Dune would seem the ripest of fodder for the ‘cancel brigade’: it’s a sprawling eco-parable about a literal white saviour (inspired by Lawrence of Arabia) ‘going native’ to rescue brown people from their colonial overlords. Dennis Villeneuve’s adaptation has avoided this fate, and succeeded where its predecessors failed, by using its medium to shunt the story aggressively towards the realm of myth. 

2021’s Dune is a film that reminds you why the cinema, the physical cinema, exists. Frank Herbert’s source novel is a literal and cultural monolith- 400 pages of sixties techno-philosophy, often cited as the world’s best-selling science fiction book. Arguably, the biggest challenge for a modern movie wasn’t just establishing the fantasy lore, but convincing viewers to go along with it. A physical viewing experience is absolutely key to this process.

Like much sci-fi of its vintage, Dune isn’t really about technology or futurecasting; it puts normal characters on distant planets thousands of years in the future, to comment on the timelessness of human nature. In this case, our ‘messiah’ is a feller named Paul on a desert planet where the inhabitants still speak Arabic and dress like Raiders of the Lost Ark extras — even though it’s the year 10,191.

The details aren’t supposed to be convincing on their own — Herbert packs his books with references to Ancient Rome, Arthurian legend, and World War II to make his intentions clear. Villeneuve, together with screenwriters Jon Spaihts and Eric Roth, navigates the transition from a dense written myth by walloping the audience with the sensory forces at their disposal. Dune establishes the sense of awe and scale in its opening minutes, embodying Herbert’s text in equally intricate sound and visual design. 

Villeneuve’s film makes the most of its budget to throw literalism out the window. And good riddance to it. The opening moment — a Zendaya voiceover of some brief, vague mystical space platitude — would be positively trite coming from an 13-inch laptop. Issuing in bone-shaking, bass-boosted glory from the darkness of a massive onscreen abyss, it’s considerably more persuasive.

Replacing Paul’s extensive internal monologue with gorgeous, evocative sensory elements makes the parable fun, rather than unbearable. Two and a half hours of Timothee Chalamet monologuing about the struggles of having a rich dad would be a very different film.

Or would it?

Chalamet is ideal for this parable partly because he’s playing himself. Alongside the familiar ‘space fascist’, ‘space peasant’, and ‘space emperor’ archetypes, T-Chala puts the ‘space softboi’ in the sci-fi pantheon: the latest manifestation of the sensitive white boy, taking his cues from Holden Caulfield as much as King Arthur.

The casting is another dimension of Villeneuve’s approach to cinema as the vehicle of modern myth. Chalamet aside, the ensemble of familiar actors mix genres and references both adeptly and unpretentiously. The ridiculously insistence on swordfighting, and the total absence of guns- in a world with planet-sized spaceships — becomes even more Pirates of the Carribbean-flavored with Stellan Skarsgard as a moist, white otherworldly being. Dave Bautista and Jason Momoa, meanwhile, are lifted straight from the superhero stable and its attendant lore (doubly so in ex-WWE star Bautista’s case). 

Dune conveys the abstracted physical awe — the awareness of one’s personal insignificance — in Herbert’s 1965 text in a medium that is painfully relevant to the 2020s and the issues that it’s meant to comment on. Herbert’s concern with climate change, oil wars in the Middle East, and fraught white identity might have been ‘prescient’ in 1965; but he probably didn’t predict that cinemas would become one of the most potent symbols of the social effects of a pandemic. Hopefully they’re still around when Dune Part 2 comes out.