier Bardem’s character into something of a mono-dimensional believer.
If, like me, you loved the book, you probably recall the mantra about fear that some of the characters utter (“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”)
But, for me, the more important line (one which I may, ironically, be misremembering) is one that applies to my chosen profession of journalism: “It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.”
I think fetal Alia was a good compromise. The changes made to Chani make her more interesting and definitely help beat the point home.
J’ai arrêté de lire car je veux éviter les « spoilers ». Je n’ai pas encore vu Dune 2, ça ne va pas tarder, mais ton article démarre très bien … je lirai la suite avec plaisir. J’ai aussi dévoré les bouquins ado