Author | A tree
I hadn't read the Dune novel and didn't understand what a complex world it was.
But I'm a die-hard fan of director David Lynch. Since he didn't include his 1984 version of Dune in his career sequence, I had no reason to watch it.
So, this time, I don't have any additional expectations for Dune directed by Bullfrog (fans' "nickname" for Villeneuve), how it restores the original work, or how it surpasses its predecessors. The biggest expectation is that it should not lose the true character of the director.
▲ "Dune", directed by Dennis Villeneuve. The "Dune" novel is famous and has been filmed and televisionized many times
That's all.
Indeed, Dune continues Villeneuve's inner temperament. Directing such a super-large-scale project, he was not kidnapped by industry, which is not easy.
But is it a good movie? Sorry, no conclusions.
▲ "Dune" Douban score
Dune is wayward. A long 2 and a half hours, only the prologue was opened. The core of the story has not yet been touched, and what we see now is a "semi-complete work" in a vacuum.
This makes it easy to misunderstand, but I'm willing to be a little patient and discuss it in a semi-open way.
Still "Bullfrog"
Watching "Dune", I fell into some trance, as if watching "Arrival", "Blade Runner 2049", the middle Eastern style, war, religion and mythology, and can be traced back to the director's earlier work "Scorched Earth".
From another perspective, these works are like etudes for "Dune", and the director seems to be ready to show his ambitions and dedicate a masterpiece.
▲ Stills from "Arrival"
Pressing first does not show the final results, ambition, at least with the willfulness revealed by the work is matched.
A nearly 3-hour prologue, a story without a climax, is a huge test for both the Hollywood industry and audiences around the world.
You know, the larger the project, the more you have to balance the benefits and risks, and the more you can't tolerate the creator's willful behavior.
Author-type directors such as Villeneuve enter Hollywood, often assimilated by the system, minimizing personal style and adapting to industrialization. Many talented directors eventually became screws on the assembly line and went to be buried.
But since Blade Runner 2049, Villeneuve has always held a strong grip on turning mega projects into his solo shows.
▲Blade Runner 2049
Dune also sees no compromises, continuing Villeneuve's usual style.
The narrative moves forward slowly, and the rhythm of the editing follows the progression of emotions, without pursuing dazzling effects. Instead, Some of Hans Zimmer's industrial soundtracks are much more explosive and a bit cheaper.
Continuing the BDO aesthetic from Advent, this time it was unleashed as it pleased.
The so-called BDO, or Big Dumb Object, is a fascination with huge silent objects.
Villeneuve is obsessed with iconic visual images and spectacle, but not ostentatious. Under his lens, everything is minimalist, with a restrained aesthetic that combines classicism and futurism.
The characters are placed in a huge landscape, which is a dramatic construction at the image level. In this game, the oppressive feeling of BDO brings a lingering tragic atmosphere that becomes a potential driving force for storytelling.
▲ The BDO aesthetic of Dune
That's why Villeneuve doesn't rely too much on lines.
The characters in Dune are restrained. Friends who have read Dune novels tell me that the characters in the movie are far less talkative than the novels.
"Dune" is not like the average blockbuster, which expounds the worldview endlessly, or uses endless noise to create a noisy dramatic effect.
So, you don't see the lame jokes of Marvel sci-fi blockbusters, or the rhetorical lines that go over the box. Villeneuve struggled to maintain a sense of solemnity.
▲ Stills from "Dune"
Villeneuve's imagination of the alien world is not very whimsical. The outer space we see is a soft gray, a solemn black, medieval style. Almost monotonous.
The visual construction of the dune world, following the tenets of naturalism, is much simpler. Dune creates a sense of everydayness, where the desert is sensible, organic, and almost an ecological aesthetic. People who don't know, still think it's a demonstration clip of National Geographic.
Holding their breath and sinking into it, the audience feels the sensuality, magnificence, undulating and rolling of the dunes, with a soft texture like velvet, the undercurrent of danger and fear, and the mysterious color that is everywhere.
Of course, this may also depend on the medium form of viewing. Streaming can greatly detract from its charm. Almost exclusively for Chinese cinemas, the 3D format may be so black that even the whole picture of sandworms cannot be seen.
The 2D big screen is the best choice, with enough brightness and a certain sense of distance, the picture is not rushing to you, but a little bit will grab you into it.
With the rhythm and atmosphere pursued by Villeneuve, there is an inherent sense of coherence.
In any case, in Dune, we see Villeneuve's consistent aesthetic proposition: technology, serving the atmosphere, creating a space for storytelling.
Ambience comes first
From the beginning of "Arrival", fans have seen Villeneuve's genius ability to create atmosphere.
A startling, massive oval spaceship descended on Earth, towering low, echoing the blackstone monument in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
But the arrival of the alien spacecraft brings fear, uneasiness, and confusion.
Villeneuve wants humans to confront this psyche and try to talk to it.
▲ Blackstone monument in 2001: A Space Odyssey
Alien invasion of Earth is an outdated topic. But Villeneuve returns to a daily narrative of how to communicate with aliens. He may have discovered a huge bug in the sci-fi world, and the aliens are sure to be fluent in American English.
They have their own civilization, their own language, and communication is the most pressing issue.
Linguists came in handy, and in the process, the acquisition of alien languages subtly changed humanity.
Villeneuve did not directly present this worldview setting, but used it as suspense, relying on the advancement of the atmosphere, step by step to those frightening and curious alien words.
The use of the pre-flash technique also pushes the audience into a labyrinth of time and space deformation.
The atmospheric narrative ability, in "Blade Runner 2049", once again achieved miraculous results. The same slow pace, rich and subtle details, guide Killer K to the truth of existentialism:
How is memory true?
▲ Killer K (Ryan Gosling) in Blade Runner 2049
If memories are false, how can the soul be true?
Excessive speech not only hurts the narrative atmosphere, but also reduces its sense of suspense.
We know that the core of science fiction is the worldview. For mediocre creators, presenting a worldview requires a lot of space to expound.
In many popcorn-style science fiction films, every character competes to explain, lest the audience not understand its principles. Villains, in particular, end up giving a big speech and then die of too much talk.
Elaboration is the laziness of narrative.
Oshii's Ghost in the Shell also elaborates, but it is philosophical speculation and high-level.
▲ Stills from "Ghost in the Shell"
How clever science fiction films construct a worldview is a test of the director's audiovisual artistic achievements.
More than half a century ago, Kubrick juxtaposed chimpanzees tossed the sky with bones and spaceships, turning the film into a revelation of the genesis Bible— 2001: A Space Odyssey.
In Blade Runner 40 years ago, Ridley Scott used extremely complex lighting to create the aesthetic core of cyberpunk.
Good science fiction films are good at using images to construct their own material reality, and do not need to turn the characters into tour guides or store guides.
For more than 50 years, Frank Herbert's Dune has left countless filmmakers scratching the head.
Jodulovsky's great idea was forced to abandon it in the face of reality. David Lynch said that he shot it, but was ashamed to admit that it was his own child.
▲ David Lynch's version of "Dune" stills
The biggest reason is that Dune's worldview structure is extremely complex.
The complex world of words only requires a genius brain and a pen, but the image realizes its material reality, which is another matter, involving capital, technology, creativity, director control, and then narrative ability.
With the practice and testing of the waters of the first two games, this time, Villeneuve has an investment of $165 million and sharpens the knife.
As always, in Dune, Villeneuve skips the complex setting and chooses a lighter, more unified narrative line: what the young Paul sees and hears and what he grows up with.
Paul had never met the emperors of that era, and he didn't know what kind of war had brought civilization back to feudal monarchy, and how religion had returned to humanity.
Of course, he also did not know the foundation of the dune world: spices, how to shape the pattern and strife of that world.
The director did not elaborate, so that the audience, like Paul, did not know anything about it.
Villeneuve focuses on Paul's perspective, presenting Dune's worldview setting. The advantage of "limited knowledge perspective" is that it avoids the complexity or bloat of panoramic depictions. More importantly, the film follows the mental, emotional and mental activities of young Paul in order to advance the narrative, allowing Paul to lead us into the dune world while also going deep into his heart.
"Sweet Tea" Chalame's cheekbones and deep eyes complete most of the story.
In this tough world, Chalamei's weakness adds a bright color.
▲ Young Paul (Timothy Chalame) ▲ Young Paul (Timothy Chalame)
Like K in Blade Runner, Paul is reticent and even a little listless. The only thing he was fascinated by was the dunes, which was a fatal attraction to him.
The pre-flash technique in "Advent" is used again. The young prince was haunted by visions of the future. This illusion also makes the audience fall into confusion and uneasiness. What kind of unknown world and unknown fate awaits us in the young Paul?
In this way, the film slowly supports the entire dune world in a low-key, eerie atmosphere.
to be continued
Now here's the problem.
In two and a half hours, Dune presents us with a familiar and unfamiliar world: the threat of imperialism and colonialism, feudalism, the backlash of history, political struggles, religious control, resource plunder, clash of civilizations, climate crisis, war, space travel, natural solidarity, etc.
▲ Alien Duke in Dune
There are also more strange languages, terms, and shapes that may mean more complex stories.
But they mostly flash by until the end of the movie, when the characters tell us that this is just the beginning.
The audience will inevitably be dissatisfied with this.
The current "Dune", not a complete film, in the existing text form, its story does not seem to be energetic enough, without a real sense of climax. The best part is nothing more than leading the audience to the mysterious sand dunes.
The end of the adventure is another starting point and does not constitute an "arrival" in some central sense.
This also raises the more important question, how to define the story of Dune? If science fiction is only presenting the mystery of naturalism, what is the meaning of science fiction?
You know, the original "Dune" was published in 1965, more than half a century of stumbling, science fiction, has already broken through the limits of human imagination. The most recent peak, the Matrix 20 years ago, has been unmatched so far.
Dune's colonialism, the political struggles of the feudal monarchy, and the revenge of the prince are too old.
▲ War scenes in "Dune"
The two major families of the empire invaded the dunes and plundered the "spices", which is nothing more than a copy of the present world.
Brown deserts, a raw material that lay the foundation of civilization, it is hard not to think of oil exploitation in the Middle East, the invasion of Western countries.
Even more difficult to characterize is the character of Paul.
Pieced together by the existing clues, a delicate Messiah, the cheesy image of a savior, his mission is to lead the oppressed Freymans of the dune world to rise up against it.
The motive for the rebellion was not based on humanitarianism, but on the "selfishness" of Shakespearean prince's revenge.
But wait, come to think of it, we can't jump to conclusions so hastily, I'm afraid it's not exactly that way.
"Sweet Tea" has a handsome face, a light body, and extraordinary screen expression. But his heart is always turbulent, and the dune girl in his dream is seductive and ominous.
The "illusions" that occasionally break into the mind seem to foreshadow something unusual.
▲ The illusion in Paul's dream
There is also a deeper level of distress.
Paul was not a hero in the conventional sense.
More notably, as he was trapped in the desert, his vision became clearer and clearer, and he seemed to realize that he had been cast into a monster that had waged a brutal war of corpses.
In retrospect, Paul was not a hero, even an anti-hero.
He is an illusion shaped and publicized by his mother and the religious groups behind him. The eugenics of the "Sorority" chose him and pushed him into the abyss of conspiracy.
Perhaps, we can foresee that Paul had realized that he had a destiny to become a tyrant, and how could he resist this fate?
Limited to the length of the film, everything has not yet been unfolded. This is where a lot of viewers criticize
Let's bring the field back to director Villeneuve. He filmed "Arrival" and "Blade Runner 2049", the theme is also old, but he is good at breaking the existing framework, innovating the old, telling the most universal and eternal motif of mankind, the authenticity of memory, the struggle of fate, etc.
This is timeless.
Therefore, I have the most basic trust in Vinulneva and look forward to the next story of Dune.
Of course, the premise is that there is a next one.
Edit | He Yan
Typography | Benin