Dune

WARNING:  There will be spoilers

Dune, the novel, was published in 1965. I read it a few years later, and liked it enough to hunt down and read other things Frank Herbert, the author, had written.  Some of it was pretty bad.  Dune represented Herbert at his best.  It was an immediate hit with Science Fiction readers like me.  The level of popularity within that community was high enough to cause the more mainstream part of the reading market to become interested.  There too, it was well received.

This popularity had the inevitable result, a sequel called Dune Messiah.  In spite of the fact that it was a sequel to a novel that wasn't supposed to have one, it was pretty decent.  As night follows day, a second sequel soon followed. It wasn't as good.  And that became the pattern.

With each subsequent book the quality diminished a little more.  It eventually reached the point where Herbert's son was cranking out additional books after his father died.  They were not very good.  But they achieved enough commercial success to justify keeping the sequel machine humming along well past it's "sell by" date.

One of the things that attracted many readers to the books were their imputed ecological message.  But Herbert got the science wrong.  And that caused me to be concerned that eco-readers would take away the wrong message.  Since the first book was published the earth's ecology, now generally referred to as its climate, has deteriorated substantially.  It is going to take good science rather than fantasy to get us back on track.

So, what science did Herbert get wrong?  First, I am going to ignore the space ships and other standard components of a Science Fiction yarn.  I am instead going to focus on the elements that are unique to Herbert's books.  The first, biggest, and most obvious one, is the sand worms.  Their physiology is impossible, but I am going to ignore even that.  Instead, I am going to focus on their locomotion.

They travel underground through sand at great speed.  To understand the problem try punching a sandpile, hard.  This will likely result in several broken bones.  But more importantly, your fist will penetrate the sand by, at most, and inch or so.  Sand doesn't flow the way water does.

What Herbert had in mind was the way large whales like Humpbacks swim through the ocean.  In spite of the fact that they are very large they can swim at high speed.  And they sometimes breech, leap out of the water and crash back, spectacularly.  But water is a fluid and sand isn't.

Small creatures like moles and prairie dogs can live in sandy soils.  But they do so by digging tunnels at a rate measured in feet per day.  Inch worms do a little better a the whole underground living thing.  But they are even smaller.  No large creature even tries to live under dry sand.

Next, consider how worm riders control the worm.  They use hooks to raise the leading edge of the large scales that cover the worm.  But a real scale opens at the back.  The Herbert design guarantees that sand would get jammed under its scales every time a worm tried to move forward.  So forget giant worms traveling through sand with people on their backs.

Then there is that technological marvel, the stillsuit.  Supposedly, it keeps you cool while trapping and recycling all of your sweat.  The design is thermodynamically impossible.  Your sweat is a cooling mechanism.  It depends on the fact that it takes a lot of energy to turn water from a liquid to a gas.  The energy that goes into that transformation is taken from your body, thus cooling it.  But a stillsuit prevents that from happening.  In a stillsuit 99.9% of your sweat is captured and recycled, all while keeping it in a liquid state.

It is possible that this capture-and-recycle process could be done efficiently.  But that leads to a different problem.  Your body also uses sweat to get rid of salts that would otherwise build up in your body.  It would take a lot of energy to remove those salts from your salty sweat so that potable water would be produced.  The modest amount of energy generated as you walk is not nearly enough.

Wearing a stillsuit in the desert would be like wearing a full-body wetsuit in the desert.  It would turn you into a well-done piece of meat within a short period of time.  If you look at the kinds of clothing desert people actually wear, it is either very loose, thus allowing them to sweat.  Or it is almost non-existent, again allowing them to sweat.

And that brings me to the ecological dream.  The Fremen ("free men" - get it)  dream of turning their desert planet into a green paradise.  To further that dream they have been collecting water in large secret underground cisterns for generations.  Supposedly, they are close to collecting enough water to flood the planet and turn it green.  But the math doesn't work out.

How big are the cisterns?  Perhaps a thousand feet by a thousand feet and a hundred feet deep.  How many of them are there?  Perhaps ten thousand.  Collectively, that much water amounts to less than a drop in the bucket when spread across an entire planet.

For reference, the earth's oceans cover 70% of its surface and are over ten thousand feet deep on average.  Even if the job could be done with 10% of the water in our oceans, that's many thousands of times more than the Fremen have been able to collect.

If we mark the extent of their cisterns on a map planet Dune, we would see a series of pin pricks.  99+% of the surface would have no cistern underneath it.  In actuality, cisterns of the necessary size would be so large and so deep that they could not be hidden.

Then there is the plot itself.  It is a direct steal from "Lawrence of Arabia".  During World War I, the British sent T. E. Lawrence to Arabia to stir up trouble behind enemy lines.  At that time all the land that we now refer to as The Arab World was controlled by the Ottoman Empire, essentially Turkey.  And the Turks were on the other side of the War from the Brits.  Lawrence succeeded beyond anyone's expectation.

But he went off script.  If political control of the area were to be shifted, it was supposed to shift to the British and the French.  That was the plan that Lawrence's superiors were working to.  But Lawrence on his own decided that political control should instead shift to the Arabs themselves.  He was an early de-colonialist.  And, after a few fits and starts, he was largely successful.

This will sound eerily familiar to anyone who has read the book.  Paul, the book's hero, is supposed to wrench control of the planet Dune away from the Harkonnen family and return it to his family, the Atreides.  Instead, he decides to give control of the planet to the Fremen.  He succeeds, but in the process he becomes a messiah and the Emperor of the entire space culture that is extant at the time.

"Messiah" is an Arab word.  Herbert stole liberally from Arab language and culture.  At the time the book was first published people were generally ignorant of cultures outside of North America and Europe.  So, all this Arab-speak sounded new, different, and interesting.

And if we substitute oil in our world for the "spice" of the book, the parallels between our world and the world of Dune become inescapable.   In our world, oil is the vital commodity that makes our modern society possible.  In the Dune world spice performs the exact same role.  The oil pumped by Arab countries are not quite as critical to our modern world as spice is to the world of Dune.  But then oil is less important now than it was back in 1965.

And, since Herbert wanted to tell what was essentially a medieval tale, he had to invent a reason why the non-Freman culture was a mix of high-tech (space ships) and low tech (people fighting hand-to-hand rather than using modern weapons).  The reason he came up with was barely serviceable.

One trick he used for squaring that particular circle was to substitute specially trained humans called "Mentats" for computers.  But, as is far too often the case when it comes to fictional people who are supposed to be super-smart, his Mentats do not seem to me to be any smarter or more gifted than any of the other characters.

So, that's a shallow dive into the original book.  What I really want to talk about is the movies (and TV show) that were spawned by the book.  And I specifically want to talk about Dune Part One and Dune Part Two, the two very recent efforts along this line.  It is the availability of Dune Part Two on Max that provided the impetus behind this post.  And as an aside, if the name of a particular streaming service needed to be shortened, which it didn't, then HBO would have been a far better choice.

But this current cycle of Dune movies is not the first time a page to screen translation has been attempted.  It is, in fact, the third attempt.  David Lynch, the well respected director, took a shot in 1984 with Dune.  Unfortunately, the project was sabotaged by none other than Frank Herbert himself.  He insisted that the entire plot from the book be included.  Even with a running time of 137 minutes, it didn't fit.

The result is best described as "highlights from Dune".  The movie jumped from event to event so quickly that even Dune afficionados like myself couldn't keep track of what was going on.  Motivation and characterization were jettisoned completely in the rush to include all of the critical plot points.  The distributors even tried providing a syllabus in pamphlet form to movie goers.  But it wasn't enough.  The movie flopped.

Herbert died in 1986.  That eliminated his ability to sabotage subsequent attempts.  And, though deeply flawed, Dune led several Hollywood types to believe that the translation could be done successfully.  It just needed a different approach.  In any case, a second effort, something called Frank Herbert's Dune, made it onto the small screen in 2000.  It was produced for and aired on what is now called the Syfy cable channel.

Most people have lost track of this version.  I own a 3-DVD set of it that I bought years ago.  That package is now hard to come by.  But you can still find a Blu Ray of it on Amazon.  My point, however, is that when this version was initially released, it was a success.  It got the highest ratings Syfy had ever seen up to that point.  It was so successful that it spawned a sequel called Children of Dune.

Children of Dune was also considered a success at the time.  Since then it has dropped even further out of sight than Frank Herbert's Dune did.  I have seen it, but I can't remember anything from it.  I am going to ignore Children of Dune in the same way I am ignoring the many sequels to the original book.  And, rather than analyze Frank Herbert's Dune on a stand-alone basis, I am going to compare and contrast it to the latest offering.

The latest offering comes in two parts, Dune Part One and Dune Part Two.  There are a number of sequels to these two works in the works, but I am going to ignore them too.  And, for convenience I am going to consider Dune Part One and Dune Part Two as as a single entity.  They were always envisioned as a two-parter, so that's how I am going to treat them.  And I am going to shorthand the combined entity as simply Dune.  Similarly, I am going to shorthand Frank Herbert's Dune as simply FHD.

FHD was championed by Richard P. Rubenstein and Michael Galin.  They brought John Harrison on board to direct.  All three believed that it in order to successfully bring a faithful adaptation of the book to the screen, a longer running time was necessary.

Dune was single handedly championed by Denis Villeneuve.  He produced it (with help), directed it, and wrote the screenplay (also, with help).  Like the FHD team, he thought that a longer running time was an absolute necessity.  He got his wish.  Dune consisted of a two-hour movie followed by a three-hour movie.  FHD also got its wish.  It aired as six one-hour episodes spread over three consecutive days.

Dune has been a success with the movie going public and movie critics in the same way that FHD was a success with television viewers and the TV critics of its time.  But, of the two I prefer FHD.  Modern commentators, on the other hand, mostly ignore FHD.  Those that acknowledge it, dismiss it.  But both are worthy and generally successful attempts.  That puts both of them far ahead of the original attempt.  Without further ado, let me proceed with my comparison.

The first item that needs to be addressed is context.  The two were created in far different environments.  FHD was made for TV.  That necessarily limited its budget.  It was initially an open question as to whether enough money could be found to make it at all.  Expensive special effects would be necessary if it was to have any possible chance at success.  The need to save money wherever possible drove several key decisions.  The show was shot in the Czech Republic for cost reasons.

First of all Sci Fi entered into a co-production agreement with several European partners.  That enabled a substantially bigger budget.  It also resulted in a lot of slots, both in front of the camera and behind, being filled by Europeans.  And Eastern Europeans, who were cheaper than Western Europeans, were used where possible.

Cost considerations also meant that A-List talent was pretty much out of the question.  The only A-Lister in the cast was William Hurt.  And since his character was killed off less than a third of the way through the series, it was probably a smaller paycheck than he would have otherwise gotten.

But the biggest cost driven decision was a surprising one.  The series was shot entirely on sound stages.  Stock footage was used in a few places.  But all the new material was filmed on one of several sound stages.  This included shooting all of the desert scenes on a big pile of sand in a sound stage.  In spite of this, the desert scenes are remarkably effective.  

Shooting a "big budget spectacular" on sound stages was an extremely daring choice.  It could have gone wrong in so many ways.  But I thought they made this choice work for them.  They did what all successful projects operating on a shoe-string budget do, they substituted creativity for money.  Time after time they found creative ways to make a set on a sound stage feel like it was part of a much larger world.

Dune, on the other hand, was an actual big budget Hollywood movie.  That meant that A-List talent was employed, even for smaller parts.  And if you need a telegenic piece of desert, which you do, then you move the entire production to Jordan and shoot outside rather than using some cheap cheat.  You have the money, so why not?  And when it come to special effects and CGI shots, you have the budget to do whatever you want.  The only limit is your imagination.

The budget for FHD was $20 million.  The combined budget for Dune was more than $350 million, almost eighteen times as much.  I thought that the budget for FHD was well spent.  The budget for Dune, not so much.  The problem with having a Dune sized budget is that you have no excuse for producing second rate work.  And I thought too much of Dune was second rate work.

Side note:  FHD suffered from the same problem that plagued the original Star Trek TV show.  Many people, William Shatner most prominently, complained that the Star Trek sets were cheesy.  He was right, and for the same reason that applied to FHD.  The hand-done, film-based, special effects used in Star Trek were fantastically expensive.  That meant that every possible corner had to be cut elsewhere.  If episodes of Star Trek had cost the same as other shows of the period, NBC would never have cancelled it.

The fact that that FHD was shot on sound stages affected its look and feel.  But the producers compensated in several ways.  They employing over-the-top set decoration and costume design.  I particularly recommend to viewers that hats employed.  They are worth the price of admission all by themselves.

They also adopted an operatic look and feel for the show.  Opera is not about strict realism.  It is about drama and spectacle.  The fact that there were a lot of Italians in front of and behind the camera helped.  FHD employed dramatic "stage" color and lighting extensively.  For instance, some "special effects" were done simply by diming some areas and brightening others.  And each key group of players had its own color palate.  The Atreides were rendered in brown, the Harkonenns in red, and the imperial palace in blue. 

Dune had lots of money for costumes, set decoration, etc.  They went overboard in the other direction, bland, bland, bland.  Bland, unmemorable costumes.  Bland, boring space ships.  (The FHD space ships were much more imaginative and interesting.)  And the interior spaces - what were they thinking?  A theme of both implementations is "space is big".  So, with FHD we have really big, but interesting, space ships.  With Dune we have spectacularly big, but spectacularly boring, space ships.

The same thing carries over to interior spaces.  With FHD we have large interior spaces.  But they are interesting to look at.  And they look practical and lived in.  With Dune we have spectacularly big interior spaces.  But they are all bland beyond belief.

Who wants to hike what seems like a quarter of a mile to get from one side of a cold and boring room to the other.  Especially if you know that the next room you enter will be just as large, boring, and cold as the one you are leaving.  I can't imagine anyone actually living in any of the "living" spaces in Dune.

The same thing carries over to the people themselves.  FHD spends enough time with the principle characters that you get to know them and to understand what motivates them.  Their actions are understandable because we can follow their motivations.

Dune does not spend enough quality time with its characters.  Key scenes which would make the characters relatable and understandable are missing.  As FHD demonstrates, often all that is needed to fix this are a few short scenes.  Maybe they are being saved for the director's cut.

This is even true of the main character, Paul.  He is the character the whole enterprise pivots around.  He needs to have conflicts to wrestle with.  In FHD what he is thinking and why is clear.  And that means that his conflicts are clear.

He starts out as a bratty kid trying to impress his dad.  He is then thrown without any warning into the desert and the Fremen culture.  He needs to learn to become one of them and eventually to lead them.  Finally, he tries to figure out how he can stave off a war that will kill billions.

His motivations in Dune are far less clear.  Dune avoids the bratty kid stage.  But that restricts his ability to grow and mature before our very eyes.  Key events in his time with the Fremen are omitted or brushed over.  So, an opportunity for the audience to bond with Paul and his journey of discovery is not taken full advantage of.  Finally, Villeneuve tries to shift Paul's final dilemma, but it was never clear to me what the new dilemma was supposed to be.

And what applies to Paul, applies to the secondary characters to an even greater extent.  The character of Irulan, the Emperor's daughter, is given extensive screen time in FHD.  We learn that she is first intrigued by Paul, then impressed, and finally comes to love him.  She is the person from the outside world who comes to understand him best.  That makes her a tragic figure when Paul eventually commits to a loveless (and presumably sexless) marriage with her for political and diplomatic reasons.

In FHD, she is played well by the beautiful Julie Cox.  Florence Pugh, another beauty and a capable actress, plays her in Dune.  But Pugh is given nothing to do, so she remains a cypher.  Her only role is to be there at the end so she can marry Paul.  What does she think of that?  We have no idea.

Even the villains are treated badly in Dune.  In FHD Duke Harkonnen is played in a wonderful over-the-top performance by Ian McNeice.  For instance, he tends to end his speeches, and he has several memorable ones, with a rhyming couplet.  Stellan Scarsgard plays him in Dune.  Given nothing interesting to do, he blends into the background.

In FHD as part of the color scheme all the Harkonnens have bright red hair.  They are given lots of curtains to chew, so they stand out.  In Dune all the Harkonnens are pasty and bald.  Villeneuve planned for this to stand out the way the red hair did in FHD, but he fails.  They are some of the blandest villains I have ever come across.

Another big contrast is with the Emperor.   Given sufficient screen time, and being someone who knows how to play this kind of part, Giancarlo Giannini does a great job with him in FHD.  His character is trying his best to retain control as he is buffeted from all sides.  In the end his only true ally turn out to be his daughter.  So, he ends up a broken man.

Christopher Walken was brought in to play the part of the Emperor in Dune.  He has no clue as to how to play the part because there is nothing there to play.  It is probably for the best that he has little screen time.  And when he is on screen he looks acutely uncomfortable.  I can't blame him.

In another missed opportunity, an unknown child actor named Laura Burton plays Alia, a key figure in the climax of FHD.  She is terrifying.  But by that time we know her back story.  So, we get to go along for the ride as she leaves various villains literally trembling in their boots.

In Dune, Alia is played by Anya Taylor-Joy.  She is an excellent actor and, given a chance, could have delivered a memorable performance.  But why is an adult playing a character that should be a child?  We don't know.  Supposedly, Villeneuve came up with a justification for this change.  But, if it was there, I missed it.  And, if you blink you will miss Taylor-Joy's entire (and uncredited) performance.  Needless to say, another missed opportunity.

One of the few places where Dune does the better job than FHD does is with Chani, Paul's love interest.  In FHD, she is played by Barbaroa Kodelova.  As far as I can tell she was picked because she could speak passable English and was willing to bare her ample breasts in a short, and completely unnecessary, topless scene.  I never connected with her.

Zendaya plays the same character in Dune, and plays her well.  The part is not written as well as it could have been.  But there is enough there for Zendaya to have something to work with.  She acquits herself well.

Here is a list of some of the other characters, and who played them in each version:

• Paul - Alec Newman and Timothee Chalamet
• Jessica (Paul's mother) - Saskia Reeves and Rebecca Fergusson
• Stilgar (lead Fremen) - Uwe Ochsenknecht and Javiar Bardem
• Leto (Paul's father) - William Hurt and Oscar Isaac 

As far as the relative quality of the respective performances.  Chalamet is by the better actor, but he is too skinny to be credible as an action hero.  I think both Reeves and Fergusson both did good work.  Uwe was good but Bardem was better.  Neither Hurt nor Isaac had much to do.  Both did it well.

One final observation - FHD was made for TV in an era when many people were still using picture-tube-type TVs.  These are low resolution and low contrast devices.  That affected how shots were framed and lit.  To the modern eye this translates to a too-brightly-lit and Technicolor look to the production.

Dune was made for theater exhibition, or home viewing using modern flat screen technology.  To the modern eye this translates to what we have been trained to expect, more muted colors and a lot of dimly lit scenes.  We are now used to how Dune is shot and framed rather than how FHD was.

This puts some people off as it is not what they are used to.  But they should not be put off by it.  They should instead embrace it as part of the experience.  It is akin to watching an old black-and-white movie.  The fact that it isn't done any more doesn't detract from just how effectively those old movies turn a seeming disadvantage into an advantage.

In summary, Dune represents a missed opportunity.  My two main complaints are with the script and with the special effects.  Minor changes to the script which would not have significantly affected its running time could have sharpened and clarified the characters and their motivations.

And although well done from a technical perspective, the special effects were a missed opportunity from an artistic perspective.  The design of the space ships and interior spaces, many of which used CGI "extensions" so that only part of the set needed to be built and filmed, were dull and uninteresting.  Making more interesting artistic choices would not have increased the cost or the difficulty.  But it would have made both movies more interesting.

I blame both of these shortcomings on Villeneuve.  He was the one with the artistic vision that determined how the finished script came together, and the look and feel of the finished films.  All he had to do was to watch FHD over and over to understand how his script could have been made much better without changing it in any essential way.

Modern effects houses are capable of producing truly magical visuals. All you have to do is ask them to do so.  That's what the FHD people did.  And their effects people were able to deliver striking results in spite of the budget constraint.  All Villeneuve had to do was give the effects houses more interesting things to do and they would have done them.  But apparently, he didn't.

Now don't get me wrong.  Dune is well worth a watch.  It is just far from as good as it could have been, and should have been.  And, of course, I recommend that people who liked Dune to seek out and take a look at FHD.  If you give it a chance to charm you on its own terms, I think you will find your time and effort well be rewarded.

BONUS CONTENT:  A standard feature of the action genre is the climactic mano-a-mano fight between the good-guy champion and the bad-guy champion.  Dune, in all of it's various forms includes just such a fight.  In Dune's case, it is between Paul and Feyd Harkonnen.  (Note:  In Lynch's Dune, Feyd was memorably played by Sting, the singer.  This bit of stunt casting resulted in Sting having a modest but successful career as an actor.)  The part was played well by Matt Keslar in FHD, and played under so much makeup and prosthetics that he is unrecognizable by Austin Butler in Dune.

A required attribute of these fights is that the participants seem evenly matched.  To do otherwise would diminish the drama by delivering a one-sided fight.  But is that realistic in the context of Dune?  As in the medieval tradition, both Paul and Feyd have been trained in hand-to-hand combat from an early age.  That should make them evenly matched.

But we are told that Feyd loves fighting and has done a lot of it.  Paul, on the other hand, dislikes fighting and only goes through the training out of a sense of obligation.  Advantage, Feyd.  But most of Feyd's opponents have been drugged or injured before the fight starts, so that Feyd is guaranteed an easy win.  Advantage back to near even.

But Paul has been trained by his mother in a special technique called the "Weirding Way".  Advantage, Paul.  And Paul spends years fighting with the Fremen and learning from them.  And the Fremen, we are told, are some of the best fighters of that age.  So, Paul should have an even greater advantage.

Then Paul acquires super-powers by "drinking the waters of the Maker".  (It's a Fremen thing - and it's what allows Paul to become powerful enough to unilaterally declare himself Emperor.)  This should convey an overpowering advantage upon Paul.

Paul should wipe the floor with this guy without even breaking a sweat.  Instead, all of the fights in all the various versions conform to the much beloved and wildly overused "bad-guy gains an early advantage but good-guy keeps fighting and ultimately triumphs" formula.  There is a fix for this problem that would work within the context of Dune.

In FHD we are shown that the bad-guy cheats.  It turns out that he has a poisoned needle concealed in his belt buckle.  Paul learns this but the crowd viewing the fight (the genre often demands that a handy crowd be available to function as an on-site stand-in for the audience) doesn't.  But what if Paul fights the early rounds with one metaphoric hand tied behind his back so that the fight appears to be even.

Then at the critical moment he exposes the bad-guy's cheat to the crowd.  Then he can then proceed to wipe the floor with him without diminishing the dramatic release the fight is supposed to provide.  FHD comes the closest to doing this, but it too chickens out in the end.  The other versions don't even try.