Frank Herbert’s Dune has a turbulent history with the visual media. Published in 1965, the novel quickly acquired a cult following among counter-culture types due to its trippy prose and drug-taking analogies, but it was considered unfilmable. In 1970, fresh off having filmed another unfilmable novel, Pierre Boulle’s La planète des singes, producer Arthur P. Jacobs planned to make Dune as his next big movie, but the runaway success of Planet of the Apes meant that he was tied up with making sequels for many years. Art-house director Alejandro Jodorowsky had a crack at it in 1974, but his incredible ambition for the project made it unachievable on the available budget, so the rights to the novel finally fell into the hands of Italian media mogul Dino De Laurentiis, who drafted in we-know-he’s-great-but-we-don’t-quite-know-what-to-do-with-him director David Lynch and actually got the film made in 1984.

Badly marketed and mistakenly courting a Star Wars audience, David Lynch’s 1984 Dune is visually stunning but forced to distort the plot in order to fit it into a 120-minute running time. An expanded 3-hour TV version was later released, but Lynch hated the edit so much that he had his directing credit removed and his screenwriting credit replaced with ‘Judas’. The Sci-Fi Channel screened a mini-series based on Dune in 2000 (followed by a second based on Dune Messiah and Children of Dune) which managed to suitably expand the story, but lacked the budget to furnish the work with the necessary grandeur. The movie rights passed from studio to studio, with various projects falling at the first hurdle, before French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve, hot off the back of two big sci-fi projects Arrival and Blade Runner 2049 expressed an interest in tackling a new adaptation of Frank Herbert’s magnum opus.

Villeneuve’s Dune was one of a number of big movies hit by the COVID crisis and its release was pushed back a full year, so we had to wait a long time to see it. Was it worth the wait? Well, that kinda depends on what you were expecting, but I’d have to reply with a resounding ‘yes’. It’s a film that requires a great deal of patience from its audience; it’s very long, it’s rather slow and it’s almost entirely humourless. It’d be a terrible date movie. But if what you are looking for is intelligent old-school science fiction, with ideas and politics and drama, then this will be right up your alley. Since the advent of the blockbuster, hard sci-fi movies have become fewer and further between, but recent years have seen an increase in the sub-genre as the industry starts to take such movies seriously and even view them as Oscar™ worthy in categories beyond the usual Visual Effects and Sound Editing areas.

If you don’t know what Dune is all about… you’re probably going to stay that way, because such is its complexity, I’m not even going to attempt to summarise it. Suffice to say it is thousands of years in the future (the year 10191 to be precise) and the powerbase of the galaxy has been split between a number of imperial ‘Houses’, which the Emperor plays off against each other in order to solidify his position as supreme ruler. The relatively benign House Atraides are given control of the planet Arrakis (also known as Dune) in place of the politically and socially corrupt House Harkonnen. Arrakis is the only planet which produces the spice Melange, vital to interstellar travel and therefore extremely valuable, so the Harkonnen’s are naturally displeased with this development. On Arrakis, Duke Leto Atreides’ 15-year old son Paul is seen by the native Fremen as a long-awaited messiah and his life is about to change forever…

It’s important to acknowledge that this movie is only half of Frank Herbert’s novel and is credited on screen (but not on posters) as Dune Part I. This is obviously to avoid it being unassailably long, as this half alone clocks in at a weighty 2 hours 35 minutes. Unfortunately, the novel doesn’t have a natural intermission point, so there’s no cliffhanger or dramatic high at the climax of this movie – it just ends with Paul and his mother Jessica having survived the massacre of House Attraides and going off to join the Fremen and even this is kind of wound down towards over a stately half-hour of wandering the desert. It’s hard to judge this film without the support of its second instalment because it really doesn’t stand up on its own. That’s not a criticism by the way; it’s just an expression of frustration that they’ve had to chop this film into two out of necessity and it’s not a narrative that naturally lends itself towards that form of bifurcation.

Dune is a beautiful looking film. A lot of the design elements of the House Atreides are not dissimilar to the earlier David Lynch film, using the same bottle green colour palate and Romanov-inspired uniforms. The stillsuits worn on Arrakis are also similar in design, although the Fremen are accessorised with robes and turbans that echo real-world desert dwellers. The technology is a lot more impressive though; Lynch’s film favoured angular, slab-like spacecraft and buildings, in a harsh industrial style favoured by the director, but this version returns to the ethic of the classic 70s sci-fi illustrations. The ornithopters are actual winged flying machines, much as they were intended to be, and have a distinctly Moebius feeling to them and the mighty starships could easily have leapt from the pages of a book by Chris Foss. There’s a very retro Metal Hurlant feeling about the design of Dune and it’s all the better for it.

The Harkonnens are hard to visualise without making them very obvious moustache-twirling villains (National Lampoon’s spot-on 1985 spoof novel Doon has Baron Hardchargin strangling kittens for fun) and Lynch’s version fell into that trap, highlighting their penchant for sadism and perversion. Villeneuve pulls back from that and although Baron Harkonnen is both physically repellent and a power-hungry tyrant, the Harkonnens are never quite represented as the kind of people who strangle kittens for fun. If you’re expecting to see the Baron’s nephew Feyd-Rautha, ‘memorably’ played in 1984 by Sting in a cast-iron thong, you’ll be disappointed, because he does not appear until the second part of the story, but we do have Glossu ‘The Beast’ Rabban, ably played here by Guardians of the Galaxy’s Dave Bautista.

The casting is uniformly strong here, with Oscar Isaac playing Duke Leto Atreides and Rebecca Fergusson as Lady Jessica. Paul Atreides is played by Timothée Chalamet, who at 25 is actually the same age as Kyle MacLachlan was in Lynch’s movie, but with his sleight frame looks more convincing as a teenager. Josh Brolin and Jason Momoa manage to bring gravitas to what are essentially tough-guy parts as Gurney Halleck and Duncan Idaho and Stephen McKinley Henderson gives a delightfully measured performance as the Mentat Thufir Hawat. Perhaps thinking that the novel was short on significant female roles, the character of Dr. Kynes switches gender from male to female as is played by Sharon Duncan-Brewster, but it’s a misjudgement really to think that Dune is male-led, because the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood represent some of the most powerful characters in the narrative. Continuing the earlier film’s tradition of casting grand dame’s of cinema in these roles, Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam is played by Charlotte Rampling.

The Harkonnens are slightly in the background in this movie but Stellan Skarsgård, grotesquely bulked-up and unrecognisable as Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, makes for an ominously dark presence and David Dastmalchian is suitably unsettling as the Harkonnen Mentat Piter De Vries. Similarly, the Fremen don’t get a lot of screen time until near the end of the movie – with the exception of Javier Bardem as Stilgar – but Zendaya’s Chani, prominent on all the film posters and ostensibly the movie’s female lead, literally doesn’t appear until the last 20 minutes (apart from a few brief glimpses in a dream sequence). This is the problem with being faithful to the novel and splitting the story into two; some significant characters barely appear in the first half of the story (or in the case of Feyd-Rautha, don’t appear at all), so it makes for quite a disjointed viewing experience. I can’t help thinking I won’t be able to fully appreciate it until I’ve seen Part II.

It’s a shame that COVID robbed a lot of people of the chance to see Dune on the big screen, because it really is a cinematic experience. From cinematographer Greig Fraser’s sweeping vistas to composer Hans Zimmer’s booming score, this is a work of art to be enjoyed on a massive canvas, but sadly even after its substantially delayed release, a lot of people weren’t happy with going to the cinema in the wake of the Pandemic and chose instead to enjoy Dune from the comfort of their own homes. Is Dune a great movie? Yes, but it’ll be an even greater movie in the wake of its second part. Is Dune 2021 better than the David Lynch version? Again yes, but mainly because it suffered from less studio interference and had the luxury of telling the story over a longer running time. I really like Lynch’s film, I always have, but I’m happy to admit that Raffaella De Laurentiis picked a fashionable up-and-coming director who was basically the wrong guy for the job. Denis Villeneuve is the right guy for the job and it shows in every inch of this film.

Frank Herbert’s novel has always been amazing and this is a very authentic adaptation of that novel, but it’s only half the story, so it’s difficult to critique accurately. I have a strong tolerance for sci-fi movies with a slow, stately pace, having weaned at the teat of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Solaris, so I’m okay with Dune’s indulgent progress, but I’m aware that a lot of people won’t be. The cinema-going audience has become used to long movies in the years since David Lynch’s film through the likes of the Lord of the Rings films, but they had a much livelier pace. I hope people will accept Dune for what it is and return for Part II, which should contain a lot more action. I’d love to see Herbert’s entire Dune sequence, right up to Chapterhouse Dune, adapted for the cinema, but whether that will happen in the lap of the Gods. If anyone can make it happen, it’s Denis Villeneuve – for he is the Kwisatz Haderach!