DUNE MOVIE 2020 MOVIE
With all this on his mind, and on ours, the battle for the planet gets underway, as does a movie that clocks in at about 158 minutes, only half of which are bearable. Paul’s awakening to his destiny is the most interesting thing about “Dune.” Jessica, who on occasion wears Buddhist-inspired robes the color of saffron-the same color as “Spice,” the life-extending, mind-enhancing drug mined by “outlanders” on the Fremen’s planet-has prepared Paul as best she can. Jessica had been ordered to have a girl child (she has the ability to select the gender), but in defiance of the Bene Gesserit-the all-female religious order and shadow political force to which she belongs-she gave birth to Paul and raised him in The Way, whose adherents possess uncanny powers both mental and physical. Paul’s awakening to his destiny is the most interesting thing about “Dune,” and Villeneuve knows it. The weapon he imagines is a “kris” knife, which etymologically does not derive from “Christ” but is mentioned often enough to make one wonder.
Conceived by an unmarried mother, Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), Paul has dreams that are haunted by a Fremen girl, Chani (Zendaya), and his vision that “Someone will hand me a blade”-as he intones with a premonition of betrayal that suggests being denied three times before the cock crows. Is Paul Atreides “The One”? Portrayed by Timothée Chalamet, Paul is the hero of this epic, heir to the House of Atreides, a young man uncertain of his destiny who foresees his own death-and whose behavior and innate knowledge conform to the prophecies of the Fremen, the oppressed desert people of Arrakis.
Others still will wonder, and not for long, how this new film version of the 1965 book approaches the Messiah story underlying Herbert’s futuristic fantasy, something the director and his co-writers (Jon Spaihts and Eric Roth) place front and center and use to adorn a movie that badly needs the juice.įrank Herbert’s beloved novel has enough material that should preclude the kind of dead space that inhabits so much of this “Dune.” “How,” they will be asking, “will director Denis Villeneuve be portraying the 1,300-foot slugs that burrow like hungry subways beneath the parched surface of the planet Arrakis?” Others will be eager for Villenueve’s take on Herbert’s colonialist metaphor, about feudal clans exploiting a resource-rich, underdeveloped planet that every military power in the galaxy wants to control. Certain fans of Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel Dune will be all about the sandworms.