And 'Dune', finally, became flesh and lived among the classics

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There is an unwritten law in the cinema that says that if you are hesitating between committing suicide or drunk, try making a movie with a giant worm crawling in the sand. All who have tried have been unable to solve the dilemma.

They have been ruined, yes, but they are alive and sober.

And so on until the third and final attempt.

Denis Villeneuve

presented on Friday in Venice his long-awaited and always delayed by the pandemic version of the

Frank Herbert

classic

where the always hidden protagonists are the huge Shai-Huluds. That is, the worms that produce the spice that move the universe and that crawl through the sand. Now he's drunk. And happy. And alive, of course.

The new

'Dune'

makes what

Alejandro Jodorowski

and

David Lynch

tried before

. The first - which promised a cast with Mick Jagger, Orson Welles and David Carradine, in addition to the collaboration of the cartoonist Moebius, the sculptor HR Giger and Pink Floyd - left him in the most beautiful attempt in the history of cinema. His no-movie is now a myth. The second, directly, did not understand anything. Or, the other way around, he understood everything so precisely that he decided to transfer the apocalypse that the novel proposes to himself.

The film that came out in 1989 was, and still is, the most brilliant self-boycott the arts world has ever experienced.

Drunkenness and artistic suicide all at the same time.

Villeneuve, as he did in his rereading of '

Blade runner'

, understands that it is not about telling a story (but also) as about recreating a universe with the appearance of a trompe l'oeil so faithful to the meticulous unreality devised by Herbert that it would be said to be completely real . Not in vain, all '

Dune

'

readers

know that you have to start with the appendices, where the author details from the biology that protects his planet Arrakis to each of the twists and turns of the messianic religion that animates its inhabitants.

In other words, what matters is the ability of both literature and cinema to convert the word not so much into a metaphor as into a simple and harsh reality.

Ultimately, what we perceive as real is real.

And to that applies what is the first installment signed by the Canadian director of, probably, the many that will come. The story of the messiah Paul Atreidis (also known as Muad'Dib or Usul) played by Timothée Chalamet on the desert planet acquires on the screen the texture of the inalienable. Fantastically distant and yet so close.

Villeneuve knows of the actuality of a text that speaks of a time, ours, on the very edge of all precipices:

the ecological, the political, the economic and the identity. It is not that we are not able to intuit a meaningful future, it is that we simply begin to doubt our past. It is not that we have lost confidence in ourselves to build a better world, it is that we already distrust everything we want and it makes us what we are. We have reached a point of exhaustion where excess memory prevents us from remembering anything.

'

Dune

' was

talking about all this

when it was published in 1965 and the film in question cannot help but reflect on all this. The director considers the story of the struggle for power between the Atreides House and the Harkonen, with the inhabitants of the sandy area who attend to the name of Fremen as catalysts for everything, like

a contemporary myth narrated in a trance.

All the solutions both narrative and, let's say, technical (watch out for the brilliant solution for the shields) are correct.

The convoluted plot launched '

in media res

' (the story begins at the end of Harkonen's rule over the planet) with its innumerable procession of characters obeys the logic of a story that, in truth, wants to be cosmogony. And the staging, supported by the already ritual echo sound signed by

Hans Zimmer,

is handled with the same clarity in action and in dreams. There is no choice but to surrender to a mature and perfectly self-aware entertainment machine that places what we call '

blockbuster

' on another level.

In the presentation to the media, Villeneuve and Javier Bardem, who plays the Fremen Stilgar, spoke about the topicality of Herbert's message. At his side, he was a good part of a cast that includes Zendaya, Oscar Isaac, Rebecca Ferguson and Josh Brolin. "Environmental destruction is happening as we speak, which is a bit scary.

It is up to governments and large corporations to find the solution

to take a big step forward and change our mind about how we behave in this world," said the Spaniard. . For his part, the director could not help but add his own: "'Dune' is relevant today for warning about the danger of mixing religion and politics, about the threat of messianic figures, about the impact of colonialism ...

Definitely, every day is more current

. I think it's time to push and make changes. "

It should be added that the description of the role of large technology corporations (the Cofradía) or the specific analysis of the consequences of oligopolies in the control of basic resources complete the range of concerns. But still, and despite the ability of science fiction to pose thought experiments (as Ursula K. Le Guin says), what matters falls on the side of the ability of this new '

Dune

' to rewrite popular cinema perhaps after the pandemic. Who knows if after '

Star Wars'

or

'The Lord of the Rings' it

is the turn for

a new saga that refutes the superhero obsession once and for all.

"God made Arrakis to test the believers," reads the frontispiece of '

Dune

'.

So be it.

For now, a movie law has been disproved.

Never before has a giant worm on the sand looked more beautiful.

And '

Dune

', finally, became flesh and lived among the classics.

A scene from Dune.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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