[IMAX 70mm]

Taken as one work, Villeneuve’s “Dune” is a staggering work that expands and enhances the original source material. Just like Jodorowsky says in the documentary on his famous failed adaptation of the same name, “This is my ‘Dune’.” Villeneuve has created a work that reveres and celebrates Herbert’s world and simultaneously makes his own vision of the world of “Dune”.

How do you make a “Dune” adaptation in a world where the majority of science fiction has taken the majority of the elements from the classic novel and recontextualized them? You combine them all into a modern vision that feels familiar but incredibly distinct. You can see Denis’ respect for previous versions of the book, I’m pretty sure the opening is a tribute aesthetically to Lynch’s film. You see glimpses of Lucas’ work from “Attack of the Clones” and Kubrick and Clarke’s “2001” but Villeneuve uses them to create a different style of “Dune” that fits the times we live in and bending reality while keeping it grounded enough for there to be stakes. 

The greatest development Villeneuve has made to “Dune” is the female characters. Chani, Lady Jessica, and Lady Margot Fenring are just some of the examples of characters developed even better than in Herbert’s original work. But the expansion of the female characters expands the three dimensionality of the politics of “Dune”. “Dune” is a harsh world where everyone is after each other and the only way to survive is to become the environment, in this case the beauty and horror of Arrakis. The men may fight and strategize but, just as Lady Margot Fenring says, the women have “plans within plans”. They can go fight in their war on the battlefield, but the real war is within the smaller details. Bloodlines, prophecies (false and otherwise), and heirs to thrones of planets in unimaginable distances. The film asks us how much do we sacrifice of ourselves in order to survive and potentially build a better world, even though that filthy ambition creeps in the corner. 

Villeneuve’s expansion of Chani adds even more layers to the film as she’s the only character grounded in reality. She wants her people to be free while everyone else is either blinded by faith and/or revenge. She’s a young woman slowly watching the young man she loves become something she has been fighting against her whole life. As much as certain people want to believe otherwise, the morality of certain character is not close to black and white like the black sun on Geidi Prime. There’s many implications to Paul’s actions but none of them are easy answers.

The sinister undercurrent of “Dune” makes everything the audience feels so complicated. Yes, you cheer for the grand spectacle of the fights and the science fiction majesty but at the same time, you realize by the end, you have been following, not the path of a hero, but the path of an incredibly complicated man who will be leading The Holy War he had resisted until he saw the only way. He had to realize he was the enemy to defeat the enemy. It’s not an indictment of Paul, it’s an indictment on the politics of the world of Dune that are not far removed from the reality we had and still lived in today.