What I like about Dune as a text is that it’s as complex as you need it to be. When I first encountered the novel in my teens it was about the same time that I read The Count of Monte Cristo. The novels are not dissimilar, they’re about the same length, neither of them written with electric prose, and both concern a hero who returns from exile on an errand of vengeance that has transformed his identity. Dumas’s is a more traditional story, of course, about the redeeming power of love, whereas Herbert was interested in all the structures and systems that civilizations create to sublimate and control humanity. Villeneuve’s adaptation works to the extent that his metteur-en-scene tendencies leave room for the actorly gesture, for expressions of humanity within impeccably designed blockbuster bombast. The lumpy pacing remains a liability, it’s a big novel but not one that lends itself to the two-part treatment, though Villeneuve’s conception of a trilogy with Messiah as the third installment allows him to improve on the first novel’s abrupt finale. The real selling point is the casting, which has been duly praised and some of the most interesting tensions are between different modes of performance. Many of the dialogue exchanges are straightforwardly expository and there’s a good bit of fashion-model acting going on: Pugh is a real actress, maybe a great one, but she has the most clotheshorse work to do here; Zendaya isn’t a great actress, but she has an unaffected quality that works well opposite Chalamet’s studied intensity; Anya Taylor-Joy, for her part, is onscreen for the exact amount of time she should be onscreen in every movie. The contrast between Chalamet and Butler provides the most excitement and anticipation, although book readers know that it’s a time-limited dynamic. Butler is the more expressive and eccentric performer, but his character Feyd-Rautha is also a monster of incestuous breeding. Paul, from a close if not identical lineage, has inherited the same traits of delusion and inhumanity but in recession, they emerge through his confrontation with the machine of religious revolution that has been waiting for someone to wield it. The first sandworm riding sequence is the film’s highlight, making all the movie’s shortcomings into explosive, stimulating montage. Villeneuve’s spatially questionable cutting finds its rationale in the incomprehensible size of the grandfather worm; like Paul the viewer can only grasp a small part of the whole. Grappling with, steering, and riding forces too large to comprehend in total or even truly control: these are the novel’s themes of civilizational upheaval, and what it takes to achieve it, expressed through action. The bits where Villeneuve is able to keep the characters in perspective, miniature agents within a vast and suffocating spectacle, are very good indeed.