These dreams are strange to him, and even possibly prophetic… because Paul has inherited talents from his mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson: Reminiscence, Doctor Sleep), a former acolyte of the “witchy” Bene Gesserit sect of women who are powers behind thrones everywhere. And he’s been having dreams of Arrakis, even before the emperor’s unexpected command, and of a young woman of the indigenous Fremen there, called Chani (Zendaya: Spider-Man: Homecoming), though he doesn’t know her name yet. Paul isn’t sure if he can wear the mantle his father expects of him: to take over House Atreides, eventually. So House Atreides hies off from their home planet of Caladan for Arrakis… Be warned: This is a very beardy movie. But Duke Leto is a genuinely good man - grading on the curve of capitalistic colonizers, at least - and believes he can bring peace to Arrakis, which has been torn with strife under Harkonnen rule. (It just does, okay?) This new post for the Atreideses is dangerous for many reasons, not least because the “brutal” House Harkonnen, from whom the emperor has stripped the spice franchise, is unlikely to take this lightly. Paul’s father, Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac: The Card Counter, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker), has just been commanded by the emperor to take over the mining of spice on the planet Arrakis the spice is the most valuable commodity known to humanity, because its hallucinogenic qualities allow navigators to traverse interstellar space. For here we have young Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet: Little Women, Beautiful Boy), heir to House Atreides, one of the great houses that rule, under an emperor, interstellar human civilization in year 10,191. Yes, it’s another hero’s journey (and a white-savior one, too, dammit), though this is more like if Star Wars was presented from the perspective of Princess Leia. Even if Dune is a very different kind of movie. And getting caught up in it is magnificent. The bigness of Lucas’s vision is positively expansive, of a civilization sprawling enough so that even the biggest of the big baddies - Darth Vader, the Empire - are nothing but a distant rumor to many.īut now, here, with Villeneuve’s Dune, we have something like that again. No one worldbuilds in movies the way that Lucas did… yes, even in the less-than-satisfying second trilogy. There’s sweep here like nobody’s business. No one is making movies like this anymore. The director and coscreenwriter has taken a story that is familiar - and not just because it’s based on a book, by Frank Herbert, beloved by many - and told it with uncommon elegance and pensiveness, even dreaminess, on a scale that is breathtaking.Īlmost a decade ago, I reconsidered The Phantom Menace when it was rejiggered for 3D.
Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is monumental in a way that hasn’t been true of a film in a long time. The word I keep coming back to is monumental.
0 kommentar(er)
