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Page A—26 Shelton-Mason County Journal — Thursday, Sept. 17, 2020
THE DARK REVIEWS
portends
What Denis Villeneue’s 'Dune’ trailer
nerds, you might have
noticed them losing their
minds over a movie trailer
that went online Sept. 9.
We’re all at least a little
nerdy these days -— it’s un-
usual to meet someone who
hasn’t seen
an episode
of HBO’s
“Game of
If you know any hardcore
a film in one
of the three
trilogies.
By hard-
core nerds,
I mean the
folks who
freaked out over the “Red
Wedding” a little more than a
dozen years before it aired on
television, back when it was
published as part of George
RR. Martin’s “A Song of Fire
and Ice” series of novels.
The Sept. 9 trailer was a
teaser for director Denis Vil-
leneuve’s upcoming movie
adaptation of Frank Herbert’s
1965 novel “Dune.” Without
“Dune,” you arguably never
would have had “Star Wars”
in 1977, the novel “A Game of
Thrones” in 1991, or the TV
show “Game of Thrones” in
2011. .' ’
Before the feud between
‘ House Stark and House
Lannister, “Dune” gave us
the centuries-old vendetta
between House Atreides and
House Harkonnen. Before
Luke Skywalker learned the
ways of the Force from Obi-
Wan Kenobi on the desert
planet 0f Tatooine, Paul Atre-
ides was schooled in all forms
of combat before his royal
family moved to the desert
planet of Arrakis, also known
as “Dune.”
Herbert did for science fic-
tion with “Dune” what J .R.R.
Tolkien did for medievalist
swords—and-sorcery fantasy
with “The Lord of the Rings”
trilogy in the mid-1950s. Her-'
bert brought both legitimate
scholarship and the scale and
sensibilities of an epic myth
to the genre.
Science fiction had no
shortage of smart writers
before Herbert. Isaac Asimov
managed to spin most of
his disparate stories about
robots, galactic empires and
civilization-guiding founda-
tions into a single, cohesive,
millennia-spanning fictional
history of the future.
While Asimov was clever
and thought—provoking, Her-
bert gave science fiction the
operatic atmosphere that had
been reserved for either Tolk-
ienesque fantasy or “plan-
Thrones,” or .
“Star Wars” I
. etary romance” pulp nevels
about princesses on Mars.
If Asimov was Roy. Orbi-
son, unquestionably talented
and impeccably precise, then
Herbert was Elvis'Presley
—— Herbert wove together
complex depictions of both
palace intrigue and planetary ,
ecology while making it hip-
swaggeringly sexy.
What’s not established by
the trailer is that “Dune” is
set roughly 20,000 years in -
the future -— for those keep-
ing score, most historians
agree human civilization is
about 10,000 years old
which has given humanity
ample time to expand and col-
onize the cosmos while devel-
oping an incredibly nuanced
level of social interaction (“A
feint within a feint within a
faint” is the phrase Herbert
uses to describe the royals’
layered deceptions).
And as gorgeous and lav-
ish as the trailer’s shots of its
desert locations are, I’m not
sure the trailer adequately
conveys h0w environmentally
extreme the planet Dune is.
Herbert’s laundry list of
professions outside of writing
science fiction stories ranged
from newspaper reporter to
environmental scientist, but .
to me, the key to understand-
ing Herbert is his stint in the
US. Navy’s Seabees during
World War II.
My dad worked in electri—
cal engineering as an officer
in the Air Force. I served
aboard the USS Theodore
Roosevelt for two wartime
deployments. Add those to-
gether and it approaches the
ruthlessly pragmatic outlook
that defined the worldview
expressed in Herbert’s science
fiction novels, all the way
back to‘“The Dragon in the
Sea” in 1956, his debut novel 1
about then—near-future sub—
.~7.>ww,w..ww
..
Denis \fllleneuve’s “Dune” arrives inthea'te’rs Dec. 18.
Courtesy graphic
’marine warfare.
For all his imagination,
most of Herbert’s story
prompts could be summed
up as the necessary realities
caused by the removal of one
or more otherwise essential
elements to humanity’s sur-
vival. In “Dune,” the planet
Arrakis was created to an-
sWer the question, “What if
water was the rarest resource
on a given world?”
For a little historical con-
text, the Organization of the
Petroleum Exporting Coun-
tries was founded in 1960, so
by 1965, Frank Herbert was
writing about an expansive
yet corrupt empire whose
material wealth and ability
to stay connected over vast
distances through transporta-
tion relied upon an incredibly
finite natural resource that
was found exclusively in in-
hospitably arid deserts that
had been settled by devoutly
religious survivors.
In case you’re not getting
the real-world relevance of
this ostensibly fantastical sci-
ence fiction scenario, Dune’s
inhabitants are depicted as
wearing filtration masks to
survive an environment with
orange skies.
There have been previ-
ous onscreen adaptations of
“Dune.”
The first, by director David
Lynch in 1984, was armed
with a magnificent cast and
enough money from producer
Dino De Laurentiis to deliver
a decadent opulence in its
‘sets and costumes. The sec-
ond, aTV miniseries cemmis-
sioned by the Sci-Fi Channel
(since renamed Syfy) in 2000,
. had relatively pared-down
special effects, balanced out
by a better screenplay than
Lynch had to work with.
‘ This time, though, what’s
been gratifying about the
ms; mas:-
. Hear 3“ ‘, ,.
flay: ,
Space’is mm '90
With , :1
reactiOns’to‘ this trailer has
been seeing audiences asking
the right questions.
In “Dune,” Herbert con—
ceived of humanitfs future
as fusions of seemingly dis-
cordant cultures, with the
desert-dwelling Fremen, the
native inhabitants of Arrakis,
descended from “Zensunni”
wanderers, a combination
of Zen Buddhists and Sunni
Muslims.
Even his allusions to the
“Orange Catholic Bible” are
a bit of an inside joke, from
Herbert as an Irish-Ameri-
can the Orange Order of
Northern Ireland was found-
ed to oppose the Catholic
Church.
Unlike the casts of previ-
ous adaptations of “Dune,”
Villeneuve’s “Dune” shouldn’t
just be populated by a bunch
of white people, and while I’ve
heard a few folks dismiss this
trailer as looking “too white,”
both the actors who appear in
the trailer and are listed on
the film’s IMDb page consti-
tute a majority-minority cast:
I Guatemalan—American Os-
car Isaac plays Paul’s father,
Duke Leto Atreides.
' I Native Hawaiian Jason
Momoa plays House Atreides
swordsman Duncan Idaho.
I Spaniard Javier Bardem
plays Fremen leader Stilgar.
I Part-Filipino actor/wrestler
Dave Bautista plays House
Harkonnen lackey Glossu
“Beast” Rabban. . .
I Armenian/Iranian David v
Dastmalchian plays House
Harkonnen strategist Piter
' De Vries.
I Taiwanese Chang Chen
plays House Atreides retainer
Dr. Wellington Yueh.
I Zendaya plays Paul’s Fre-
men love interest, Chani.
“I Fellow African-American
actor Stephen McKinley Hen-
derson plays House Atreides
strategist Thufir Hawat.
I And J amaican-descended
British actress Sharon Dun-
can-Brewster plays planetary
ecologist Liet-Kynes, who was
a male character in Herbert’s
novel.
Another valid concern I’ve
I heard expressed by those
unfamiliar with Herbert’s
“Dune” is Whether it con-
stitutes yet another “white
savior” narrative. On the face
of it, “Dune” is indeed about
a very pretty white boy who
is improbably gifted at nearly
everything he attempts
and Winds up becoming the
universe-changing messiah of
the native inhabitants of the
desert planet Where his fami—
ly is exiled and overthrown by
its sworn ancestral enemies. ,
While I obviously can’t say
for certain how Villeneuve’s
movie adaptation will depict
this dynamic, what I can tell
you, as someone who grew up
reading “Dune” when I was
, around the same age as ado-
lescent protagonist Paul Atre-
ides, is that even the relative-
ly benevolent House Atreides
is portrayed as a family of
privileged colonizers.
Likewise, the messianic
myths of the Fremen, which
Paul leans into in order to or-.
chestrate his revenge against ,
the Harkonnens, are the re-
sult of previous generations of
colonizers (in this case, a sect
known as the Bene Gesserit,
a sisterhood to which Paul’s
mother Jessica belongs) seed—
ing the cosmos with myths
designed to manipulate those
planets’ native inhabitants
into providing aid to any sis-
ter, or her family, who might
need it. ’
Herbert was explicit in in-
terviews about his mistrust,
not only of power over others,
but also of those who would
use either politics or religion
to wield such power, so while
“Dune” offers up some fasci-
natingly debauched villains,
it would be a mistake to treat
its Atreides or Fremen cru-
saders as “heroes,” because
Herbert certainly didn’t.
Fortunately, given that
this “Dune” adaptation is
being directed by the man
who not only gave us the nu-
anced and challenging 2016
science fiction film, “Arrival,”
but also somehow managed
to furnish a worthy successor
to Ridley Scott’s 1982 “Blade
Runner” with “Blade Runner
2049” in 2017, I’m confident.
Villeneuve can convey the
moral complexities intended
by Herbert.
Villeneuve’s “Dune” is
slated to premiere in theaters
Dec. 18.
Offer good (mm 9/10 to 09/23/2020
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