Dune review: Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi epic kicks off promisingly with largely satisfying part one – ABC News

If history is anything to go by, it's been easier to fold space and time than to film Frank Herbert's 1965 sci-fi classic Dune, an epic far-future tale of feuding space dynasties, secret sisterhoods and New Age prophets that cleaves to and critiques the genre's classic hero narrative.

Many have tried and perished in the sandstorm. Wild-eyed Chilean surrealist Alejandro Jodorowsky had grand designs a 14-hour version he hoped would star Salvador Dali, Mick Jagger and Orson Welles that proved way too ambitious to realise. Ridley Scott toyed with the idea before giving up and moving on.

David Lynch a filmmaker in sync with Herbert's psychic visions made it all the way to the screen with a memorably grotesque piece of pop art in 1984, only to have it chopped down to the point of near incoherency.

The latest filmmaker to put their hand in the pain box, Canadian writer-director Denis Villeneuve, seems like a bit of an odd choice by comparison. He's the kind of filmmaker dubiously marketed as a 'visionary' by studios, even as his recent sci-fi forays Arrival (2016); the deeply unnecessary Blade Runner 2049 (2017) seem better suited to show off flatscreen TVs in designer apartments than evoke any kind of sweeping mystical future.

So it's a pleasant surprise to report that his take on Dune, which finally descends upon cinemas this week, is an engrossing, well-mounted adaptation that makes good on his potential as a sci-fi craftsman not exactly enough to qualify as a visionary work, but an ambitious and largely satisfying space opera that rises like an oasis against the desert of Hollywood's current superhero cinema.

Boosted by Hans Zimmer's speaker-rumbling score with its metronomic thump and guttural alien chants the film is burnished and commanding, full of immense wide shots that dwarf the screen, jagged spacecraft that seem to emerge from misty oil paintings, and an admirable commitment to big, earnest movie myth-making.

But Dune's prettiest effect might be its cast, especially its young leads, baby-faced androgyne Timothe Chalamet and galaxy-eyed princess Zendaya two kids who're enough to suggest a brighter, or at least hotter, cosmic future.

Chalamet is Paul, teenage heir to the noble House Atreides, a mall-goth glowerpuss who divides his time between learning mind tricks from his witchy mother, Lady Jessica (a soulful Rebecca Ferguson), and putting off the politics of the family business with dad, house boss and resident dreamboat, Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac).

It's the very distant future never mind the swords, faux-medieval trimmings and bagpipes and the galactic Emperor has dispatched House Atreides to take custody of Arrakis, the desert planet rich in the spice that is essential to space travel.

The appointment isn't going down well with the Atreides's bitter rivals House Harkonnen, a planet of sinister creeps who bathe in black slime, keep giant spiders as pets, and whose leader, Baron Vladimir (Stellan Skarsgrd), seems modelled after Marlon Brando's performance in Apocalypse Now (1979).

Exploited for its natural resource, Arrakis also known as Dune is inhabited by the indigenous Fremen, a band of blue-eyed nomads who include Zendaya's Chani, the desert warrior who's been turning up in Paul's dreams.

These premonitions also suggest that Paul might be a kind of space messiah; much to the concern of Lady Jessica's clan, the Bene Gesserit, a shadowy, distaff order of psychic witches who've been trying to summon forth a chosen one via an Atreides daughter to bridge space and time, past and future.

"So much potential wasted on a male," hisses the order's Reverend Mother, played by Charlotte Rampling in a neat echo of her all-female-cult queen in John Boorman's Zardoz (1974).

No wonder Paul looks so gloomy, moping about like some post-punk wanderer above a sea of fog.

It's certainly a lot to swallow for the uninitiated: a fact that undid Lynch's truncated version, in which poor Virginia Madsen (as imperial Princess Irulan, heir to the galaxy) had to dispense reels of exposition over the eerie, spectral opening moments.

Villeneuve has the relative luxury of two chapters be warned, this is only Part One and he uses this to his advantage, allowing the narrative to breathe against the scope of the images.

Shooting partially on location in Jordan, Abu Dhabi and Norway, Villeneuve, Australian cinematographer Greig Fraser (Rogue One) and production designer Patrice Vermette (Sicario; Arrival) give the story a sense of scale and lived-in detail, welding the wide-screen vastness of Lawrence of Arabia (1962) to the scrappy grit of the first Star Wars (1977), a film whose desert sequences were famously inspired by Herbert's writing.

The vistas are enhanced by all the special effects a reported $165 million dollar budget can buy: combat holo-shields that glitch and glimmer, insect-like ornithopters that swoop through sandstorms, and titanic spacecraft that seem to have teleported right off the pulp paperback covers of the 60s and 70s.

For sci-fi nuts, it's hard to resist.

But the showy effects are also offset by an attention to less expected, human-sized details: Jason Momoa's easy, movie-star charm as Duncan Idaho, a swordmaster who Paul adores; the way the great Stephen McKinley Henderson, as human computer Thufir Hawat, parades a parasol during a military inspection; or the beverages distilled from sweat, tears, and spit presumably not available in the Dune combo at the candy bar, unless you incur the wrath of a disgruntled teenage employee.

What Villeneuve and his co-screenwriters Jon Spaihts (Prometheus) and Eric Roth (A Star Is Born) will do with Dune's overarching narrative with its Messianic leader and looming holy war is harder to assess, given the obviously unfinished nature of their story.

At least initially, Paul is a character in conflict with his destiny as an heir to a patriarchy that ravages an ecosystem; as a potential saviour to a people and Chalamet plays him with a suitably furrowed brow.

Villeneuve has also tweaked Herbert's novel to open the film not on the imperial princess's tale of Paul, but on Chani effectively framing events through the eyes of the Fremen.

"Who will our next oppressors be?" she wonders in the film's opening minutes.

The Atreides' arrival on Arrakis carries the distinct feel of high-tech imperialists landing to pillage a desert nation.

Elements drawn from Arabic culture and Eastern mysticism run throughout Herbert's work, which tangles with themes of colonialism, ecological neglect and the corruption of power, though this mixing of cultures a staple device of science fiction sits less well with the current moment, where such creative license, however nuanced, is viewed with suspicion.

The new Dune has drawn some intelligent criticism for flattening the nuances of Herbert's text, downplaying the source material's grounding in Middle Eastern culture even as Hans Zimmer's recourse to Arabic vocal tones often used to underscore an emotional moment of pause for the protagonists leans on a Western audience's notion of the 'mysterious' for dramatic shorthand.

All of which might have been less noticeable had Villeneuve been more attuned to the psychic power of images in the way Lynch, and certainly Jodorowsky, understood the kind of filmmaking that might transcend a real-world analogue and transport an audience to something genuinely strange or alien.

His Dune is too polished and cautious to risk putting a foot wrong which makes sense, given this project's history, but also means there's nothing here willing to court ridicule, and by extension, genius. (If we can't have pugs and space slugs, couldn't we at least have gotten Timothe Chalamet doing the worm in place of the sand walk?)

But it more than captures the attention, and sometimes even inspires awe. If this is the beginning of a resurgence in ambitious, operatic space fantasy, then bring it on.

Dune is in cinemas from December 2.

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Dune review: Denis Villeneuve's adaptation of Frank Herbert's sci-fi epic kicks off promisingly with largely satisfying part one - ABC News