Hundreds of years from now you can imagine Hollywood swallowed by gargantuan sands, forgotten by history, streamed into oblivion. The oppressive rays of the sun blast heatwaves that shimmer and distort reality until a traveller from an antique land appears like a mirage before a broken pedestal. They gaze at the two vast and trunkless legs and then at a colossal stone head, half sunk in the sand, a lens pressed hard against one pupilless eye. The traveller takes a breath, pauses, before wiping centuries worth of dust and grime off the pedestal and these words appear, “My name is Denis Villeneuve, King of Directors; look on my Works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Cut to our present-day Ozymandias. The French-Canadian director Villeneuve has, within a decade, scaled the heights of Hollywood to stand shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, and Paul Thomas Anderson to amass almost godlike creative control over his projects. Villeneuve’s cinematic power can be felt gradually accumulating with each film, Incendies, Prisoners, Enemy, Sicario, Arrival, Blade Runner 2049 and now reaching the zenith with his cyclopean adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune. But just like the Padishah Emperor of the Known Universe, Shaddam IV, Villeneuve may have overreached at a critical juncture.
Dune has been an aborted project by the likes of Ridley Scott and Alejandro Jodorowsky, the latter’s attempt immortalised in a 2013 documentary, filmed as a well-received but underwhelming miniseries on the Sci-Fi Channel and most infamously made it to screen as a glorious failure in 1984 by a young David Lynch. The themes of the novel continue to be prescient, climate change, colonial genocide and exploitation, the corruption of power. The Spice Melange central to interstellar space travel in Dune serves equally well as a warning against oil, the drug trade or even the ironic shortfall in lithium, nickel and cobalt needed to make EV batteries. Better yet, is the Spice trade an allegory for the waning power of Hollywood to control content in within the global pandemic?
Villeneuve is both messiah and monster
What’s endlessly fascinating about Villeneuve’s Dune is how the director can be glimpsed in roles both as protagonist and antagonist. Like Timothée Chalamet’s brooding, Byronic portrayal of Paul Atreides, son, and heir to House Atredies, Villeneuve is both messiah and monster. As Paul skulks around the corridors of power like a futuristic Hamlet we can imagine Villeneuve wrestling with his conscience as he realises that his hubris of taking on a monumental tome such as Dune could be met by his nemesis in the form of the pandemic and the great streaming house of Warner Brothers that are his master. Can Villeneuve save the spectacle of cinema in its IMAX format, or will his bombast finally tear asunder the temples of the multiplex?
Having launched to excellent reviews and decent pandemic levels of box-office, Villeneuve’s vision of Dune has secured the greenlight for the second instalment and in that sense he has emerged victorious. And what a vision it is! Seen on an IMAX screen, the human figure is reduced to minuscule insignificance, the universe of Dune conjures up the existential dread of knowing what it is to be human within the infinite. Yet, in close-up, the faces of the characters are monumental, driving the course of the universe before them with every knowing stare, hushed tone, or barked order. The emotional core of Dune more than matches the thunderous score or totemic visualisations that unfold like space in in front of us.
To watch Dune as it is intended is to remember what we have missed during the pandemic, the sheer audacity of megalomaniac filmmaking, the thrill of catching a tiger by the tail and trying to hold on for the ride. Hundreds of years in the future nothing may remain around the colossal wreck of Villeneuve’s statue and the lone and level sands may stretch far away, but in the present, safety permitting, we have been spared the indignance of experiencing Dune in miniature and expanded the Known Universe for a few years more.