Herbert’s protagonists, many of whom possess heightened mental abilities, frequently think to themselves using italicized sentences like this,
a device Lynch replicates with constant, dreary voiceovers. Villeneuve,
rather than boring us with internal monologues, has his actors convey
their inner thoughts through body language. At the same time, unlike
Lynch, he depicts the various otherworldly forms of communication often
referenced in the book, in particular forms of sign language (always
subtitled) used to convey secret messages, or a wonderful scene in which
a “cone of silence” is projected above several characters to drown out
their voices to anyone standing outside, including the audience.
Villeneuve’s
fealty to the core ideas of the book and to the unique textures of
Herbert’s universe exceeds Lynch’s, but at the same time he takes many
more liberties with Herbert’s infamously ponderous dialogue: Here,
actors like Oscar Isaac, Jason Momoa, and Josh Brolin (who respectively
play Duke Leto Atreides, Paul’s father, and the warriors Duncan Idaho
and Gurney Halleck, who serve as surrogate uncles to Paul) are given
quippy, Hollywood-friendly lines. The trailers make this last feature
seem like it might get annoying, but in the actual film, it serves to
keep the audience grounded in an otherworldly universe.
One
principal who is too dignified for one-liners is Paul’s mother, the Lady
Jessica, played by a standout Rebecca Ferguson in what was always Dune’s
most emotionally affecting character arc. From one of the very first
scenes, Jessica instructs Paul throughout the film in the Bene Gesserit
“weirding way,” which Lynch comprehensively misrepresents as something
involving little Walkman-like devices that can blow things up, as
opposed to what Herbert actually describes: pinpoint control over bodily
reflexes, facial expressions, vocal pitches, and so on, enabling
adherents to withstand intense pain, to master hand-to-hand combat, and
to control other people with firmly voiced commands. Lynch doesn’t
bother trying to capture any of this, but with the aid of his skilled
cast, Villeneuve if anything does a better job with it than Herbert does
with his sometimes labored exposition.
The feature of the
novel that has held up worst, by far, is Herbert’s decision to emphasize
the villainy of Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (played here by Stellan
Skarsgård in a fat suit) by making him a pederast who lusts after
enslaved teenage boys, as well as his young nephew Feyd-Rautha (played
in Lynch’s film by a codpiece-clad Sting and in Villeneuve’s by no
one—he’s the only major character from the first half of the novel not
to appear at all). Lynch faithfully recreated Herbert’s grotesque
homophobia on screen, at the height of the AIDS epidemic. In our
mercifully more sensitive times, Villeneuve has left out this aspect of
the book and, in general, has given the Harkonnens less screen time than
Lynch did—perhaps in recognition that their scenes were always a bit of
misdirection. By portraying the Baron as obese, greedy, genocidal, and
gay, Herbert was trying to contrast him with the kinder, gentler, and
decidedly heterosexual Duke Leto, thereby misleading readers into
expecting a crude good versus evil story.
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