Welcome to the continuation of my Best Picture Nominee Reviews! Here’s the overall list, with links to the reviews that are live, and notes about forthcoming reviews. I might not be able to see all the movies before the awards at the end of the month, but I’ll try!
(All the movies, with my linked reviews: King Richard/ Belfast , CODA, Don’t Look Up, Drive My Car, Dune, Licorice Pizza, Nightmare Alley , The Power of the Dog (review forthcoming) ,West Side Story (review forthcoming) )
Dune has been nominated for 10 Oscars: Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Sound, Best Visual Effects, Best Production Design, Original Score, Film Editing, Makeup and Hairstyling, Costume Design, and Cinematography. Of the “big five” awards (picture, director, actor, actress, screenplay—original or adapted), it’s nominated for two. (For comparison, King Richard is nominated for three—picture, actor, and screenplay, and Belfast also is nominated for three—picture, screenplay, and director.)
I hadn’t read the massively popular sci-fi novel until right before I saw the movie. While some people said you didn’t need to read the novel ahead of time, I found that I did, and even then I’m still sort of sketchy about certain things. If I hadn’t read the novel, I think I would’ve been pretty lost. The screenplay does do a good job of exposition, but I still wondered about certain things and wanted more detail, which, of course, the source novel has. (You can’t get everything into a movie; it’s not possible.)
The novel is actually divided into two films, because the director, Denis Villeneuve (Arrival), didn’t want to skip anything from the book. So in order to present it in its entirety, it’s two films. This movie stops about halfway through the novel.
(Before we get into the plot: if you are a massive fan of Dune, I give you my apologies right now, because I’m probably mangling the plot in an attempt to simplify it. I’m sorry!)
The basic plot: Paul Atreides, heir to House Atreides, is sent to Dune (aka, Arrakis) since the Emperor of the Galaxy (or something like that) has decided that his father, Duke Leto (Oscar Isaacs, The Force Awakens), is the new ruler of the planet. This comes with the extremely lucrative “spice melange” contract—spice is really the only thing worth having on Dune, which is a desert planet where the lack of water affects everything from the color of the sky to the clothing you wear. The spice has incredible powers—it enables higher levels of cognition, it makes space travel possible (you can’t navigate in space without spice, apparently), etc. (More here.)
However, this move comes with a cost, because the former rules of Arrakis are the Harkonnens, who are enemies of the Atreides, and they are, as one of the characters says, “BRUTAL!” So this promotion is not without a lot of danger, because obviously the Harkonnens are a little annoyed at this turn of events.
Our enemy: Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard)
Paul’s mother is Lady Jessica (the fabulous Rebecca Ferguson, Mission: Impossible, The Greatest Showman) and is a member of the aforementioned Bene Gesserit, an order of what are basically nuns (they have a Reverend Mother, for example) who are gifted in manipulation, both bodily and otherwise, politics, and all sorts of other shadowy machinations. Before the family leaves for Arrakis, the Reverend Mother (Charlotte Rampling) comes to test Paul with a few Bene Gesserit tests—a box of pain and the gom jabar. Paul passes these tests with flying colors, and the Reverend Mother thinks that Jessica has manipulated her body (when she was pregnant with Paul) to produce “a mind”—the great mind that can see beyond space and time, into the future and the past, and bring about all sorts of things. Basically, a Messiah.
Paul (Timothee Chalamet) undergoes the gom jabar test at the hands of the Reverend Mother (Charlotte Rampling)
So, with all this happening in the background, the Atreides family leaves their home planet of Caladan and take up residence on Arrakis/Dune. From the first, things are not good. There’s an assassin’s plot to try to kill Paul in his room, the housekeeper that Lady Jessica interviews gives her a crysknife, a Fremen’s weapon, to defend herself, and there’s rumors that someone is going to betray the family. Paul has been trained in combat, and he wants to prove his worth, but at the same time, his father is reluctant to let him do that, since he is the House’s only heir.
Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) and Duke Leto (Oscar Isaacs)
And, just to make things really interesting, Paul has been having dreams about Arrakis and a certain Freman girl, and his dreams about the future tend to come true.
I think that’s enough plot to get you going, right?
The movie is, first and foremost, gorgeous. The scenery, the effects, the cinematography, and the costumes are first rate and deserve to win the Oscars for their respective categories, I don’t think anything else comes close in terms of costumes this year. Lady Jessica gets to wear a lot of fun things, but every person is costumed appropriately and well, in a way that is uniform but not over the top (I thought this about the West Side Story costumes but we’ll get to that in that review.)
Costuming: Lady Jessica and Paul on Caladan, at the “Herald of the Change” ceremony.
On Dune: Paul and Lady Jessica in stillsuits, which enable survival in the desert by recycling the body’s water.
The casting is an embarrassment of riches. Ferguson and Issacs interact well together, and with Paul, create a believable family. You feel the affection they all have for each other. It’s criminal to me that Ferguson didn’t get nominated in the Best Actress category, because her part is difficult and she pulls it off beautifully.
Chalamet, who plays the teenage Paul, has been in high profile projects before, especially Little Women and Beautiful Boy. He does justice to the role of the perhaps-Messiah of the galaxy, going from a boy eager to fight to one who knows he has to fight to fulfill his destiny, even if he’s not entirely sure what that is. There’s a mystical edge to the part that could be overdone, but I don’t think Chalamet does that.
Josh Brolin as Gurney Halleck and Oscar Isaacs as Duke Leto
Josh Brolin and Jason Momoa are excellent as members of the Duke’s entourage, and Javier Bardem plays a Freman leader, Stilgar, with the appropriate shadowy qualities—we’ll see more of him in Part II, along with Skarsgaard’s Baron, who only appears in flashes but whose menace underlines the entire movie.
Jason Momoa as Duncan Idaho,
Zendaya plays Chani (aka the Freman girl in Paul’s dreams) well, even if we don’t see much of her here. (Again, more to come in Part II). There’s also one more cast member I really liked. In a gender-bending role—the character is male in the novel—Dr. Liet Kynes (played by Sharon Duncan-Brewster) is the planet’s top expert, and she’s in charge of helping with the peaceful (ha!) transfer of power. Duncan-Brewster’s performance is excellent.
I really enjoyed Dune. Of course I think the Best Picture Oscar would go to it after the second installment, assuming it’s nominated again ( a la Lord of the Rings being nominated but not winning the top prize until Return of the King). It’s an “old school” kind of movie: adventure, action, drama, all put together in a complete, gorgeous package. I’m very excited to see Part II.