Long story short: it’s actually good.
Dune by Frank Hebert is a book that I purchased in the summer of 2019, got 185 pages in, then put down for over two years. Not even the allure of Timothee Chalamet and Zendaya could make me pick it back up. It wasn’t until I volunteered myself to write this very post that I decided (had to) finish Dune (the book) to enjoy Dune (the movie). I bought tickets to see Dune in IMAX 3 days later, in order to give myself a hard deadline.
It seems I had given myself an impossible task. A book that I hadn’t picked up in 2 years (it was legitimately collecting dust on my shelf) needed to be finished in 3 days before I saw the film. But the craziest thing happened when I picked it up to keep reading (I started on page 185, don’t judge me), I could not put this book down. I had somehow passed the parts that were dryer than the actual planet of Arrakis, and reached plot!
I finished the whole thing in a matter of hours. How? I’m still not sure. I do know that, even though this book was published in 1965, the themes have only persisted for decades. It’s about the politics of humanity, the morality of choice, dangers of technology, destruction of the climate, etc. It has everything. It starts excruciatingly slow, very similar to the movie which has been explicitly branded as a “Part 1.”
I find that in some sci-fi film adaptations, there is a lot of information lost between the page and the screen, but Denis Villeneuve and company kept to the book nearly explicitly. The plot followed almost exactly through the book, things were omitted but nothing seemingly was changed. The film lacks in-depth history the books include, but regardless you get the sense from watching the film that there is a rich history behind the characters.
I think the casting of the movie was done beautifully, usually reading through a book I picture characters how I want, and if a movie casts differently than my idea I have a hard time holding both of those images in my head; however, as soon as the cast was announced they fit seamlessly into my mind of who those characters are. The score was exceptional, there are a lot of scenes that would be lackluster without the incredible music.
After finishing the book, I am really excited to see Part 2, since most of the action comes in the last 100-150 pages of the book. Even after finishing Dune (the book), I almost want to keep reading the series. Which is a far cry from how I was feeling after letting the book be continuously pushed to the back of my shelf for 2 years.
Kendal Writer
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