When Paul, played by Timothy Chalame, arrives at the planet Ofracos, where his Family of Ertridi has been entrusted with trusteeship, he sits in his room and a male voice tells him through holograms about the survival wisdom of The Planet Erracos: the natives of this desolate planet, the Freymans, will walk through the desert in a dance-like way to avoid rhythmic footsteps that will attract sandworms— a gigantic creature that lives in the desert of The Planet Elakos, and that sandworms will devour everything.
The scene is not thrilling until a mechanical hunting dart in the form of a fly sneaks into Paul's room. Nevertheless, it is one of the most important passages of the entire film, and apart from telling the audience one of Paul's ways of understanding the unknown world (the other of course is a prophetic dream that runs through the film), it simultaneously constitutes a way that the audience can understand, touch this future world, and even in a sense a self-referent to the ongoing act of viewing: sitting in a certain position, looking not far ahead, the instantaneous light and shadow are playing a visual deception. Sounds that follow certain grammatical rules are transmitted to the ear and processed by the brain to produce intuitive meanings.
In the most avant-garde fantasy films, creators do nothing more than create a distance between the story and the audience by deviating from everything that is familiar to people, and sometimes even the moral system tacitly accepted by society, as Alessandro Zodurowski and Giulia Dikuno are accustomed to doing. It is undeniable that this approach has indeed been fruitful, with strange events and wild imaginations destroying the familiar world of common sense, thus opening up the territory of film symbols and ideological boundaries; when we realize that it has brought the latter a heavy Palme Trophy, we cannot forget how the former with great ambitions stopped at the last moment - the world finally failed to see The Dunes belonging to Jodulovsky, and its story was finally sealed in a documentary.
But Dennis Villeneuve chose a different path, with dreams and holograms being the origin of our understanding of the rules he believed in. On the one hand, the future is equally elusive for Paul, his mother Jessica, and even the Madonna of the Sisterhood, and although no one knows whether Paul is the Chosen Son or not, the sudden visit of the Virgin mary and Paul's several verified dreams vaguely confirm the Sorority's speculation that Paul has a special endowment, and perhaps he is the one the Sisterhood has been waiting for for a thousand years. It is the dream that makes these expectations worth looking forward to, and it is the dream that makes everything possible, and Paul's three dreams happen to have three different endings:
Duncan died on The Star of Erakos as he dreamed; Jamie, who demanded a duel, did not kill him as he dreamed; and it is unknown whether Chini, a girl played by the glittering Zadaya, would stab her dagger into the latter's chest while kissing Paul.
The unknown can bring strangeness, and strangeness makes the audience curious about what will happen next, or more accurately, what they will "see", which is a law that most sci-fi movie creators believe in. It's just that in Villeneuve's Dune, this unknown experience doesn't come primarily from the strange image of uncanny—to say that there is probably only Laban's snake-faced uncle, but a dream, which is repetitive and simple, but never certain. Oh of course, and the two voices that haunt Paul's ears, first Lisan Al-Gable, and then Quetzhardhak, who are they? Where do the voices calling their names come from? Why did these two names appear in Paul's mind? In this two-and-a-half-hour prologue, Villeneuve remains mysterious enough, as he did in Advent.
What does the hologram, or the information Paul gets from holograms and artificial intelligence male voices, mean for Villeneuve's Dunes?
My answer is rhythm, which is a film about melody if I had to sum it up most succinctly about the film. Leaving aside for a moment the fact that Dune is only the first part of the opening chapter, and placing it in a traditional three-act structure, then its curtain division is undoubtedly the order of the Ertridi family on its native planet Karadan receiving the emperor's decree, the Arrival of the Erracos, and the capture and suicide of Paul's father, the Duke of Rito, by the invading Haknen family.
After the montage was invented, the editor replaced the theater crew who landed the curtain and raised it again. Dune is a film about melody because it switches between the scenes almost opera, while maximizing the film's advantages over drama: before the title appears, Cheni's narration explains the cruelty of the Hakenam family, who slaughter the natives of the planet, and the Fremans who defend their homeland are out of the dungeons of the Hakenam family, until the emperor's edict allows the Haknan family's spaceship to leave the planet Erakos overnight.
In the two inter-curtain transitions that follow, Villeneuve unheededly uses many large-range shots, with the characters often so small as ants that the "love letter to the screen" that was used by directors in a nostalgic tone in the streaming era is self-evident here, and it is no wonder that Villeneuve publicly complained about Warner's decision to stream Dune simultaneously. Far from being hopelessly self-pitying, Villeneuve's dedication to the big screen stems from the melody of Dune, which fills the rift between the fall of the curtain and the re-rise of the curtain with the ultimate details – as grand as the light and shadow of the spaceship, as small as each grain of sand on The Star of Erracos, and the image and the emotions it can dispatch rise and fall like a tidal wave, if not viewed on the big screen, the details of the picture cannot be captured at all, and the constant progression of tension between the screens will not be perceived. Believe me, neither you nor Dune can afford these losses.