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If movies can have previews, why can’t movie critics release “pre-reviews”? I ask because September 9th was the release date of the first trailer for the first half of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune.
Dune is one of the most-anticipated movies of 2020. Trailers can build up a lot of excitement for a film, but they are immediately forgotten when the movie actually appears. Yet due to COVID-19, there is a real chance that more people will see the movie’s trailer online than will see the actual film in theaters when it is released in December, and it may take months before the film is released on video and streaming services. Until that time, this and any subsequent trailers will eclipse the film itself.
Hence this little experiment. I want to prereview Dune based on the first trailer, plus other information gleaned from interviews and promotional materials. When (and if) you see the film, you can judge my prereview for prescience.
Any Dune adaptation is highly significant, because the novel is one of the great works of twentieth-century popular fiction, straddling both the sci-fi and fantasy genres. First published in 1965, Dune inspired legions of fans. Herbert wrote five sequels, and after his death his son Brian Herbert, together with Kevin J. Anderson, wrote more than a dozen Dune universe books, none of which I have read.
This movie is also significant because Dune has already inspired a series of screen adaptations. The first was by Alejandro Jodorowsky, which was highly influential even though it was never filmed. David Lynch’s 1984 Dune belongs in the category of great flawed films. In 2000, the Sci-Fi Channel did a four-and-a-half-hour, three-part Dune miniseries, which I thought was pretty bad, although its sequel, the Children of Dune miniseries (2003) is surprisingly good.
Dune also inspired screen homages and rip-offs, most notably the vast Star Wars “franchise” — which is what the movie industry calls a “mythos.”
Beyond that, a Dune adaptation is politically important because, as I have argued in “Archaeofuturist Fiction: Frank Herbert’s Dune,” Herbert’s vision is deeply reactionary, anti-modernist, and anti-liberal — and for quite compelling reasons.
Based on his movies Sicario, Arrival, and Blade Runner 2049, Denis Villeneuve is a highly talented director of both science fiction and action films. Thus he was a good choice to direct Dune. But will Dune be a good movie? Will it be better than the Lynch or the Sci-Fi Channel’s versions? (Yes, the Sci-Fi Channel adaptation was inferior to Lynch, but it included plot elements omitted by Lynch but not by Villeneuve, so it is reasonable to compare the two.) Will Villeneuve’s film bear any relation to Jodorowsky’s Dune? This three minute, five second trailer contains many clues.
Perhaps the chief flaw of Lynch’s Dune are the clunky special effects. The Sci-Fi Channel version’s effects also look cheap. Based on the trailer and Villeneuve’s other science fiction efforts, this adaptation beats the rivals easily in this department. But this is largely due to advances in technology. The big question is whether Villeneuve’s use of the new technology is tasteful or vulgar. Based on the trailer, I can’t yet decide. Aside from the sandworms, most of the effects in the trailer are static images that give one a sense of the design of vessels. But the test of effects is how well they move.
Another flaw of Lynch’s Dune was a lack of grand landscape photography, especially on the watery world of Caladan and the desert planet of Arrakis. Lynch mostly used models without much context. Fortunately, the trailer shows us glimpses of dramatic vistas on both planets. Another flaw of Lynch’s Arrakis is that many of the scenes, even in the desert, are dark, gloomy, and ugly. Deserts are beautiful places, but you’d never know that from the Lynch film. Unfortunately, based on the new trailer, Villeneuve’s Arrakis is almost as dark and ugly as Lynch’s.
Villeneuve’s movie dramatizes the first half of the Dune novel. The setting is more than 20,000 years in the future. Mankind has colonized the entire galaxy. No other intelligent life forms have been found. Because of the great distances between planets and the high cost of space travel, the political order is feudal. Noble houses (Dukes, Counts, Barons) rule entire planets, all of them subordinated to the Padishah Emperor on far-off Kaitain.
In addition to the noble houses, the other major powers are secretive initiatic societies dedicated to the development of human capacities.
The Spacing Guild has developed higher mathematics and prescience to traverse space.
The Bene Tleilax brotherhood, who are Sufis, has developed mnemonics to create “mentats” (human computers, because artificial intelligence is religiously prohibited), yogic superpowers that allow them to shift shapes, and genetic engineering techniques.
The Bene Gesserit sisterhood has developed skills in martial arts (the Weirding Way), memory sharing, hyper-observation and abductive reasoning, seduction and sex, religious and political deception, and eugenics.
Nobody knows what their ultimate goal is, but their proximal goal — which they are nearing — is breeding a superman, the Kwisatz Haderach (shortener of the way), a Janus-like figure who will be able to access all of his ancestors’ memories as well as presciently peer into the future.
You can buy Return of the Son of Trevor Lynch’s CENSORED Guide to the Movies here
The most valuable resource in the universe is the so-called spice mélange, harvested from the sands of Arrakis, also known as Dune. The spice extends life but also expands the mind, thus it is used by the Guild, Tleilaxu, and Bene Gesserit in all their schemes to transcend the human condition.
The plot of Dune centers on the struggle of two noble houses, the Atreides and the Harkonnen, for control of Arrakis. But this is no normal aristocratic feud, because the most precious resource in the universe is at stake, and one of the players, Paul Atreides, the fourteen-year-old heir to Arrakis, may well be the Kwisatz Haderach the sisterhood has been searching for.
In the trailer, the two primary characters are Paul Atreides (played by Timothée Chalamet) and the Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam (Charlotte Rampling) who has come to test Paul’s powers on the eve of the Atreides’ departure to take control of Arrakis. Their scene and bits of dialogue from it are intercut with flashes of events to come as the Atreides are attacked on Arrakis by the Harkonnen. Paul and his mother are forced to flee to the desert, where they take refuge with the Fremen, the indigenous people of Arrakis.
I wasn’t thrilled when I heard that Chalamet was cast as Paul. He does not look as good as Lynch’s Kyle MacLachlan or the Sci-Fi Channel’s Alec Newman. He looks too delicate for the action sequences. But it is difficult to find an actor who can pass for a teenager and handle the role. Judging from the trailer, however, Chalamet has some steel in him. He will probably do the character credit.
One of the best sequences in Lynch’s film is when the Reverend Mother tests Paul with “the box.” We see glimpses of this in the trailer. Lynch’s Reverend Mother was played beautifully by Siân Phillips. In the Sci-Fi series, she was played by a Czech actress, Zuzana Geislerová, who would have been forgettable if her stupid hats and heavy accent had not made her ridiculous. (She was much better in Children of Dune.) Based on the trailer, Rampling has poise and a great voice. She will do justice to the role.
The only other character in the trailer with significant lines is Duncan Idaho. (Baron Harkonnen and Chani have just a few words.) Although Idaho is a very important character, especially in the subsequent books, Lynch’s adaptation left little room for Idaho, who was played by Richard Jordan. In the Sci-Fi miniseries, he was played by the forgettable James Watson. (In Children of Dune he was memorably played by Edward Atterton.) Villeneuve has cast the half-Hawaiian bodybuilder/action hero Jason Momoa to play Idaho.
Momoa is a very good choice. The first half of Dune contains a number of flight and fight scenes featuring Idaho that were cut by Lynch. These will make excellent action sequences, so Momoa with his heroic physique and martial arts skills will shine in them. As for Momoa’s mixed-race ancestry: Duncan Idaho is really the only character in Dune who is described as not being white. “Idaho” is an American Indian name, and the character is described as having high cheekbones, a somewhat flat face, and dark, wavy hair like a karakul sheep. Momoa actually looks the part.
Oscar Isaac plays Duke Leto Atreides. This is actually a better choice than Lynch’s Jürgen Prochnow and Sci-Fi’s William Hurt, since the Atreides are supposed to have a Mediterranean look (brunette, aquiline noses) and descend from the ancient Greek house of Atreus. Isaac, who is of Cuban, Guatemalan, and French ancestry, looks the part. Chalamet, who is half-French, half-Jewish, does so as well.
A beautiful Scottish-Swedish actress, Rebecca Ferguson, plays Lady Jessica, Paul’s mother. She looks good, but not as good as Francesca Annis in Lynch’s film. Saskia Reeves in the Sci-Fi series was too earthy. Alice Kriege (the Borg Queen) was, however, utterly regal in Children of Dune.
Just as Kyle MacLachlan looked like he could have been the child of Jürgen Prochnow and Francesca Annis, Chalamet looks like he could be the son of Isaac and Ferguson.
Josh Brolin is a great choice for Gurney Halleck, the Atreides weapons master, who was memorably played by Patrick Steward in Lynch’s film.
I can’t complain about Villeneuve casting a Chinaman to play the traitor, Dr. Wellington Yueh, even though he was not described as oriental. Thufir Hawat, the Atreides mentat and Master of Assassins, is played by Stephen McKinley Henderson, who has some black ancestry, but who looks quite white. So even this choice doesn’t really stray from Herbert’s vision.
As for the Harkonnens: Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård plays the mad Baron, Vladimir Harkonnen. Dave Bautista plays his brutish nephew Glossu Rabban. Bautista is part Filippino but is in whiteface. The Baron’s nephew, Feyd Rautha, does not appear in this movie. David Dastmalchian plays the Harkonnens’ twisted mentat Piter De Vries. With his Armenian, Iranian, and European ancestry, Dastmalchian is a strange looking guy and inspired casting for this role, which was memorably played by Brad Dourif in the Lynch film.
The Fremen leader Stigar is played by Javier Bardem. He’s a great actor and will be the best Stilgar yet, although Steven Berkoff was outstanding in Children of Dune.
Unfortunately, at this point, Villeneuve’s casting goes completely off the rails.
The character of the Imperial Planetologist, Dr. Liet Kynes, is described by Herbert as a natural leader of astonishing nobility as well as a scientific genius. He was memorably portrayed by Max von Sydow in Lynch’s film. Villeneuve has decided to cast Kynes as a very black woman (Sharon Duncan-Brewster).
This is such outrageous political correctness that Villeneuve claimed that it was necessitated by his choice of a mulatto actress, Zendaya, to play Liet’s daughter Chani, who becomes Paul’s love interest. This argument is complete nonsense, however, since Zendaya presumably had a white male parent, so there was no need other than blatant racial appropriation to change Kynes’ sex and race, just as it is racial appropriation to cast his daughter as a mulatto.
But it gets worse. Villeneuve casts two other Fremen with black actors as well. Harah, the wife of Stilgar, is played by Gloria Obianyo. Jamis, who fights with Paul and is killed, is played by Babs Olusanmokun. This is a very bad sign, for it seems likely that Villeneuve wishes to portray the Fremen, who are the good guys, as primarily non-white. Given that their enemies, the Harkonnens, are depicted with shaved heads and conspicuously white skin, Villeneuve is turning Dune into an anti-white race-war prosecuted by non-whites and white race-mixers (Paul, Stilgar). This isn’t Frank Herbert’s Dune. Like every other piece of mainstream entertainment, Villeneuve’s Dune is just another version of the White Genocide script.
The fact that America has been convulsed for four months by people LARPing the same script is producing a great deal of fatigue for blacks and their white saviors. If COVID does not turn audiences away in droves, this blackface desecration of Herbert’s vision just might. In the past, I could overlook this kind of casting if other parts of the story were good. I don’t think I can do that anymore. This isn’t a game. Our race and civilization are dying, and the politicians, journalists, activists, and artists who are promoting the Great Replacement are simply evil. Denis Villeneuve has desecrated Dune. This movie deserves to bomb as badly as Disney’s Star Wars.
The Unz Review, 2020
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31 Comments
We already have two Dune movies. Then they make this one so they can rub our noses in it. Bless their hearts.
Don’t you mean rub their hands?
I found Leto II, the god emperor of Dune to be more compelling than Paul Atreides (Maud Dib). Anyone of Leto II’s “fishspeakers” (soldiers, if you haven’t read the books) could have killed Maud Dib with one hand tied behind their backs. I won’t even go into Miles Teg’s superpowers that he acquired by the end of book five (they were superspeed, and a danger sense). Miles Teg would have killed Maud Dib with one finger. I found Leto II’s accomplishments to be more interesting than book one, which was just a dynasty change. Frank Herbert was definitely one of us–a thorough Nietzschen. I have read all six books, and I was under the impression that it was about 50,000 years in the future, and only part of the galaxy had been explored.
The Jews will not give movies money if they don’t hate Whitey or valorize miscengenation. Money talks. Artists beg.
I rather liked the SciFi Channel version of Dune. It told the story well and had the requisite exotic elements to signal the strange future Herbert imagined. The one element of the Dune universe that is rarely touched upon and never followed up in detail is the religious aspect of the stories. The characters in the story are driven by religious faith of one kind or another. What is seldom remarked upon is how interested in eugenics Herbert was and how this plays are role in Dune and my other favorite book by him (however flawed) ‘The Dosadi Experiment’. The Bene Gesserit are like an all-female SS bent on controlling access to females to control the development of bloodlines in order to give birth to — and control the power of — the Ubermenschen Kwisatz Haderach.
I really don’t want to watch a movie staring Timothée Chalamet in a heroic role again after watching The King. He should stick to playing meth addicts as in Beautiful Boy; he has right the physique for that.
I never saw “Call Me By Your Name,” but I expect I will always think of Timothée Chalamet first as Armie Hammer’s catamite.
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” Dune ” is a ripoff off ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’
Should name this new one ‘Lawrence of Arrakis.’
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Does not it seem obvious yous guys that the spice is intended to represent oil allegorically? Those people at Unz refused to acknowledge this. Spice is necessary for interstellar travel, is highly valuable, can be made into a variety of other products, including plastics, and comes from under the ground on a desert planet. It’s obvious, right? I think they are all in a conspiracy to annoy me.
The goyim know!
What tectonic shifts are taking place?
Yeah, spice representing oil in Dune is well known. I’m pretty sure Herbert mentioned that explicitly.
I’ve always regarded previews as a form of art unto themselves. They are worth production: High impact, low capital investment.
I perceive them in the vein of Stanislaw Lem’s book “Imaginary Magnitude”, which includes an introduction to a book of introductions to impossible books.
“I wasn’t thrilled when I heard that Chalamet was cast as Paul. He does not look as good as Lynch’s Kyle MacLachlan or the Sci-Fi Channel’s Alec Newman. He looks too delicate for the action sequences. But it is difficult to find an actor who can pass for a teenager and handle the role. Judging from the trailer, however, Chalamet has some steel in him. He will probably do the character credit.”
I’m just going off this one screen shot of this actor but clearly there is a trend in Hollywood I guess for the last 20 years or so, to cast weaker, more insipid, less vital, often less handsome, less rugged looking, and substantially more autistic, somewhat more androgynous male leads where they can. You can see it everywhere. Turns out in this case, this guy is also Jewish, and he does look Jewish from that shot. Ok the character is meant to be young, but does this guy give a sense of being a great aristocratic leader who could lead a resistance from that pic? He just looks like a drippy freak to me.
But it’s not merely a movie problem anymore.
We about bioleninism with regards to filling up public positions with resentful indigent but grateful third world groups, artificially furthering the upward mobility of poc, and being gradually ruled by an indignant brown soup with Jews on top managing it all, but actually we are facing the fact that we are also in the middle of a serious and actual bioleninist crisis with white men today.
Around 2016 there was a certain amount of talk about this, ‘soy boys’ and so on, there is also a certain overlap with the NPC meme aimed at leftists, but I now think these didn’t go far enough.
There appears to be scientific consensus that autism spectrum disorders are skyrocketing, and this can’t just be attributed to more thorough reporting and categorizations today.
A high percentage of young white guys today are clearly on this spectrum. The vacant eyes, the staring, the inability to read others’ emotions adequately, a vocal inflection you would once only hear on gay men that’s been normalized into this identity, coupled with this odd sense of entitlement.
Sometimes it seems we not only being replaced by poc, but our own people are being biologically cultivated into a kind of Night of the Living Dead. We are becoming surrounded by white zombies.
These white zombies, like real zombies are consumers. They just consume stuff. They have no spirit, soul or purpose but to consume.
These Hollywood male white castings (I’ll just treat this Jewish actor as white for these purposes) mirror what is actually happening.
Perhaps at first it was a way of undermining prior ‘threatening’ forms of white masculinity to cast these guys, a kind of ‘take that white bigot male’, but it’s actually going hand in hand with this wider white bioleninism. The castings are speaking to this growing white zombie population to empower them. Hollywood is making sure it is talking to these white zombies with these castings at least where it can pull it off.
Greg mentioned Villeneuve’s other films including Blade Runner 2049. I enjoyed the movie, I thought there were some really interesting visual ideas in it that are worth seeing. I thought there some glaring short cuts and poor writing in places as well. But this guy Ryan Gosling is just another example of this ‘casting down’. I’m not sure I’ve seen such a bland, ugly boring leading man as this. I enjoyed the movie despite Gosling, not because of him.
“We about bioleninism”: should be “We talk about bioleninism”
On the other hand, consider the cast of the Marvel movies. Or the popularity of Keanu Reeves (I know he has some mixed ancestry, but you can barely tell). Nolan has also had good casting (Tenet has a brother for a lead actor, but at least there’s Pattinson). I don’t know how big of an issue the casting of white men really is. You can find examples from both ends of the spectrum. Replacing them with other kinds of actors seems to be the bigger problem.
I think Gosling is fine, at least when he’s doing stoic roles. Maybe he’s not the typical leading man you would want in your generic blockbuster, but not everyone has to be that guy.
This what decadent cultures do basically , they just keep repeating themselves and never come up with antyhing new.Basically it is just recycling the contents of a late 1970s students bedroom,on the wall is a Star Wars poster,on the floor a big stash of Marvel comics ,on the book shelf Tolkiens Lord Of The Rings and Frank Herberts Dune Trilogy.This adds up to the sum total of the Wester mind now.Cool!
Possibly Midway (1999) was the last watchable movie that Hollywood produced? As such it was panned by the critics but was actually quite good. I guess the critics were upset about the lack of valiant all-Black aircrews leading the dive bombing attack of the Japanese carriers.
It’s getting so that Netflix is becomming unwatchable. Occasionally they have a rerun of a 1970’s or 80’s movie which is all I can see there. Their DVD service by mail is still good tho as you can get all the old classics there. An independent animation shop called DUST is also producing a lot of short films viewable on YouTube for free. Their plots range very very good to really bad. Sometime those films are also very “woke”.
It’s shame about DUNE. Often the Black actors don’t just play a straight role but also try to display their “wokeness” or “Blackness” in ways that are really obvious. These types of movies become unwatchable in my opinion.
I would suggest reading more books, the classics of our people, for instance. There are many thousands of Great Books, novels and story and poetry and drama collections, that Europeans have been producing since Homer. Why do people waste their time watching crappy stuff, when I guarantee no more than one CC reader (if that) has, eg, read all 92 novels and novellas of Balzac’s Human Comedy? Who here has read all of the Greek tragedies (not hard to do), Sir Walter Scott, or Trollope, or even Dickens or Shakespeare or Proust? For example, have you read (Eng. Trans.) Alas, The Regent’s Wife; Fontane, Before the Storm; Manzoni, The Betrothed? These are some of the greatest novels in Western Lit, yet few Americans have read them. Doing so is a far better expenditure of time – better for the soul, for the mind, and for the race – than indulging popular entertainment.
But if one simply feels like watching something fictional, films are best. By far. Why? Production values, as well as the sheer amount of effort that goes into making an industrial (or even independent) movie. Two hours of TV is almost never the equal of two hours of even an average film. There is just so much more effort and money going into the latter than former.
Can you make a list of books you think a CC reader should read ? Where does one start with Proust ?
It is a great shame that Liet Keynes has been transmogrified into a magical negress in this forthcoming adaption, but let us at least be thankful that the BBC were not involved!
In their recent television series Troy, Fall of a City black actors were used prominently in a effort to turn the ‘effnik yoof’ (young black Britons) on to Homer.
With ‘Yellow Haired Achilles’ and ‘Aegis Bearing Zeus’ portrayed by a shaven-headed Nigerian and an elderly Jamaican Rasta respectively, the impressive Mycenaean Bronze Age costumes and setting could not offset piteous acting and atrocious diction from black cast(*) members utterly alien to Illiad’s primal Indo-European ethos.
Of course assorted Rent-a-Gob academics and cultural commentators were recruited by the BBC to uphold the travesty in the media and brand detractors as racists. Undaunted by the fracas, the BBC have recently decreed that ethnic quotas shall henceforward be enforced upon all period dramas, so that another bastion of white supremacy will be demolished.
The upshot of course will be to attract no urban black audience at all, for the classical cultural productions of other races, no matter how dumbed down and adulterated, are of little interest to them. License-fee paying middle-class white viewers, the traditional ‘middle-brow’ demographic, will however doubtless give the resulting shambles a miss.
The best we can hope for presently is that market forces will place a limit on the extent of politically-motivated desecration of well-loved literature by film and television. Until we are in a position to dictate the terms of cultural transmission, we may have to endure the ‘black-washing’ of our classics.
(*) It seems no attempt was made to use black actors for Memnon’s ‘Aethiopean’ contingent, which suggests that the casting director, in his zeal to burnish his progressive credentials, may have omitted to read the source material.
Read first three Dune books when young; big fan of David Lynch’s version for decades; keenly anticipating for months; was being brought by your review to a “Finally! Something to look forward to!” moment…then, the fatal words, “…at this point, Villeneuve’s casting goes completely off the rails…”
You should have started with, “This will crush your soul.”
I just wanted to say, the author was really on fire last week. Those articles provided a lot of entertainment. Thanks.
The Christian churches are the Jew’s “Missionaria Protectiva!”
How did you like the scene where Patrick Stewart holding Lady Jessica’s dog orders the counterattack, ha, ha, ha! That was so silly!
I’m surprised Hollywood didn’t demand a Wakanda world where BLM talking apes use white zombie subclass Antifa slaves to harvest a toxic liquid called Purple Drank.
Depends on how Villeneuve spins the Fremen…
If the Fremen are depicted as a noble “oppressed” people rising up in a righteous war of liberation against a YT-surrogate regime, then the new Dune will be a bad trip.
But if the movie follows Herbert’s rather cynical premise, that the Fremen are being used as muscle by a Machiavellian Atreides overclass to seize total power, then it could be better. i.e., the forces of “liberation” are pawns in a bigger power struggle run by hostile elites who have their own Agenda 20,001. Bear in mind that Herbert in Dune Messiah explicitly states that the Fremen jihad turned into the biggest bloodbath in Galactic history.
Who knows, Villeneuve might just awaken some White sleepers.
One other thing: at the 1:31 mark we see Paul being escorted by a couple of troopers wearing fashy black uniforms. It ain’t over until Maud’Dib rides the Arrakeen Worm.
I am sorry to hear you didn’t like the first trailer for the movie Dune. You consistently praise the novel and have many articles at CCP about it.
One of the features of the novel you cite is the type of political system used called feudalism. Feudalism was the type of political system that thrived in the Middle Ages. Well here are five sword and sorcery movies your friend Trevor Lynch will enjoy. These movies unifying concept is that of a warrior nobility. In other words, they are pro-white movies. They are: Dragonslayer (1981), Clash of the Titans (1981), Excailbur (1981), Conan the Barbarian (1982) and Krull (1983).
Good choices! They haven’t made movies like those in decades! Esp Conan. I would add Conan the Destroyer, although I agree it’s lighter in tone.
In the Conan the destroyer scene with the sorcerer, he represents Nashmo, who is revealed to live inside a palace of illusion. His weakness is the mirrors, which reveal his inadequacies to him, much like the knight of mirrors from Don Quixote.
Conan the barbarian is Wagnerian in proportion. Notice how each character has a leitmotif and the leitmotif overpowers the others depending on the dignity of the character on stage.