Lights, camera… Jordan
Wherever you go in this desert state, you will feel like you are in a movie. As Dune hits the big screen, Chris Leadbeater explores a country of a thousand film sets
As introductory statements go, the first words spoken by the Fremen woman Chani – as voiced by the American actress Zendaya Coleman – do an excellent job of setting a scene.
“My planet Arrakis is so beautiful when the sun is low,” she intones, as the opening moments of the new blockbuster movie Dune begin to flash before your eyes. “Rolling over the sands, you can see Spice in the air.” With this, a desert world unfurls in front of you – great piles of sand swelling; fierce ridges of rock jutting upwards; flamboyantly uniformed warriors colliding, fighting, tumbling, in a realm of dirt and death, swords clashing, blood in the dust. The main cinematic event of the autumn arrives with a punch.
It was always likely to. With the exception of Bond’s return in No Time To Die, the latest bid to reboot Frank Herbert’s venerated 1965 novel – one of the gospels of science fiction – for the silver screen is the most hotly anticipated of the film releases delayed by the pandemic.
It is, by necessity (thanks to a slab of source material, over 400 pages in length, that will require an as yet unmade sequel to complete its narrative arc), big in all things. It is big in subject matter, its tale of a prince coming of age in a time of galactic warfare weaving a tapestry that is both futuristic (events are set in the year
‘The crags were capped in nests of domes, less hotly red than the body of the hill’
10191) and medieval (the plot revolves around the enmity between two royal powers, the House Atreides and the House Harkonnen). Onto this broad stage are thrown big themes and reference points. There are hard questions about the impact of colonialism, in the treatment of the indigenous Fremen people of Arrakis by both houses. There is a heavy dose of Hamlet to the princeling Paul Atreides’s struggles with his father’s foes. And there is a fair element of Christ metaphor to the Fremen’s wait for a messiah, and the hope that this serious young man may be him.
Consequently, Dune is also big on star quality. Not just Zendaya (who tends to go by Christian name alone), but Oscar-nominated French-American pin-up Timothée Chalamet as Paul, and Rebecca Ferguson as his mother, Lady Jessica, from whom he has inherited the gift of second sight. In Canadian director Denis Villeneuve, meanwhile, the film has an artistic pilot with experience of large-scale sci-fi (his two previous projects were 2016’s alienattack drama Arrival, and 2017’s sacred-text follow-up Blade Runner 2049).
But if all this sounds like an expensive soup of spaceships and starlight, then the biggest star of all is the setting. Herbert defined Arrakis as a place of geographical extremity; a planet without surface water, notable for being the sole repository of the universe’s most valuable commodity (“spice”, a sand-like drug that does everything from fuelling interplanetary flight to extending human lifespans), but home to precious little else. It needed a real-world location of suitable starkness and arid majesty. It needed Wadi Rum.
But of course, you might say. Jordan’s most fabled desert region is scarcely an unknown concept. Yet any hint of over-familiarity is quashed by its magnificence. There it sits towards the southern tip of this fascinating Middle Eastern country – 280 square miles of wind-eroded granite and sandstone, hitting an elevation of 5,689ft at the top of its highest peak, Jabal Ram; drowning in an ocean of orange-red sand on the valley floor.
To the British mind, it has been a celebrated dot on the map since Thomas Lawrence galloped through it in one of the side-duels of the First World War – the Arab Revolt (of 1916-18) against the collapsing Ottoman Empire. It would stay in Lawrence’s mind too. He would still be awestruck, eight years into peace, in his 1926 memoir Seven Pillars of Wisdom. “The hills on the right grew taller and sharper, a fair counterpart to the other side, which straightened itself into one massive rampart of redness,” he wrote of his first impressions. “They drew together until only two miles divided them – and then, towering gradually until their parallel parapets must have been a thousand feet above us, ran forward in an avenue for miles. The crags were capped in nests of domes, less hotly red than the body of the hill; rather great and shallow. They gave the semblance of Byzantine architecture to this irresistible place – to this processional way, greater than imagination.”
Plenty of this amazed sentiment is echoed – albeit forced through a “102nd century” filter – in Villeneuve’s new encapsulation of Dune. On camera, Wadi Rum is widescreen and wondrous – not least in the scene where Paul and Jessica fly across it in an “ornithopter”, a bird-like craft whose outlandish design and maniacally beating wings do nothing to detract from the grandeur of the view. Villeneuve, who had filmed in Jordan before (for 2010’s harrowing family saga Incendies), knew what to expect of the country. “It’s very impressive – how, every 25 miles, you have a totally different landscape,” he enthuses. “You have as many different kinds of deserts here as you could wish for. There’s something about the light, there’s something about the soul of the country, that I think we’ve captured on camera. I haven’t found that same kind of emotion anywhere else. There’s something pretty dramatic about the landscape that was really suitable for Dune.”
Devotees of the novel will point out that his is not the first attempt to transfer Herbert’s vision from page to screen; that an earlier Dune exists, starring Kyle MacLachlan as Paul.
But Villeneuve’s version is a different beast. The 1984 movie was a creature of its decade, hemmed in by the technological limitations of the era, and enlivened only a little by its use of Mexico’s Sonoran Desert. Its 2021 successor tolerates no such constraints. It is rich in costume, in effects, and in location. As well as Wadi Rum, it pulls in Stadlandet in western Norway – a peninsula whose dense treeline and coastal cragginess take on the role of Caladan, the Atreides home planet. Villeneuve also had access to “Military Dunes”, an area, close to the border with Israel, that is usually reserved for the Jordanian army. It is this sea of powder which (with a smidgeon of assistance from the Liwa Oasis in Abu Dhabi) provides the film’s most photogenic sandscapes, dunes soaring and falling.
That said, it is Wadi Rum – where the Dune crew spent four weeks – which works hardest as a setting. As it so often has. The valley’s extraterrestrial appearance has made it as in-demand as any Hollywood heavyweight. Of late, it has stood in for Mars – in the 2000 sci-fi flop Red Planet, and in 2015’s excellent The Martian, where
Matt Damon is left stranded on Earth’s inhospitable neighbour. It has played a fictional desert planet in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012), and Star Wars movies Rogue One (2016) and The Rise of Skywalker (2019). And it cropped up as a stereotypical Arabia in 2019’s liveaction remake of Disney’s Aladdin – Will Smith’s guffaw bouncing merrily off its canyon walls.
That each of these films has been released since the turn of the century is no coincidence. In 2003, Jordan set up its Royal Film Commission (film.jo) – a government-sponsored body designed to help develop the local film industry, and its place in the Hollywood sphere. This line of planning made considerable sense. With a wealth of cameracatching sites at its disposal – such as the many-hilled national capital Amman, the ruined Roman city of Jerash, and the eastern shore of the Dead Sea – the country was always likely to attract directors in search of the exotic. The above list of movies demonstrates that it has.
But then, the initial catalyst for Jordan’s ascent as a cinematic playground could not have been further removed from a policy decision or a think-tank meeting. It was a single film, and a particular scene. It seems astonishing now, 32 years later, to think of the third instalment of a long-running movie franchise having so significant an impact. Yet this is what Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade did.
The choice of Petra as the lost citadel where Harrison Ford’s whip-cracking archaeologist discovers the Holy Grail was seismic. In 1989, in a world before the internet, when mainstream tourism to Jordan was in its infancy, the sight of Al-Khazneh – the ancient city’s famous treasury, intricately cut into the rosy sandstone of the cliff that has shielded it from unfriendly eyes since the first century AD – was startling. Petra was not a total mystery at the time, but it attracted only a few thousand hardy travellers a year. In 2019, that number was 1.1million. Every one of those tourists will have passed souvenir shops trading shamelessly on the link – Ford’s face glowering down from the hoarding, fedoras for sale within. The association with the movie is such that, in 2012, Dubai-based satirical website The Pan-Arabia Enquirer (panarabiaenquirer.com) ran a spoof story declaring that the Jordanian tourist board had officially renamed Petra “That Place From Indiana Jones” – the joke being that, for many visitors to a wonder which predates the Roman Empire, this is largely a statement of fact.
Dune is unlikely to have the same revolutionary effect on tourism in Jordan – even if you were to draw a parallel between the real-life Nabateans who built Petra and carved petroglyphs into the living stone of Wadi Rum, and the fictional Fremen who scratch an existence from the harsh environment of Arrakis. Such a comparison would be far-fetched – as, for one thing, Wadi Rum has little of the unforgiving nature of the planet it portrays on screen. On calm afternoons, it is a scenic paradise – so much so that the Dune production team had to choose their bad days carefully. “From a colour perspective, Denis [Villeneuve] wanted Arrakis to be harsh and desolate, unwelcoming to outsiders,” explains the movie’s director of photography, Greig Fraser. “So we tried to make sure the sky was never blue. There is a lot of desert photography where there is yellow sand and blue sky. We leaned away from that – and went towards washed-out sand and white sky.”
The very imagery Fraser was tasked with avoiding is what tends to greet travellers who arrive in the valley. Wadi Rum runs through a range of colours; most of them bright. It can be a gleaming gold in the afternoon, darkening to ruddy orange as the rays of the setting sun slant across it. Its bluffs and outcrops are grey-brown and brooding, but their splendour is only emphasised when the firmament is azure-turquoise above. Evening delivers a fresh palette, the heavens impenetrably dark but for a scattering of stars that, in the absence of any sort of light pollution, are clearly visible against this perfect backdrop.
Wadi Rum’s cinematically-elevated profile has, inevitably, sparked a surge in tourism – although this boom has been sensitively managed by the Zalabia, the Bedouin tribe that has long called the valley home. The prime example of their vigilant stewardship is, perhaps, SunCity Camp – one of a series of accommodation oases slotted discreetly into the sand, 15 miles east of the north-south Desert Highway that runs the length of the country. Here, 40 large black-canvas tents and 20 “Martian Domes” look out at the landscape from a gentle slope. The latter – pale orbs which resemble radar stations as much as accommodation – are an indication that the camp takes its silver-screen cue from Damon on Mars rather than Chalamet on Arrakis. But the effect is much the same. This is a base from which to admire Wadi Rum without intruding unduly upon it. Regular escorted tours go into the heart of the valley – hiking trips, camel rides, climbing expeditions, star-gazing excursions – but the point is to leave as few footprints as feasible.
This was certainly the case on my last visit to the area, late in 2018 – and a drive out into its midst, which departed before dawn. At this unlit hour, the desert was playing one of its greatest hits – the shiver-inducing cold, always a shock to the first-time visitor, that accompanies the night. Coats were clenched around shoulders, the fire constructed from wood scraps by a Bedouin guide was hungrily circled, and the coffee brewed upon it in a battered kettle was craved by chilled fingers as much as sleepy heads and thirsty mouths.
Then the sun came up – a kraken yawning behind a ridge, transforming both the vista and the temperature with merciless speed. It was a remarkable spectacle, and I was reminded of it when watching Dune, and the scene where Duncan Idaho – Paul’s mentor and loyal bodyguard (played by Jason Momoa) – tells his charge what to expect. “You wait until you see it,” he smiles – as the Atraides fleet approaches Arrakis. “It’s beautiful out there.”
Wadi Rum can be a gleaming gold in the afternoon, darkening to ruddy orange