If these Dune flicks had come out 20-odd years ago–back when I first binge-read the Frank Herbert novels in High School–I would’ve been so pumped to see them! Nowadays, however, the only thing that has interested me about them is that it’s the same director as Arrival. At least with Denis Villenueve in the director’s chair, I knew that there would be some stunning visuals, and there were; but that’s all there were, frankly—and all they needed to be. I long ago lost all pleasure in lore-heavy sci-fi/fantasy that was more interested in world-building than in saying anything interesting about the world we currently inhabit now.

Because seriously, what does Dune have to say about the human condition at this point? That sometimes religion can radicalize people into Holy Wars? It’s usually the opposite, that people use religion to merely justify wars they were going to wage anyways–and honestly, Herbert never seemed particularly broken up about all the people massacred in Muadib’s Holy War (case in point: the billions killed in jihad all occur off-screen in Dune: Messiah). Is it that you gotta be careful about becoming a Messiah figure, because things might spiral out of control? Quite frankly, our modern-day problem isn’t reluctant Messiah-figures like Paul Atreides, but people only far-too-willing to be Messiah-figures–and in either case, the Dune series doesn’t have much to say about how to stop or prevent them from arising in the first leave. Is it that sociopaths exist and fascist dictatorships are bad and sometimes the powerful will cynically betray their allies for vague and amorphous reasons? Water is also wet, news at 11.

Likewise, all those folks who read Dune as critiquing, rather than merely enacting, the Campbellion-Hero-Cycle, are giving the series far too much credit in my opinion; yes, the original books constantly lamp-shade how artificial its Hero Cycle is, but that never distracts from the fact that it’s still a rather straight-forward Hero Cycle. (There’s an old joke that I’ll only share the G-rated version of: At a certain point, it doesn’t matter if you’re kissing a pig ironically, you’re still kissing a pig.) It’s trying to be postmodern without ever fully committing to the postmodernism. In any case, the Villenueve films largely eschew all the books’ lamp-shading of the Hero Cycle to instead focus primarily on visual spectacle–and given how philosophically shallow the original books were anyways, that was, again, I think, the right decision.

Indeed, films by literal definition are nothing but empty spectacle. Well do I remember going to the theater a month after my mission and becoming hyper-aware, for the first time ever, that all I was watching were projections upon a screen, nothing more. When my old High School friends presented me with stacks of DVDs and CDs to catch-up on, I looked upon it as less a relief than a chore. For those 18-24 months there, we had all lived life too directly, too purely, too deliberately, for us to be impressed by mere escapist fantasy anymore.  What were the formulaic inventions of Hollywood hacks compared to the passions of real lives really lived, in all their grief, power, and intensity?  What were the artifice of CGI or even live-sets compared to the hot sun on our skin, the glare in our eyes, the sweat on our face, the noise of the streets, the palms swaying in the breeze, the broken-concrete beneath our feet? 

I had that exact same experience watching Dune: Part Two in the cinema last week: that feeling that all I was watching were just projections upon a flat screen, nothing more. It is almost enough to make me grateful when directors restrict their films to mere visual spectacle without trying to say anything concrete about the human condition–it’s more honest. Dune: Part Two was perfectly fine, but I am unlikely to ever watch it again.