So I was talking to this old hippie I know who couldn’t believe I was just meh on Villeneuve’s first half of DUNE because he thinks I’m an indiscriminate nerd but dude did a little too much LDS at Berkeley in the 60s if you know what I mean and I think you do, so I told him it’s impossible to film because the entire book is an endless rumination.
Plus, you know, the entire driving force of the narrative, the thing that literally makes them go, is dismissed in two lines of dialogue.
There’s a planet of dreamers, right? Alien explorers of the mind and of reality, and they get to the point in their civilization where they can travel through the stars. But it’s mental, right? The cosmic scope is too much for their minds and they can do it, but they don’t know where they are or how to get back so what’s the point? All those resources to learn something you can never tell to anybody.
At some point somebody realizes the spice is a trip and some bloated hero thinks, hey, I’m the golden boy of the class of ‘72, screw you guys, I’m out, and I’m bringing this cargo hold of Acapulco Gold and I’m gonna blaze across the galaxy. Joke’s on this alien Snoop Dogg, though, and the spice lights the way, man; he can see where he’s going and where he’s been and as long as he, you know, doesn’t FLY like he’s stoned, everything’s cool and he sees some stuff and runs out of the spice and flies back to pick up some more and all the other guys are like, whoa, you can do that now? and he’s all cool! and so they lay in a supply of spice and start sciencing and religioning all over the place and it doesn’t take long for them to take over the economy of not just their planet but Arrakis too and thousands of years go by and no one remembers who they were because they’re NAVIGATORS now and you can’t fart in an airlock without the Navigators having what passes for their fingers in all the pies and eventually there’s this giant post-WWII oil metaphor with factions representing the Brits and the Turks and the Arabs and none of it happens without these giant Face of Bo guys in George and Gracie’s space aquarium driving the bus from place to place and and and
…and I am just meh on Villeneuve’s first half of DUNE because this LINCHPIN THING THAT DRIVES THE ENTIRE NARRATIVE is just dismissed with two lines of dialogue in the beginning consisting of the driest facts imaginable and not clueing in the audience as to why this is so important to the whole thing.
That book is just unfilmable, because there are 200 page backstory things in it like that that resonate in the reader that have to get glossed over because movies don’t work like books. The appeal of DUNE is it’s all the stuff that happens in your head, and not on the screen.