REVIEW: “Dune: Part One” by Denis Villeneuve

A year after the COVID-19 pandemic delayed the release of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, I finally had a chance to see this latest adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel. Given Villeneuve’s work on Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, I fully expected his Dune – the first of two movies – to look gorgeous and feature excellent acting. Dune is a powerful cinematic experience, best experienced on the big screen (I saw it both on IMAX and HBO). It’s a cinematic epic that combines the majestic deserts of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia with the science fiction otherworldliness of Ridley Scott’s Alien. 

As somebody who has not just read Dune several times but also published academic articles about it,* I can’t help but compare the film to the novel. I feel the loss of the scenes omitted from the film. I know that the book provides more detailed explanations for everything from why soldiers use swords to why nobody uses computers. The book suggests that the Harkonnens have red hair. Yet, despite all this, I also find myself agreeing with most of the film’s adaptation choices. This movie is recognizably Dune – or at least the first half of the novel – even while it is also recognizably a Denis Villeneuve movie. 

As I rewatched Dune this weekend, I began to wonder: Why did Dune work as an adaptation, despite the differences from the book? 

“Blade Runner 2049 and Philosophy”

As regular readers of this blog will know, Blade Runner and its sequel Blade Runner 2049 are two of my favorite science fiction films. I’m honored to have a chapter in the upcoming book Blade Runner 2049 and Philosophy. The chapter looks at replicants from the perspective of the political science literature on ethnic conflict. This was a fun project and led me to new insights into the film. The book goes on sale on August 20, 2019.

 

“Blade Runner 2049”

Ridley Scott’s 1982 classic Blade Runner helped me understand humanity. The film is rightly lauded for its detailed world-building and hypnotic score, but it is also a philosophical treatise about human identity (seriously, Ridley Scott’s oeuvre has spawned a whole academic subfield). Humans unfortunately have a tendency to tribalism, defining some members of the species as sufficiently worthy of respect while excluding “Others” on the basis of race, gender, or religion. Blade Runner argues that the ability to feel empathy towards other forms of life is key to humanity. Indeed, in the world of 2019, bounty hunters use the Voight-Kampff machine to detect replicants (or androids) by measuring their empathy.