Dune and the Search for More Money

“What will happen? Tune in next week, same Worm time, same Worm channel!”

Like many others, I recently watched the new film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune with interest. Denis Villeneuve’s interpretation of the story is in many respects more serious and more attentive to the spirit of Herbert’s vision, but there is also an element of cynicism in choosing to turn only the first part of the story into a movie. The fact that they chose to split the story into two movies from the start tells us that it is little more than an attempt to milk the audience for more money. This attempt will likely be successful, but that doesn’t make it any less manipulative. It is as if they made The Matrix and ended the movie after Neo meets the Oracle for the first time. It is as they made The Fellowship of the Ring and ended the movie at Rivendell. “What will happen? Tune in next week, same Worm time, same Worm channel!” Villeneuve’s Dune is excellent as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far. The writers even give Zendaya’s Chani a line to tell the audience that there is more to come: “This is just the beginning.” If part one of Dune is judged on its own merits, it is a well-executed introduction to the story, but it doesn’t and can’t stand by itself.

When we compare it side-by-side with Lynch’s unfairly derided version, it becomes clear that almost all of the key elements of the first half of the story are the same. Lynch provided more exposition and told us the characters’ internal thoughts to explain what the audience was seeing, but he also brought the story to a conclusion. Lynch was in some ways painfully faithful to the text of the novel, but that meant that he didn’t leave people hanging in the middle for no real reason. Villeneuve told a similar story without that amount of hand-holding, but then stopped halfway through.

Villeneuve’s film is visually much more impressive because of the improvements in special effects over the last thirty years, and the action is much more fluid and believable. Villeneuve gives Jason Momoa’s Duncan Idaho an important role instead of making him an afterthought, and Momoa delivers one of his best performances in the scenes he is in. Stellan Skarsgard’s Baron Harkonnen is not as campy and absurd as his counterpart in the Lynch movie, and this makes him all the more menacing. There is no sign of Feyd in Villeneuve’s part one, and presumably he is being saved for the sequel. The Spacing Guild is also strangely absent, but perhaps this will be rectified in the next film as well. Obvious omissions that would normally be considered to be huge flaws are treated differently when there is the promise of another movie on the horizon. Breaking up one story into two movies has become a common practice in Hollywood in what Mel Brooks memorably called the search for more money.

We are no longer expected to judge films as works that stand on their own merits. There is an assumption that it doesn’t matter if they are lacking and incomplete, as Villeneuve’s Dune unavoidably is. If an unsatisfactory, incomplete film is just the first part in a saga, then any objections you might have to the first part can be discounted until the full series is finished. It is strange that this has become a common practice of major studios over the last ten or fifteen years, since it was the gamble on making all of The Lord of the Rings movies one after the other before they were released that ushered in the modern era of franchise filmmaking. As it is, the next Dune will be released two years from now, and that will only be the conclusion of the story that should have already been completed this year. No doubt the execution will be brilliant, as this first part was, but it will be so long in coming that it is bound to feel stale and underwhelming when it comes. That is a shame, and it is unfair to the cast and crew that work to create these films.