Dune 1 & 2: how (not?) to craft drama in a script

Dune will fail to leave a lasting impression on most cinema goers - here's why.

May 30, 2024

The Dune movies have a drama problem. Sure, they are visually mesmerising and set to the tune of (imho) one of the best soundtracks of all time, but I believe that these films fundamentally fail to forge compelling drama. The reasons for this have nothing to do with the acting, which is all suitably intense, and instead everything to do with the script.

Only time will tell if I am right in my thinking, but I think Dune will fail to leave a deep impression in the sci-fi & fantasy storytelling zeitgeist. Allow me to explain.

THE FOLLOWING CONTAINERS HEAVY SPOILERS

The heroes and villains literally don’t know each other from Adam

I came into Dune part one with immense optimism and excitement. I was not overly familiar with the books but, as a huge sci-fi and fantasy fan, the arrival of the movies seemed to be a great entry point to the Dune universe. I watched the first move in the cinema something stupid like 4 times. Each time, my awe at the visual and sonic mastery on display faded to be replaced by the niggling worry that the narrative had built up almost to nothing despite having three hours to play with. I have watched Part Two only once, with my concerns being pretty much confirmed.

The deep strangeness of the Dune script is that this is a Universe where almost all of the central conflicts play out with the main players at a great distance from one another. In Part One, the baron is our main villain but he has face to face drama with only one member of the Atreidies family for maybe thirty seconds. Paul and Jessica or anyone else for that matter never speaks or seemingly even think about the Baron at all. Everything is abstract; factional; and impersonal.

In many ways this is actually very realistic for factional warfare. However, it makes crafting impactful human stakes drama really tough. For me, the events of Dune Part One feel completely alien and dry. We can contrast this with the - admittedly derivative - Star Wars: A New Hope, where the vital addition of a personal link between Luke and Vader from the off forges a crucial emotional foundation for the entire story. It is quite baffling to me that the Dune movies reveal a last minute and quite (emotionally, at least) inconsequential familial link between Paul and the (now pathetically emasculated and fairly pointless) Baron right at the last minute of Part Two. For me at least, this revelation has no impact at all - emotionally on the viewer, on the plot… on anything, really.

Consider also in Part Two that the climactic fight is between Paul and the Baron’s nephew, who he meets and thinks about for the first time literally at the onset of the fight. There is also the Emperor who Paul meets for the first time and immediately defeats. Neither of these conflicts build in a satisfying way nor are resolved in a satisfying/meaningful/surprising/clever way. They are weightless and Paul wins simply by… winning? Charlie Sheen would be proud.

May thy script chip and shatter: many set-ups but few pay-offs.

Dune Part One caught and held my attention on the first watch so strongly because it promised LOADS. I became suspicious on rewatches where I found the fundamental drama executed on screen to be lacking but, for all that, kept my hopes alive on the basis that the film had set-up so much. For example:

The possibility of a deeper conflict between Baron and Paul following the death of the Duke. This fizzles out into a lame and brief conflict with… the Baron’s nephew… who immediately dies within 120 seconds of meeting Paul.
The worms. The reverence with which they are held and their incredible scale hints at their playing an important role in the plot on behalf of Mother Nature. Yet, in Part Two, the worms are revealed to be ~ entirely controlled by fremen. Their raw power and unpredictability is totally lost and plot-wise they basically act as the fremen’s sandy metro.
The nukes! A good portion of the film hypes up the consequences of using the nukes, is dedicated to finding the nukes, and then in the end they fire one nuke at the sand next to everyone for… reasons. I have no idea what this is meant to accomplish and the Great Houses literally shrug when Paul threatens to blow up the spice fields (and hey, wouldn’t that kill everyone on Arrakis!?).
The emperor of the known Universe. He’s set up as a God but is in fact a moron. He arrives in person (?!!) with a tiny army for no good reason and is immediately and summarily defeated.
The fremen. Their severe independence is totally subsumed by the extremely rapid ascent of Paul to become 'best of all time’ at everything. I found the fremen to be agency-less and quite dull in Part Two, having expected them to be fairly brutal, complex, and difficult to win over based on Part One.
The prophecy. In general, this was given a lot of focus in the films yet it does not hang together or feel satisfying in Part Two. In Part One, we hear that the sisterhood had ‘laid a path’ and in Part Two we see that this involves details such as Paul’s resurrection involving the tears of someone named Desert Spring aka Chani (I realise some interpretations of how this can possibly work argue that Jessica was in full control of the resurrection and the tears were for show). The fact that this pans out so utterly perfectly with Paul having ‘fallen in love’ with Chani feels pretty absurd rather than clever to me. It is just a preposterous level of detail for a prophecy that is - to my knowledge - meant to be malleable and metaphorical rather than specific and literal.
The Voice. In Part One this is also given emphasis. By Part Two, the voice is barely mentioned or used to achieve anything.
The Shields. Important in Part One but kind of irrelevant by Part Two.
The Sardukar. Effective and scary in Part One. Easily killed in Part Two throughout - including in that visually cool opening scene which others raved about, but which I personally thought lacked tension.
The Baron. He is intimidating in Part One and - yay! - Paul has good reason to hate him. Inexplicably, in Part Two he is superseded by his lame nephew. I know people praised Austin Butler for this role and enjoyed the cool black-and-white Harkonnen homeworld scenes…. but I did not get it. We see him struggle to kill a weak, injured, and enslaved man in a fight that was meant to be rigged. Hardly inspirational stuff. Anyhow, the way in which the Baron fades into the background to the point where Paul’s confrontation with his barely registers on the drama scale is an issue for me.

Based baron

Cringe baron’s nephew

Glossu vs Gurney. Gurney has lots of reasons to hate Harkonnens, but Glossu a) hates everyone equally and b) is weak and scared by the time of his fight in Part Two with Gurney. It felt very strange to me that this ‘conflict’ was given emphasis in Part Two. Frankly, their battle felt about as shallow and predictable as the lame rivalry between Finn and Captain Phasma in the Star Wars sequel trilogy.
Finally, it is suggested to us that Dune is meant to be so hot that you need these suits at all times… yet nobody even looks mildly warm!! No sweating. No panting. No heat haze. No scenes where running out of water is even a mild concern. This is probably one of the only areas where the film fails for me at the level of immersion. I just can’t get my head around why the film looks like it takes place on a downright chilly desert…

Important things rushed. Unimportant scenes extended.

Dune deserves credit as being a very large part of the inspiration for Star Wars. At times, I think these inevitable parallels end up hurting the movie. The build up to the destruction of the Atreidies family in the first two-thirds of part one is fairly analogous to the much quicker execution of Luke’s adoptive family in A New Hope. Yet, where ANH takes off into the stratosphere from that point on, Dune Part One is nearly over: Paul runs into the desert and finds the fremen. This type of thing speaks to a major pacing issue in Dune; which is to say, an immense amount of focus on details that flesh out the world itself but not really the plot/characters.

It is all very Denis Villeneuve. I respect the man as a visionary director. His filmography is pretty fantastic overall. However, he does have a tendency to ignore dialogue almost entirely (he recently said that perhaps movies should all have ZERO dialogue in his view) and also appears to lack interest in crafting deeply satisfying conflict (character/plot). As far as I can tell, Villeneuve wants the sets/landscapes/actor’s faces and music to do all of the work and, credit where it’s due, those aspects in his films are some of the most memorable of the last 20 years. Arrival. BR20498. Dune. Visuals and audio are definitely where Dune will be remembered. It just won’t be for having had loads of compelling drama. For me, however, this is a fundamentally important missing ingredient in what is meant to be a sci-fi epic with factions and heroes and villains.

Evidence for this focus on visual/sonic details that flesh out the world (and, yes, sometimes the characters in the same breath) whilst relegating character/plot to the odd scene here and there can be found everywhere. Think: Paul watching instructional videos about dunes and desert mice with the awesome Herald of the Change playing in the background. We get introduced to both worms and desert mice in due course anyway. The scene adds basically nothing. But it sure is atmospheric!

Another example is the luxuriously slow opening of Part One the Atreidies homeworld, which adds very little of necessity to the plot and basically guarantees that factional/character conflict will have little space to bloom later on.

Beginnings are such delicate times

I also find that the flashforwards become tiresome after a while. As hard as it may seem to believe, I think there is only so many times that one can watch Timothy shake his perfect mane around in a glittery sandstorm and feel suitably awe-inspired by how ‘deep’ it is all is. Perhaps if by Part Two these visions were more proactive or specific or controlled it might feel more urgent. Instead, I just want to delete almost every quasi-flashforward from the film entirely.

Then we have the ‘romance’ between Paul and Chani. For me, this is actually a much less convincing sci-fi romance than the more widely castigated relationship between Anakin and Padme in the SW prequel films. Paul and Chani fall in love with no passion at all. It truly feels scripted and played out. I don’t believe a word they say to each other. A major reason for this is not that the acting is bad. Instead, it is simply not really possible to sell the audience on this level of development for a relationship in the short space of time that Dune Part Two can afford to spend on the topic. Lust? Very possibly. But, love?? It’s almost an impossible task.

We can see here how decisions made in Part One roll over to crush some of the ambitions of Part Two. That 30 minutes on the Atreidies homeworld + probably another 30 minutes of slow tracking, walking, and general vibe shots would have been well spent instead (IMHO) on enhancing conflict between characters, adding twists and turns to the narrative, and getting us to meet and learn from and become affectionate towards Chani by the end of Part One.

Never lose me

I feel similarly about Part Two. The movie tries its best to do the legwork to build up Paul and Chani (but fails) and the conflict between different groups of fremen (but fails). All of this comes at severe cost for the remainder of the plot which of course has to begin narrowing towards a resolution quickly. So, we end up with all of the key players meeting for the first time in a random place in the desert (I literally did not recognise the setting of the final battle - if someone can help me out in the comments, that’d be awesome!) and then Paul simply defeating them with ease. There is no drama to be found in what is meant to be the crescendo of the conflict. Instead, we have scenes like the Baron’s nephew offering a lame comeback:

Paul: “May thy knife chip and shatter.”

Baron’s Nephew: *has no idea what to say* “May… thy knife chip and shatter.” (Dies)

We conclude the film with Paul asking a bunch of people who have presumably never flown a spaceship to randomly go into orbit somehow to fight the spacefaring Great Houses who for some reason have all arrived at Arrakis. Is this likely to work??? What is happening?! Perhaps we will find out in Part Three.

My road leads away from the desert

That pretty much sums up my reasoning for finding a lack of storytelling drama in the Dune movies. I think visually and sonically they have already landed. However, there is a reason many people to went to see it at the cinema came away describing the saga as ultimately dull. It is clear to me that this was a sacrifice Villeneuve was willing to make. His filmmaking choices are intentional and, as I say, in many cases visionary. However, if you want to achieve dramatic storytelling, Dune is almost a case study in what no to do.

Don’t open the film with a plot that moves like treacle. Don’t relegate vital relationships to mere moments. Don’t leave it to the moment of conflict resolution to put the main players in real conflict with one another. Don’t have little to no personal angle to any of that factional conflict. Don’t set up 1000 things and have 0 things actually matter in the end.

Perhaps my opinion of the the Dune films is currently in a temporary nadir, having stated off so very high during my first experience with Part One at the cinema, but for now at least my road leads away from the desert… to Spotify, where the OST is still on repeat. Seriosuly - you NEED to listen to all tracks on “The Dune Sketchbook”. It is utterly unreal:

Dawn Strata - Science & Sci-Fi

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