Two seasons in and with a third already in the works, I’m still not sure if I actually like The Mandalorian. It’s a slow-moving series that I find to be generally lacking in direction or purpose, and Baby Yoda’s cuteness factor is starting to wear off, but it has its moments of greatness. And one of those moments was the season two finale post-credits stinger that unexpectedly set up a spinoff for the season’s biggest guest star, a legendary villainous bounty hunter long believed dead, who rose from the sands of Tatooine with a new lease on life.
Fennec Shand.
Fennec Shand | denofgeek.com
And Boba Fett. Okay, so technically, the spinoff series is actually called The Book Of Boba Fett, and technically yes, he’s the star and Fennec Shand is his costar…but Fennec Shand is played by one of my long-time idols, Ming-Na Wen; the unmistakable voice behind the original Mulan and the incredible physical performance behind Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D.‘s Melinda May. I am thrilled to see her in another leading role now that Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. has wrapped up its seven-season run, and the first trailer for The Book Of Boba Fett indicates that she and Temuera Morrison’s Fett will share almost equal screentime.
Both actors are honestly phenomenal and although I’m a Fennec Shand stan first and foremost, I think Morrison is doing a great job of bringing depth and nuance to a character that for the longest time was a one-dimensional baddie who happened to have a really cool spaceship. We’re finally being given a good look at the man behind Boba Fett’s iconic helmet, and he’s profound, insightful, deeply philosophical, and still just as awesome as ever. Probably more awesome now, in fact, because The Mandalorian made it canon that he fought his way out of the Sarlacc pit after the events of Return Of The Jedi.
In the aftermath of Boba Fett and Fennec Shand storming Jabba the Hutt’s old palace and unceremoniously disposing of his gelatinous right-hand man Bib Fortuna, The Book Of Boba Fett picks up with the duo as they attempt to build a new criminal enterprise out of the ruins of what Jabba left behind. Every mercenary, bounty hunter, warlord, and villain in the galaxy wants a piece of the profit, and you know what that means: palace intrigue, one of my favorite tropes in fantasy and sci-fi. The trailer introduces us to a host of new characters, each shadier and more suspicious than the last, who will all be vying for a place in Boba Fett’s good graces.
These characters are also, for the most part, aliens – a nice change of pace from the human-centric stories found in other Star Wars properties. I’m not sure if this is an unpopular opinion or if I’m just weird, but the arachnid B’omarr monks are pretty high on my list of coolest character designs of all time, so I want to give a round of applause to the trailer editors who chose to open this trailer with a sequence of a B’omarr monk scurrying across the desert on business of its own. I want the B’omarr monks to be important in this show, but even if they just skitter by in the background every now and again I’ll be happy.
The Book Of Boba Fett | gameinformer.com
That being said, if The Mandalorian found a way to squeeze in cameos from Bo-Katan, Ahsoka Tano, Luke Skywalker, and Boba Fett himself, then I can’t imagine The Book Of Boba Fett will feature any fewer guest appearances. I’m thinking Bossk, IG-88B, Cad Bane, Hondo Ohnaka, Figrin D’an and the Modal Nodes, and any number of characters who showed up for all of two seconds in the Mos Eisley cantina and yet somehow have thirty pages of elaborate semi-canonical backstory. If Emilia Clarke isn’t too busy with Secret Invasion and other projects, I’d love to know what crime boss Qi’ra has been up to ever since the events of Solo. Basically, I just want a smorgasbord of bad guys.
Hey, what can I say; there’s a reason Jabba’s palace was (and, based on the sound I made when I saw it onscreen again in The Mandalorian, still is) my favorite location in Star Wars. I love villains, especially well-designed alien villains. Seeing them all together under one roof, scheming and plotting and being fabulously evil, is extremely my jam. I can’t excuse the cringeworthy musical number that George Lucas inserted into the re-release of Return Of The Jedi, but it doesn’t detract from my enjoyment of the Jabba’s palace sequence nearly as much as it probably should.
Boba Fett, for his part, claims that he wants to lead with respect rather than fear. Will his palace still be full of corruption, bribery, backstabbing, and deceit? Undoubtedly. But I imagine Disney would prefer if the star of one of their most hotly-anticipated series’ wasn’t willingly engaging in such immoral activities, at the very least not without balancing out his crimes with some selfless or noble deeds, and anyway it makes sense that Boba Fett has grown as a person since his brush with death, so I think we can all excuse it. He’s still morally gray, and he’s got Fennec Shand to do his really dirty work for him.
Jabba’s Palace | starwars.com
This kind of storytelling, somewhat evocative of Game Of Thrones (the early seasons at least) with its layers upon layers of treachery and complex webs of intrigue, is something truly different for Star Wars. The franchise continually finds new ways to expand across multiple genres and mediums, and that’s what keeps it ahead of the competition. We saw it with Star Wars: Visions, and I think we’re seeing it again with The Book Of Boba Fett. This trailer is brief, but it’s giving me all the vibes I want from a series that takes place in my favorite Star Wars location and combines some of my favorite Star Wars characters. December 29th can’t come soon enough!
Let’s get this out of the way upfront: the first trailer for Netflix’s upcoming live-action reimagining of the classic 1998 anime Cowboy Bebop is wildly entertaining regardless of whether or not you’ve watched the original series. If I knew nothing about the plot beyond what the trailer told me, I’d still likely feel compelled to check this out based solely on the colorful visuals, cool blend of sleek science-fiction and gritty film-noir aesthetics, zany character designs, and the soaring jazz score by Yoko Kanno. But as good as Cowboy Bebop looks, I probably wouldn’t have reviewed the trailer had I not been able to finish binge-watching the original anime just the night before last.
Spike Spiegel, Jet Black, and Faye Valentine | comingsoon.net
Most of the time, if I’m not already ingrained in the fandom of any particular franchise I choose to cover, I’ll do my best to research that franchise’s lore and mythology before writing about it. To cite an example off the top of my head, I’ve never read The Witcher stories nor played the games, but I’ve written extensively about material from both while covering the Netflix adaptation. But in the case of Cowboy Bebop, I felt very strongly that I needed to absorb the anime’s themes before I could properly pass judgment on its successor.
That’s not to say that watching the original anime is essential to understanding or appreciating the Netflix series (although…well, more on that in a moment), but I’m glad I did. Because for all its witty humor and cute corgis, the original Cowboy Bebop is also a deeply melancholy series that examines how we can all too easily become defined by the events of our past, or alternatively choose to find the strength within ourselves to define our future. The anime builds off that core concept to explore a wide spectrum of human responses to trauma, regret, and the consequences of our own actions, through a cast of four main characters who are all stuck at pivotal points in their lives.
That was something I started to become aware of by the end of the first episode, and it drove me to finish the anime just in time for the release of this trailer, so that I could come into this review knowing what Cowboy Bebop is at its core and what Netflix’s reimagining has to be, and not just discussing the various references to the original series that I might have been able to catch through research. And in the process, I’ve discovered a great new show, and become invested in the anime’s vibrant world and complex characters (especially Faye Valentine – I knew I was going to love Faye Valentine the moment she walked onscreen, but I love Faye Valentine).
And yes, of course I know that I’m over two decades late to the party for the original Cowboy Bebop, but all of us – those who’ve been fans since 1998, and those who’ve joined the fandom in the years since – will get to enjoy Netflix’s reimagining of the anime together. Now you may have noticed by this point that I’ve used the word “reimagining” a lot to describe this live-action iteration of Cowboy Bebop, and that’s because details are still kind of hazy about what Netflix intends for this to be. Is it a remake? Some kind of retelling? A total reboot?
Spike Spiegel | gizmodo.com.au
None of those options seem particularly appealing, which is why I’m using the word “reimagining” out of a hope that Netflix’s series aspires at least to be more than a carbon-copy of the original anime. In a world – or rather an entire solar system – as diverse and expansive as that in which the largely stand-alone stories of Cowboy Bebop take place, there’s really no excuse for the Netflix series not to try and do its own thing. And yet this trailer indicates that Netflix will be recreating numerous iconic scenes, even entire episodes and story arcs, from the anime.
In that spirit, it seems that Netflix has aimed for as strict an adherence to the original character designs of Cowboy Bebop as live-action will allow. There’s spot-on casting, and then there’s John Cho as Spike Spiegel. He’s maybe slightly older than how I envisioned Spike in the anime, but Cho has all of Spike’s physicality, and he’s rocking the bounty hunter’s snazzy blue suit. Spike is an enigmatic figure who lingers in the galaxy searching for purpose but remains tethered to his tragic past by love and anger, and I can’t wait to see what Cho does with a quiet and pensive character like that.
If you’re getting some Mandalorian vibes from Spike Spiegel and the space western setting of the series in general, well, so is Netflix. And I think it’s pretty obvious why this trailer and other promotional material for the series has massively played up the importance of Spike’s sidekick Ein, an extremely intelligent corgi who is absolutely going to be Cowboy Bebop‘s answer to Baby Yoda. The fact that Baby Yoda’s popularity was a complete shock to everyone, including Disney, is something that other studios seem to have forgotten in their rush to find and subsequently overpromote their own adorable nonverbal sidekick characters.
I’m tempted to draw a similar link between the reinvention of Faye Valentine as a rough-and-tumble brawler with a soft spot for dogs and The Mandalorian‘s Cara Dune, although I truly hope Daniella Pineda isn’t channeling any part of Gina Carano’s unmemorable performance into her portrayal of Valentine, my favorite character in the original Cowboy Bebop crew. Valentine is a great bounty hunter, but it’s the daily battle she wages inside her head with the remnants of the person she used to be that really had me rooting for her to succeed. So much of her story hinges on the quiet moments when she’s confronting her past, and I hope that Pineda can sell those scenes as well as her action sequences.
Sadly, the trailer doesn’t give us so much as a glimpse of my second-favorite Cowboy Bebop character, Radical Edward, the energetic young hacker who joins the team almost on a whim and lights up the whole show with their vivacious personality. But we do see plenty of Mustafa Shakir as Jet Black, looking very dapper in what are presumably flashbacks to his early days as a police officer on Ganymede before swapping out his suit and fedora for the more practical gear of a bounty hunter. Jet is the only member of the Bebop team who actively longs to return to his old way of life, and the way that the anime slowly disabuses him of that nostalgia is heart-wrenching to watch.
Cowboy Bebop | engadget.com
But personally, I hope that the Netflix series has new ideas for how to evolve the characters. They’re clearly sticking with the core elements of Spike’s backstory, as evidenced by the repeated appearances of Spike’s arch-nemesis Vicious in the trailer, but if Netflix plans for Cowboy Bebop to be a long-running series with franchise potential I assume that either the narrative won’t be structured exclusively around Spike and Vicious’ long-running conflict, or the showrunners have an idea for how to send their storyline down a different route than the original anime, which ended conclusively after just twenty-six episodes.
Speaking solely for myself here, I know that what Idon’twant from this series is something that feels beholden to the anime by only revisiting areas we’ve already seen and retelling stories we already know, instead of honoring the adventurous spirit of the original series by exploring beyond its boundaries. This trailer is full of so much energy and potential, I’d hate to see that go to waste.
Amazon Prime’s The Lord Of The Rings is now slightly less than a year away from release, and we still know shockingly little about the most epic (or at the very least expensive) streaming series ever made. Every tidbit of new information we learn seems to point in a different direction, leading fans on wild goose chases as we try to piece together when the series is set in the sprawling chronology of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, how much time and space it will cover over a reported span of five seasons, and whom exactly it will follow.
Isildur | looper.com
If you’ve been following my coverage of The Lord Of The Rings for a while, you might know the basics, but here’s a refresher before we get to the latest round of rumors. First of all, despite the fact that it’s still being referred to as The Lord Of The Rings, Amazon’s series is a prequel, not an adaptation of Tolkien’s novel or a remake of Jackson’s trilogy. Up until two days ago, our only certainty was that the series would take place sometime in the fabled Second Age of Middle-earth – which doesn’t exactly narrow it down much, seeing as the Second Age is a period of three-thousand, four-hundred and forty-one years.
Only adding to the confusion, Amazon’s first officially released image from The Lord Of The Rings – purportedly a stunning screenshot from the first episode – depicts a scene from long before the Second Age began, during the Years of the Trees; exponentially widening the scope of the tale.
But perhaps we may finally be able to zero in on a specific character, and a tangible timeframe. New reporting from Fellowship Of Fans suggests that one of The Lord Of The Rings‘ central protagonists, from episode three onwards (presumably to the end of the show), will be Isildur, a Númenórean prince who became the first king of Gondor and played a major role in setting up the events of The Lord Of The Rings proper, when he cut the One Ring from the dark lord Sauron’s hand. Additionally, Redanian Intelligence reports that Maxim Baldry – who was among the first actors rumored to be cast – will portray Isildur.
This won’t be Isildur’s first time appearing onscreen. Both Peter Jackson and Ralph Bakshi’s adaptations of The Lord Of The Rings open with memorable depictions of Isildur defeating Sauron at the end of the Second Age and of Isildur’s own death at the dawn of the Third Age when the One Ring slipped from his finger and betrayed him to the orcs. As far as Second Age characters go, he’s one of the few that casual fans of the franchise might recognize, so it’s not entirely surprising that Amazon would want to establish him early on in the show. But his inclusion in the very first season of Amazon’s series comes as a bit of a surprise.
Isildur was born in Second Age (S.A.) 3209, only two-hundred and thirty-two years before he defeated Sauron in the War of the Last Alliance which concluded the Second Age. Because of his Númenórean heritage, Isildur was extremely long-lived by human standards (he was killed at the age of two-hundred and thirty-four), but his entire lifespan is only a small fraction of the Second Age. By the time he was born, the heyday of the Elves in Middle-earth had ended, the Rings of Power had been forged, the kingdom of Eregion had been sacked and Khazad-dûm had closed its doors to the outside, while Sauron was already wielding the One Ring.
In both Jackson and Bakshi’s adaptations, this nuance is largely lost because the entire Second Age is reduced to just two pivotal events in the history of the One Ring – the forging of the Rings of Power between S.A. 1500 and S.A. 1600, and the War of the Last Alliance in S.A. 3441. Canonically there’s a gap of almost two-thousand years in between these events, but in the films it’s implied that they happen pretty much back-to-back. And now that we have two reliable outlets reporting that Isildur is a protagonist of Amazon’s The Lord Of The Rings, I think we can expect to see the timeline of the Second Age similarly tailored to fit the story Amazon is telling.
Some people have come to the conclusion that Amazon is skipping over the forging of the Rings entirely, jumping straight to the end of the Second Age. But I feel very strongly that that’s not the case, and there’s evidence to support my argument. Think back to the very first map of Middle-earth that Amazon released to promote the series – the map that unmistakably showed the kingdom of Eregion and its capital of Ost-in-Edhil still standing. By Isildur’s time, Eregion had been in ruins for over a thousand years. That same map doesn’t depict Barad-dûr at all, though the fortress was completed in S.A. 1600.
Take a look at Amazon’s official synopsis for The Lord Of The Rings, too. Though it’s fairly vague, there’s one significant line that doesn’t support the theory that Amazon’s series takes place after the forging of the Rings. “Beginning in a time of relative peace, the series follows an ensemble cast of characters, both familiar and new, as they confront the long-feared re-emergence of evil to Middle-earth.” If the series were truly set after the forging at the end of the Second Age, Sauron would already have been at war with the Elves and with the Númenórean empire for centuries.
Maxim Baldry | primetimer.com
So no, I don’t think that Amazon is skipping over the forging of the Rings, arguably the single-most significant event in the Second Age. My personal belief is that Amazon will simply move the forging backwards to nearer the end of the Second Age, to around the same point at which Isildur first enters the histories of Middle-earth as a young prince of Númenor navigating an increasingly complex political crisis in the royal court. It would require a lot of reshuffling, but that way a lot of events that canonically took place thousands of years apart will now occur almost simultaneously.
There are several benefits to this approach. It would remove the need for potentially jarring time-jumps between seasons to cover all of the events of the Second Age. We’d have more time to get to know our core group of human protagonists and develop a connection with them, without constantly having to worry that by the next season they’ll be dead and we’ll have moved on to their great-grandchildren. And it makes sense to focus exclusively on what Tolkien wrote about the Second Age, so that the writers don’t have to fall back on entirely original plotlines to fill that three-thousand year period.
On the flip-side, I think there’s something to be said for why the use of time-jumps and a constantly rotating cast could have helped reinforce the primary themes of the Second Age – mainly the growing restlessness amongst humans as they become more and more fearful of their own mortality and begin searching for ways to cheat death. If the showrunners could have made us feel some of the same envy and resentment of the immortal Elves that emboldened the Númenóreans to try and wrest the secret of deathlessness from the land of the gods, that would have been an extraordinary feat.
And I can understand why many fans might feel upset that the timeline is again being tampered with dramatically – not to the same extent of Bakshi and Jackson basically taking the two events they needed and ignoring the rest of the Second Age entirely, but still seemingly prioritizing those same two events. This isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker for me, because I think it was always clear that there were going to be adjustments to the timeline one way or another simply because Tolkien himself left behind so many versions of the timeline in which there are countless slight variations, but I get where it might be for some.
As for the news that Maxim Baldry is potentially our Isildur – that definitely makes sense. I was rather hoping he’d be revealed to be playing one of the “fair forms” that Sauron took during the Second Age, but he has the build and beautiful flowing hair of a Númenórean prince, and though my only experience with his acting was through a small role in the last season of Doctor Who, I think he could certainly convey Isildur’s best qualities, his valor and selflessness, which the One Ring swiftly manipulated.
Isildur’s appearance strongly suggests that several other members of his family will also show up in the first season – including his father Elendil and younger brother Anárion, who both died during the War of the Last Alliance; his grandfather Amandil, who died at sea on an ill-fated mission to beseech the gods on Númenor’s behalf; and of course his more distant relatives, Ar-Pharazôn and Tar-Míriel, who became the last king and queen of Númenor and perished in the kingdom’s tumultuous downfall. Isildur’s family weren’t the luckiest folks in Middle-earth.
By the end of the Second Age, Isildur, his sons, and his nephew, were the last remnants of the Númenórean royal family in Middle-earth. Three of Isildur’s sons were killed alongside him during the Battle of the Gladden Fields at the start of the Third Age, leaving only the youngest, Valandil, alive. Valandil inherited the kingdom of Arnor from his grandfather Elendil, while Isildur’s nephew Meneldil became king of Gondor. But while Arnor would fall during the Third Age, Valandil’s descendants would include Aragorn – who re-established both kingdoms and reunited them under his rule.
Gondor | lotr.fandom.com
All of this makes Isildur a crucial figure in Middle-earth’s history, and a worthy protagonist for Amazon’s The Lord Of The Rings to follow across several seasons. However Amazon chooses to solve the timeline problems that they’ll be creating for themselves, I hope that they’re handled carefully. Basically, what I’m saying is that if there’s anything in this series that’s even remotely evocative of Thranduil telling Legolas in The Battle Of The Five Armies to seek out the ranger Aragorn when he was canonically only ten years old, Amazon will not hear the end of it from me.
But what are your feelings on this decision? Share your own thoughts, theories, and opinions, in the comments below!
Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune is often described as the science-fiction equivalent to J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy The Lord Of The Rings – not only because both works are immense, richly detailed, and lore-heavy, but because both are widely regarded as having redefined the boundaries of their respective genres and left an indelible influence on future works in those genres. We could spend all day arguing about whether Dune merely repackaged the ideas and themes of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation into something more friendly to the 1960’s counterculture movement, but that’s beside the point because I’m not here to review the book.
Paul Atreides and Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam | npr.org
This weekend, director Denis Villeneuve’s long-awaited adaptation of Dune finally hit screens both big and small, introducing Herbert’s story to the world at large – and it’s a momentous occasion for fans who long thought the novel to be “unfilmable”. The same word was used of The Lord Of The Rings once upon a time, and both novels were unsuccessfully adapted only a few years apart from each other (1978 for Ralph Bakshi’s animated The Lord Of The Rings, and 1984 for David Lynch’s bizarre Dune), lending credence to the theory that both stories were too vast and intricate and reliant on still-rudimentary CGI to work onscreen.
But even though Peter Jackson came along and proved that The Lord Of The Rings could work when divided up into a trilogy of monumental proportions, it’s taken twenty more years for Dune to enjoy the same treatment. Denis Villeneuve’s film only covers the first half of Herbert’s original novel, a bold but risky choice given that Villeneuve isn’t filming his entire saga simultaneously, the way Jackson did. Granted, I can’t imagine that Warner Brothers will pass up the opportunity to try and shape Dune into a sci-fi franchise rivaling Disney’s Star Wars, and this is the same company that is recklessly plowing forward with the Fantastic Beasts franchise despite the mounting evidence that no one cares, but Dune is a totally different beast.
This first section of the story has the daunting task of establishing Herbert’s sprawling ensemble cast of characters, the world of Arrakis, and the complex current geopolitical crisis in which two rival families find themselves entangled. If there’s any critical flaw in the film’s structure, it’s that the whole experience is a bit like watching people set up a board-game while you impatiently wait to play – but just as you sit down to start the game, the movie ends. Dune: Part One is not a stand-alone story. I can watch any of the films in The Lord Of The Rings trilogy and be thoroughly satisfied by the journey, but Dune: Part One has no self-contained thematic or emotional through-line of its own.
Theoretically, I suppose it’s a smart business move. Dune: Part One not only demands a sequel, but requires one. And regardless, it deserves one. Denis Villeneuve has spared no effort in ensuring that Herbert’s world feels like a fully realized location, and now that the board is set and the pieces are in motion, the game is free to unfold across a canvas rich with carefully considered detail and texture. And make no mistake, there’s already plenty of spectacular action and interpersonal drama in Dune: Part One – Villeneuve is padding out the first half of the book, but he’s doing so with as much consideration for what audiences want from a blockbuster as for what readers want out of the story and its extensive lore.
Dune is epic on a scale that Star Wars has only rarely reached in over forty years of dominating mainstream sci-fi. Villeneuve envisions a universe where everything is impossibly large. The unseen Emperor is a god-king; the royal houses of Atreides and Harkonnen are arranged like small armies in their rigid hierarchy of power; their palaces are the size of cities; their starships are geometric monoliths too great to be housed on land – when the fleets of House Atreides depart Caladan for Arrakis, they rise from under the ocean like continents ripping off the planet’s surface. And our protagonist, the tormented Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), is born into a societal structure where he’s expected to ascend to that level, to become a superhuman befitting of his family’s legacy.
But although Paul struggles with those expectations even back on Caladan, it’s only when he’s thrust into the harsh and unforgiving deserts of Arrakis by necessity that he finally begins to grasp how small he truly is in the grand scheme of things. Unfortunately, we don’t get to spend very long in the desert ruminating on this revelation before the movie’s over, and ironically it’s the least visually interesting environment in Dune. Deserts, even on our humble planet, are vibrant habitats, and you’d think that the deserts of alien worlds – deserts populated by giant sand-worms, no less – would provide fertile ground for more arresting visuals than what the film actually offers. As far as sci-fi deserts go, Tatooine still takes the cake with its binary sunset. Sorry.
This is partly a result of Dune‘s spartan color palette. The film is so austere that in the hands of a lesser director and cinematographer, it could easily have been rendered irredeemably dreary or monotonous – but with Villeneuve and Greig Fraser working on the film, Dune‘s bleakness serves a thematic purpose, accentuating the scars of Arrakis, a world being sucked dry of its natural resources by relentless capitalism and imperialism. Every rare flourish of color – whether it’s the vivid saffron of Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson)’s dress when she first steps foot on Arrakis, or the flickering red and blue force-fields that warriors wear as shields in battle – is a welcome relief, like the sight of water in a barren desert.
For interior sequences, Fraser expertly manipulates light and shadow to fill in the empty spaces of Dune‘s many sets, which are largely devoid of ornamentation or extravagance by choice. Again, it’s all about playing up scale and starkness – you wouldn’t want to live in this world built for titans (unless you’re a hyper-minimalist, in which case don’t let me stand in your way), but you can’t help but marvel at it. House Atreides even dresses severely, with costume designers Jacqueline West and Bob Morgan deserving a special shoutout for turning in a wide variety of sleek militarized fits that feel fashionable yet forbidding. They are the outward face of ruthless, efficient, terrifying power.
Gurney Halleck and Paul Atreides | cnet.com
True power, however, lies in the hands of the Bene Gesserit, a cult of psychic sorceresses who operate behind closed doors, subtly manipulating galactic politics to further their own agenda – and to mark the distinction, they wear instantly iconic all-black outfits of their own, complete with some extraordinary headdresses. Lady Jessica is a member of the Bene Gesserit, and through her Paul Atreides inherits both a killer fashion sense and a couple of other abilities and special powers. The Bene Gesserit are massively important to Dune, but they have only a handful of scenes in Part One before departing for their own HBO Max series, their appearance bookended by Hans Zimmer’s haunting theme.
Zimmer’s score is brilliant for many reasons, but it’s the completely random use of Scottish bagpipes that really stuck out to me. And I don’t mean that bagpipes are just featured on the score. No, there’s a literal bagpipe-player in this movie, set thousands of years in the future, and all I can say without spoilers is that there’s one scene where those bagpipes kick in and start playing the House Atreides theme, and if I were a hardcore Dune fan I feel like that would be my Ride of the Rohirrim moment.
But the unexpected Scottish influence on Villeneuve’s Dune is all the more bizarre when coupled with this adaptation’s erasure of the MENA (Middle Eastern and North African) and Muslim influences that exist in Frank Herbert’s original novel and inform on some level almost every aspect of his story, its themes, and its worldbuilding. How Herbert interacts with those influences in his novel is cause for frequent discussion, and how that resonates with MENA and Muslim readers is a matter of personal opinion, but that those influences exist is indisputable. Villeneuve’s adaptation makes little effort to engage with those influences beyond a surface-level, which is disappointingly predictable given that no MENA and Muslim writers worked on the film.
Even in front of the camera, MENA people are relegated to background roles on Villeneuve’s Arrakis, while their cultures and languages are used to embellish the film’s aesthetic and exposition-heavy dialogue. There are a few prominent roles for actors of color, including Sharon Duncan-Brewster as the intrepid ecologist Liet Kynes and Chang Chen as House Atreides’ personal physician Wellington Yueh, but their presence doesn’t make up for the absence of MENA talent onscreen.
So who is onscreen? Timothée Chalamet is mesmerizing as Paul Atreides, crafting a character here who is equal parts as boyish and charming as Luke Skywalker, imbued with the ethereal elegance of Frodo Baggins, and wracked by an inner darkness that is all his own to bear. Interestingly, neither Mark Hamill nor Elijah Wood was a particularly seasoned actor when they took on the defining roles of their careers, but Chalamet is already at a point where he’s capable of bringing out all of the nuance and fiery emotion required from his Paul with delicate skill and precision. Chalamet and Ferguson make for a convincing mother-son duo who are at their most formidable when bouncing off each other.
Other highlights include Oscar Isaac as Duke Leto Atreides, who can’t help but heat up the whole movie with his natural warmth and charisma, and that’s even before he gets fully nude (though to be honest in the rigid pose and harsh lighting that the scene requires, his body has a certain El Greco quality that emphasizes Isaac’s sinews over his sexuality). Jason Momoa’s bearish build and easygoing attitude makes him a comfortable fit for the character of Duncan Idaho, although some of his line-readings feel stiff. Charlotte Rampling is a powerhouse as the enigmatic Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam. And David Dastmalchian makes a strong impression in the small role of Piter de Vries, a human computer programmed with a strain of Harkonnen cruelty.
In an ensemble cast this large, there’s always going to be one or two actors who aren’t given space to exercise their talents to the fullest, and in Dune: Part One sadly that’s Josh Brolin. His Gurney Halleck is largely a blank slate throughout the film, and Brolin doesn’t bring much personality or vigor to the role, which was previously filled by Sir Patrick Stewart in the 1984 adaptation. Stellan Skarsgård, meanwhile, is unable to elevate the villainous character of Baron Vladimir Harkonnen above a kind of grotesque caricature, which robs the incomplete story of a particularly compelling antagonist; the Baron’s nephew Beast Rabban, played by Dave Bautista, is a generic muscly henchman.
And despite being hyped up in all of the marketing for this film as Chalamet’s costar, Zendaya is hardly in Dune: Part One at all. Her role as the Fremen warrior Chani is mostly stitched together from several scattered dream sequences, and an opening voiceover in which she concisely lays out the troubled history of Arrakis, making her appearance here little more than a glorified cameo. Going forward, Zendaya will have plenty of opportunities to shape Chani into a fully three-dimensional character onscreen, but she’s only just getting started.
Chani | thecrimson.com
And so is our journey as fans. Dune: Part One is only a sample of what Frank Herbert’s world has to offer. Like the back-cover blurb on a novel, it exists to entice you into the story with a lot of tantalizing hints, partly sketched-out ideas, and bold promises, all designed to leave the viewer urgently wanting more, but it’s not a satisfying stand-alone story of its own. And when Villeneuve’s Dune saga is finally complete and available to be viewed in its totality, whether or not it’s the masterpiece of sci-fi cinema that I believe it can be, I’m not sure yet if anyone will choose to watch Part One separately from the others, or that it will be beloved purely on its own merits. Everything there is to love about this movie (and make no mistake, there’s a lot) is stuff that I hope to see expanded upon or even improved upon in the sequels, whenever they come.
