Josh Varlin's Review of Dune

Back in 2021 Josh Varlin penned an impressive review of the first part of Denis Villeneuve's remake of Dune--strengthened considerably by his familiarity with the novel and its author, which enabled him to have an informed and appreciative but critical perspective on both the book and its adaptation--a far cry from what seemed to me the claquing that generally characterized that movie's reception. (It is telling of the intensity of the claquing that the movie has an 83 percent critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes and was nominated for ten Academy Awards in 2021, including Best Adapted Screenplay.) While as Mr. Varlin has explained he found Dune's "future for humanity not only improbable but short-sighted and pessimistic," and containing elements he found troubling (like the religious mysticism, and the eugenic element of the plot), he also found it a deep work that, through "graceful imagery," compellingly treated a great many intriguing themes--"anthropological, ecological, anti-colonial, political, even psychological." Looking at Part One of the film he saw a film that "mostly provided an introduction to its own sequel," which did not do very much with all that (indeed, "downplay[ed] several critical aspects of the novel . . . to its detriment")--but hoped that Part Two would make up for that, albeit while recognizing the "pressures" that would work against that possibility. (After all, Dune was being remade as a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster, with all that implies.)

Mr. Varlin has since followed up that first review with a review of Part Two--in which he said that "[i]t is no pleasure to report that those pressures won out against those more 'intriguing' elements of the novel." The world and the plot are greatly simplified through fundamental elisions and modifications (the film notably "ignor[ing] the complex political and economic structures that frame Herbert’s novel, including . . . CHOAM, the Spacing Guild and the Great Houses of the empire," reducing the relationship of Paul and Chani to "a teenage romance," etc.), with "[t]he complex factors motivating" the characters like "the curse of prescience, the desire for a verdant Arrakis, religious prophecies, feudal social norms, ecological constraints . . . hinted at but rarely explored," the "'organic' 'historical' sense, of toil and strife of the oppressed against the oppressors . . . entirely absent from the film," and the "the movement of societies on a mass scale . . . the clash of social forces" just so much "military action," "military pageantry." The result not only "fail[ed] to capture much of what's best in Frank Herbert's" book, but also failing to replace it with anything of substance had the "overall effect [of] . . . hollowing out . . . the novel," leaving "a skeleton at best" of the book and any sort of idea-oriented science fiction for that matter--and a general retreat into mere spectacle" in "a bland," "flat and lifeless" product consisting of a "seemingly endless series of explosions and gunfights."

In short, Dune, Part Two is in itself, and confirms the two-film sequence it closes as, a considerably dumbed-down version of Frank Herbert's narrative--just one way in which it pandered to contemporary prejudices of various kinds. When the claquing dies down, I suppose, and it becomes convenient to run the film down--for instance, because a remake-obsessed Hollywood studio system will want to do this one over again--I suppose we will hear more about that on the way to getting what I am sure we will be promised will be the "definitive" version.

Somehow, I suspect it will not live up to that promise either.