Movie adaptations of novels are notoriously tricky, but Dune’s strangeness makes it especially difficult to translate to screen. The novel was published in 1965, and since then two full-length movies have been successfully produced: David Lynch’s Dune (1984) and Denis Villeneuve's Dune: Part One (2021). Lynch’s Dune was a box-office bomb, and he publicly disowned the film; however, it has gained some status as a cult classic, full of outlandish costumes, voiceovers, and character choices. Villeneuve's recent adaptation had much more success financially and among critics, and Dune: Part Two is currently set for a 2023 release.
Dune’s rapidly changing perspectives, dense vocabulary, and preoccupation with philosophical and ethical concepts make for a strange movie. Lynch’s 1984 adaptation tries to tackle this using frequent voiceovers, carrying the numerous internal monologues in Dune across forms. For example, after the loss of his father, Paul (Kyle MacLachlan) stares into the distance as his voiceover says, “Where are my feelings?”—a somewhat comedic translation of a complicated scene in the novel. Villeneuve attempts nothing like that, instead using more conventional cinematic approaches, losing the form of Dune in an effort to faithfully present its content. We’ll look more at Villeneuve's adaptation here, examining the small and large changes made to tell the same story.
Structurally, the novel is divided into three parts, but there will be 2 Dune movies—this means that the climax of Dune: Part One is Paul (Timothée Chalamet) fighting Jamis (Babs Olusanmokun), rather than Paul and Jessica’s escape from the fall of House Atreides. Paul’s fight with Jamis is a relatively minor event in the novel, taking place partway through Part 2. Making that fight the climax emphasizes Paul’s first time killing someone one-on-one, which might highlight Jessica’s worry that Paul could become a killer.
The screen loses some details from the novel, but it also allows for some more obvious visual imagery that might not stick out in text. For example, there are numerous shots of Paul’s hands—after the gom jabbar, dipped into water, dipped into sand. Paul’s hand is visually used to communicate his interest and his connection to his environment. The visual imagery also makes the fact this is sci-fi more obvious. Ornithopters aren’t described in detail anywhere in Dune—they’re just presented as a given—but they have to be shown in movies. Same with shields, lasguns, and Guild ships. The technological side of Dune has to take a bigger visual part in a cinematic adaptation.
Some small changes made for the movie simply make sense. There aren’t numerous scenes in a row in a single training room, because that would be boring. Paul is older in the film, and he hides things from Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), unlike in the book, where he willingly describes his dreams and feelings to his mother—slightly odd for an angsty young man. (Lady Jessica isn’t referred to as a “concubine” in the movie, either.) The Fremen have blue irises with white sclera, not the blue-on-blue eyes of the novel, which would probably make acting a little bit harder for Chani (Zendaya) and Stilgar (Javier Bardem). Chani delivers the opening lines about Arrakis, rather than the Princess Irulan, who opens both the novel and Lynch’s adaptation.
Larger changes were made as well. Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård) is creepy, but he isn’t explicitly shown as a murdering pedophile rapist (some of this is shown in Lynch’s adaptation). Feyd-Rautha doesn’t make an appearance at all, which seems to mean that Paul will have a showdown with the Baron, not his nephew, at the end of Dune: Part Two. Liet-Kynes (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) is a black woman, not a half-Fremen, half-outworlder man; she is swallowed by a sandworm with Sardaukar—certainly a better cinematic choice than having her slowly hallucinate in a desert. The decision to make Liet-Kynes a woman changes nothing about the narrative, and it indicates a heartening change in literature and cinema to present diversity. However, the casting choice does change the white-savior aspects of Dune—in the novel, Liet-Kynes’s father and Paul are both men from different planets who come to a new place, save the strange native people, and become a messiah among them. The afterword to Dune explicitly draws parallels between Paul and Lawrence of Arabia, a British citizen who led Arab forces in a desert revolt. Making Liet-Kynes a woman of color does change this element. We can still critique Paul as a “white savior”–type hero, but Kynes’s connection to that “savior outsider” legacy is lost.
Movie adaptations are complex, and Dune is an almost-impossible text to adapt (even into a study guide). Novels have their strengths, and movies have others; in looking at them both together, a discerning audience member can find new avenues of entry into the dense concepts Frank Herbert set out to explore.
