◎ Li Ning
As a science fiction literary classic, the novel "Dune" by American writer Frank Herbert itself is grand and obscure, and the film and television adaptation is even more bumpy. There was no shortage of challengers before, but all of them were broken into the sand. David Lynch, the only one who has managed to bring it to the big screen, has also seen this experience as a huge failure in his career and shamed him, which is still difficult to let go. For Hollywood, Dune is a dangerous temptation.
However, when this hot potato was passed to Dennis Villeneuve, it made countless fans look forward to it. Because Villeneuve is good at challenging all kinds of fresh types and risky projects, he has been good at every shot before. "Scorched Earth" looks at religion and war with cruel human tragedy; "Border Killer" reflects on order and morality in the anti-drug operation of countering violence with violence; especially after the tempering of "Advent" and "Blade Runner 2049", he has increasingly formed a science fiction style with great authorial characteristics, as if he can be called a gemini star in the field of Science Fiction in Hollywood today with Nolan.
Charming poetry
Unlike Nolan, who indulged in weaving narrative labyrinths, Villeneuve was better at creating poetic moods. His science fiction films can be called a kind of "poetic science fiction", with a frugal narrative, a slow pace, emotional restraint, and is good at touching the hidden hearts of the characters with a cold and delicate posture, and closely linking the spatial environment with the psychology of the characters. The director from Quebec, Canada, seems to naturally inject the coldness of his birthplace into his own images, often making people feel boundless loneliness and gloom.
The film "Dune" continues Villeneuve's consistent literary tone. The film does not pursue the ups and downs of the plot, but wins with ritualized scenes and immersive atmosphere. The misty yellow sands on the planet Erracos and the mist-shrouded mountains on the planet Aradan all render and accumulate an emotion. There is such a scene in the film: "Sweet Tea" played by the protagonist Paul Erridi is about to leave his homeland and embark on a dangerous unknown planet, he hovers down to the seashore, behind the cliffs and floating spaceships. This can be counted as the typical rhetoric of the Vickers image: placing small figures in a grand, often low-saturation environment, using space to excite emotions and hint at their sad future destiny. In addition to the big vision, Dune also loves shallow and out-of-focus shots, especially when depicting Paul's dreams or hallucinations, where the wandering focus is intertwined with the shaking halo, creating an atmosphere of mystery and unknown.
At the same time, Dune once again highlights Villeneuve's sublime aesthetic. Specifically, it was his fascination with BDO (the giant silent object). In "Advent", the alien spacecraft is silently suspended above the earth, becoming a huge shadow of the visible and unknown that hangs over the hearts of human beings. In Blade Runner 2049, Replicant K wanders through the ruins of a repressive, boundless city. "Dune" also shows all kinds of sublime imagery: the hard and cold spaceship speeding in the universe, the silent and terrible sandworms walking downstream from the surface, and so on.
At the end of the film, Sandworm and Paul's mother and son face each other, and the blood-toothed behemoth and the helpless small human form a highly contrasting visual spectacle. The repeated presentation of such a huge mysterious object in "Dune" brings the audience a transcendent and sublime experience, a religious-like feeling of trembling, pleasure, horror, awe and other emotions mixed together.
In addition, it is worth mentioning that the intertwining of developed future technology with backward cold weapon combat, outdated feudal government, traditional ritual customs, etc., also makes "Dune" exude a strange futuristic retrofuturism style.
Cheesy game of thrones
After the release of Dune, many people praised it as a "science fiction epic". It seems that with the help of a grand and complex story setting, a magnificent scene spectacle, and the blessing of Hans Zimmer's high-level soundtrack, Dune has indeed succeeded in creating a shocking sense of epic. However, the sense of epic is not the same as epic. In other words, "Dune" has an epic sense of audiovisual accumulation, but it cannot bear the core of the epic.
The essence of the epic is to present the grand landscape of the times, the typical character image and the deep ideological meaning in a grand narrative. Perhaps in order to reduce the difficulty of the film audience's acceptance of the original work, or perhaps because of Villeneuve's consistent minimalist aesthetic, the film makes a lot of subtraction in the narrative. Compared with the original work, the film omits a lot of the process of power and wit, and omits many of the more complex character aspects and growth backgrounds of the characters, thus simplifying the story into an old-fashioned and suspenseless "palace fight drama" or "The Chosen Son Falls into Trouble". For example, many Haknam villains, such as Baron Haknam the Tyrant and Laban the Beast, have been handled in a very comic and flat manner, without showing a scheming side. Every seemingly majestic liftoff scene of Baron Hakenam is not only terrifying, but even funny. And Dr. Yue, played by Zhang Zhen, is even more hurried, reduced to a symbolic tool person.
While the narrative is simple, the film does not hesitate to use the lens to show the protagonist Paul's mental journey and the appearance of "sweet tea", and tirelessly presents his various subtle emotional ups and downs. This is, of course, the need to create a tragic hero with a rich heart, but it inevitably makes the film become strangely rhythmic: the narrative is perfunctory and the lyricism is unrestrained. Or, sometimes too fast, sometimes too slow.
For example, the duel scene between Paul and the Freeman at the end of the film is itself unremarkable, but it becomes more lengthy and tedious under the background of the upgraded shot and lyrical music, giving people a strong sense of tiger's tail. Obviously, Villeneuve deliberately escaped the classic three-part structure of genre films and avoided the path of Marvel-style films to stimulate the audience with plot climaxes, but seems to have gone to the extreme of tough lyricism.
The simplification of the movie "Dune" may also have the deep connotation of the novel "Dune". The reason why the original "Dune" is regarded by many readers as a cornerstone science fiction work is largely because it has a profound metaphor for reality. The novel was written in the context of the Cold War in the 1960s, so it carries a very typical Cold War ideology. Seemingly distant interstellar stories actually directly reflect the great power game, religious conflicts, geopolitics, ecological crises, colonialism and so on in the real world. For example, the scramble for spices corresponds directly to the oil politics that has been at war to this day.
The novel's in-depth insight into this real-life power game even foresees the changes in the world pattern in the following decades. It can be said that the excellence of the novel "Dune" is that it is an allegory and a prophecy. But apparently, the movie "Dune" focuses more on the identity anxieties and growth setbacks of the protagonist Paul, consciously or unconsciously ignoring the deeper and broader ideographic space that the epic should have.
Of course, due to the limitations of volume, the original story is far from over in the movie. Maybe the movie Dune will be the beginning of a truly epic? This question can only be answered in the sequel. It is worth mentioning that compared with the original book or other adaptations, the movie "Dune" reflects a very appropriate identity politics. Female characters such as Mrs. Jessica in the film are given more obvious character functions and role weights, especially Dr. Keynes, who appeared as a white male in previous works, was portrayed as a black female figure in this film, which directly echoes the current situation of the rise of identity politics trends in Western society in terms of gender and race in recent years. But this also proves once again that reality is the soil of imagination. Science fiction movies that seem to set their sights on the distant future are actually always looking back and watching us in the here and now.