An epic rises from the SANDS
It’s the sci-fi classic they said was unfilmable. But this Dune has spice — and daft giant worms!
Dune (12A, 155 mins) Verdict: Out of this world ★★★★✩ The French Dispatch (15, 108 mins) Verdict: Tiresomely mannered ★★✩✩✩
JAMES BOND is still on a one-man mission to save the beleaguered cinema industry, but he was at least joined yesterday by a rampaging army of angry giant sandworms. Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is not the masterpiece some have proclaimed it to be, but it is the roaring, sprawling embodiment of a film that demands to be seen on the biggest screen available.
Villeneuve’s last film, unveiled four years ago this month, was the excellent Blade Runner 2049 — the French-Canadian director has form in the business of tackling science-fiction material freighted with baggage. The baggage in that case was Ridley Scott’s original Blade Runner. Could Villeneuve do it justice with a sequel after 35 years? He did.
With Dune, the baggage is Frank Herbert’s bestselling 1965 novel, which scared off film-makers with its narrative breadth and thunderous symbolism until David Lynch had a go in 1984, a suitably apt year in which to spin a futuristic yarn. Unfortunately, Lynch’s adaptation span out of control. It was a bloated, incomprehensible mess.
So here we are again, in the year 10191, transported once more to the planet of Arrakis, a fiercely inhospitable expanse of arid rolling desert where the only creatures that feel truly at home are those worms the size of dirigibles. Tunnelling through the sand, destroying everything in their path, they are meant to inspire awe. So I’m almost ashamed to report that I found them a hoot. They are risible dirigibles.
Arrakis, by the way, contrary to appearances, is also a treasure house. It contains vast quantities of ‘spice’, the most valuable commodity in this forbidding universe. Spice production is a guarantee of obscene wealth.
WITHOUT spice, we are told, ‘interstellar space travel is impossible’. You’d have to be a little slow on the uptake not to recognise spice as a euphemism for oil, our own earthly holy of holies.
The story begins on the more salubrious planet of Caladan, home to the noble house of Atreides, where dreamy Prince Paul (Timothee Chalamet) keeps having visions featuring a beguiling beauty from some faraway place.
Of particular interest to the Emperor’s mysterious Truthsayer (Charlotte Rampling in an extravagant black headdress), Paul’s vision turns out to be beautiful Chani (Zendaya), who lives on distant Arrakis as one of the oppressed Fremen tribe.
The Fremen, led by the brooding Stilgar (Javier Bardem), are warrior-serfs, subjugated by the dastardly House Harkonnen, who have been harvesting spice for decades and duly living high on the hog. Speaking of hogs, their ruthless leader is the terrifyingly corpulent Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard in a fat suit).
Are you keeping up? Back on Caladan, Paul’s father Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac) plans an alliance with the Fremen as a way to muscle in on the spice business. In homage to Scary, Ginger, Sporty, Baby and Posh, let’s call him a spice wannabe. His wife Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) isn’t sure about any of this, and she’s not the only one. My tip is to mug up on the story beforehand.
Still, it’s a heck of a spectacle, with great visual effects, fabulous cinematography (by Greig Fraser), and a soaring Hans Zimmer score. It helps to keep that oil metaphor in mind as the Atreides troops land on Arrakis, aware that if the furious sandworms or the Harkonnen fundamentalists don’t nobble their attempts at friendly colonisation, the scorching heat will. Just to flog the modern-day allusions even harder, Paul refers to ‘a holy war spreading across the universe like unquenchable fire’.
Similarly unquenchable are the bagpipes with which the Atreides announce their arrival. Whether it’s depressing or uplifting to find that bagpipes are still around more than 8,000 years from now, with so much else having presumably fallen into extinction, you’ll have to decide for yourself.
If Dune is a hit, incidentally, then we are certain to get a sequel; this movie only covers half the story. I saw it at last month’s Venice Film Festival, emerging from the premiere into a hysterical mob of ‘Chalamaniacs’ desperate for a glimpse of young Timothee.
They will be thrilled that he also looms large in The French Dispatch, as a wild-haired student revolutionary in writer-director Wes Anderson’s idiosyncratic ‘love letter’ to journalism in general and The New Yorker magazine in particular.
ANDERSON has certainly assembled a spectacular cast: Chalamet, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Willem Dafoe, Benicio Del Toro, Tilda Swinton, Owen Wilson, Lea Seydoux, Christoph Waltz, Henry Winkler, Adrien Brody... the list goes on. And his film, segmented into four separate stories, each dramatising a feature article in The French Dispatch, supposedly an outpost in provincial France of a Kansas newspaper, is undeniably exquisite to look at, its every frame a thing of beauty.
Moreover, I write as a huge fan of Anderson’s last live-action feature, 2014’s glorious The Grand Budapest Hotel. His deliberately mannered narrative and visual style can work triumphantly.
But, while mindful of the rhapsodies heaped on it by others, and having seen it twice just to be sure, I found The French Dispatch to be a pretentious slog, mystifying in its storytelling, laboured in its comedy and generally far too adoring of itself. There are those who say much the same about The New Yorker, but I don’t think that was his point.