From Left: Courtesy of John Shearer/Getty Images; Courtesy of Vera Anderson/Getty Images
Just over a year ago, director Denis Villeneuve revived a dusty, beloved sci-fi favorite—Blade Runner—with decidedly mixed results. Blade Runner 2049 was visually stunning with a slow-burning plot that wasn’t a huge hit with general audiences. But the amount of goodwill he’s built up in the broader filmmaking community with meaty art-house dramas like Prisoners, Enemy, and Sicario, as well as the credit he earned with genre fans for his meditative take on alien invasions in Arrival, meant that the news of Villeneuve tackling Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi saga Dune was met with cautious optimism. But every casting decision Villeneuve has made since has ratcheted that caution up to a fever pitch of excitement. The latest announcement that Internet darling and all-around charm factory, Oscar Isaac, could be taking on a key role has sent expectations heavenward.
Variety reports that Isaac would play Duke Leto I Atreides, the father of the film’s protagonist, Paul Atreides, who will be played by another social-media favorite: Timothée Chalamet. The rest of the cast is peppered with faces familiar to genre and art-house fans alike, including Mission Impossible star Rebecca Ferguson as Paul’s mother Jessica, Stellan Skarsgård as the scheming Baron Harkonnen, Dave Bautista as his brutish nephew Glossu Rabban, and Charlotte Rampling as the imperious Reverend Mother Mohiam.
If Isaac takes the role, he will be the latest in a line of actors who have taken on the part: William Hurt played it for TV, Jürgen Prochnow starred in the bumpy 1984 David Lynch film, and David Carradine—in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s doomed 1970s production that would never see the light of day. Dune has proven a famously thorny book series to adapt. The retro-futuristic story of the noble Atreides family, the feudal interstellar Padishah Empire, sandworms, and the pursuit of an invaluable spice, called Melange, spans six books written by Frank Herbert himself and an even more expansive series co-authored by his son, Brian. Though it has stymied even the endlessly inventive mind of David Lynch, Dune’s evocative blend of sci-fi, fantasy, Middle Eastern promises, and mysticism has proved irresistible territory for storytellers hoping to put an art-house twist on genre storytelling.
The most compelling examination of why Dune is such an alluring property for unorthodox storytellers is the 2013 documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune which dives into the attempt to tell the Atreides mythology as a10–14 hour fever dream of an adaptation roping in prog-rock from the likes Pink Floyd, and a wild cast that ranged from surreal artist Salvador Dalí to Rolling Stones front man Mick Jagger. Would his project have been good? Hard to say. But it would have been gloriously ambitious. Four artists who were drafted for the film—H. R. Giger, Chris Foss, Jean Giraud, Dan O’Bannon—re-united later in the 70s to make the sci-fi classic Alien. In other words, Dune presents the potential for pairing high-flown artistic filmmaking with genre storytelling in a way the director of something like Arrival or Blade Runner 2049 might find irresistible.
Villeneuve has a definitive advantage over past filmmakers, in that the culture, broadly, is much more accepting of genre storytelling than it was when either Jodorowsky or Lynch were making their films, or the story was relegated to the niche, lower-budget realm of pre–peak TV SyFy (back when it was still called the “Sci-Fi Channel”). Both of the previous directors who attempted to adapt Herbert’s work encountered narrow-minded pushback from the studios writing their checks. Lynch has even gone so far as to remove his name from some cuts of the film, refusing to take ownership of a final product that was butchered by producers.
However, in the intervening years, not only has Star Wars (made after Jodorowsky but before Lynch) readied the general public for intergalactic warfare and desert planets, but the rise of Game of Thrones has taught modern audiences patience when it comes to the intergenerational struggles and betrayals among noble Houses like the Atreides. Hard to imagine Villeneuve’s overlords at Legendary Entertainment—the genre-friendly home of Pacific Rim and Jurassic World—being afraid of the director really going for it when it comes to the weird and wonderful world of Arrakis.
But where Villeneuve may truly have hit gold is in the strategy to split Herbert’s lengthy novel into two feature-length films. If Jodorowsky’s 14-hour proposal was much too long and Lynch’s butchered endeavor too short, then Villeneuve’s two-parter could be just right.
This story was originally published by Vanity Fair
via USAHint.com
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