Why Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Succeeded Where the Previous Adaptation Struggled

There is an easy way to tell the story of Dune on film. David Lynch tried in 1984, it didn’t work, Denis Villeneuve tried again in 2021, and this time everybody finally got it. Neat story. Also not a particularly fair one.

Lynch’s Dune is messy, rushed and at times almost defiantly difficult to follow. It is also full of images that have survived for nearly four decades, and it has long since found the cult audience that its original reception suggested it might never have. The problem wasn’t that Lynch lacked imagination. If anything, there may have been too much imagination fighting for room inside one film.

Frank Herbert’s novel is simply a brute of a thing to adapt. It is a coming-of-age story, a political thriller, an ecological warning, a religious epic and a study of power that spends a suspicious amount of time warning you not to trust the hero everyone else is beginning to worship.

Villeneuve’s breakthrough was not discovering a secret way to make all of that simple. He stopped trying to fit all of it into one movie.

The biggest difference is sitting in the title

Villeneuve’s film is officially called Dune, but the words that matter appear before the story begins: Part One.

David Lynch’s 1984 film attempts to travel from the fall of House Atreides through Paul’s transformation among the Fremen and toward the novel’s conclusion in a little over two hours. The result has extraordinary moments, but it often feels as though somebody is turning the pages before the film has finished reading them.

Villeneuve ends his movie roughly halfway through Herbert’s novel. That means the first film can spend time on things that are not technically plot advancement: the ritual of the Gom Jabbar, Paul’s relationship with Jessica, Leto’s unease about Arrakis, Duncan Idaho’s loyalty, the first encounter with a sandworm, the strange etiquette surrounding water.

TIME’s history of the attempts to adapt Dune gets at the fundamental problem: Herbert created a world with enormous political, religious and ecological density, and filmmakers have repeatedly had to decide how much of that density a movie can carry.

Villeneuve’s answer was wonderfully expensive and slightly mad: don’t rush.

The 2021 film doesn’t make Herbert’s world less complicated. It gives the audience enough time to become comfortable inside the complication.

Arrakis is allowed to feel enormous

Scale is one of those words used so casually in blockbuster criticism that it can stop meaning anything. Every expensive movie is supposedly “epic.” Every computer-generated army is “massive.”

Dune actually understands scale as a relationship between people and the space around them. Paul is small against the Atreides ships. The ships are small against Arrakis. The spice harvester looks huge until the sandworm arrives.

Villeneuve and cinematographer Greig Fraser repeatedly resist the temptation to make the frame busy. The desert is often frightening because there is almost nothing in it.

That restraint is very different from Lynch’s approach. The 1984 film is baroque, sweaty, grotesque and crowded with visual information. Villeneuve goes in the opposite direction: stone, shadow, sand, enormous negative space.

House Atreides gets to be a family before it becomes a tragedy

The extra room matters most with the Atreides. Oscar Isaac’s Duke Leto isn’t simply a noble father waiting for the plot to kill him. We see the weight of command on him. His conversations with Paul are brief, but they establish affection without turning Leto into a sentimental dad in space.

Rebecca Ferguson’s Jessica is even more important. She is Paul’s mother, a Bene Gesserit, Leto’s partner and a woman whose decisions have consequences she cannot entirely control. Villeneuve frequently lets Ferguson’s face carry information that the screenplay refuses to explain aloud.

Herbert can put readers inside minds. Cinema cannot do that in quite the same way without resorting to constant voice-over. Lynch famously leaned heavily on internal narration. Villeneuve instead tries to make anxiety, calculation and suspicion visible through performance, framing and silence.

Timothée Chalamet’s Paul is allowed to be unfinished

The 1984 film has to move Paul quickly. Villeneuve can leave him unfinished.

Chalamet’s Paul is observant and capable, but he is also a young man who has not yet caught up with the expectations other people are placing on him. He is frightened by his visions rather than excited by them. His relationship with destiny is less “chosen one” than “why does everyone keep telling me things I don’t want to hear?”

That matters because Dune becomes much less interesting if Paul is treated as a straightforward messiah. The seeds of Herbert’s warning about charismatic leaders are already present in Part One: Paul’s visions include violence carried out in his name.

It explains less — and somehow becomes easier to follow

Lynch’s version often explains because it has no time not to explain. Terms, factions and motives pile up. Voice-over fills gaps.

Villeneuve sometimes withholds definitions altogether. He lets the audience understand the function before learning the terminology. We see what shields do. We see why spice matters. We understand that the Bene Gesserit have frightening influence long before we could write an accurate paragraph explaining their history.

Villeneuve told Vanity Fair that the filmmakers had to approach the material as though the audience knew nothing. With Dune, that isn’t as obvious as it sounds.

The film looks expensive because it often looks physical

There is another reason Villeneuve’s version feels easier to believe: things appear to have weight.

The ornithopters don’t move like sleek superhero vehicles. They shudder. The Atreides ships seem absurdly heavy. Stillsuits look like equipment people have to wear rather than costumes designed to photograph beautifully on a poster.

The visual effects are obviously doing enormous work, but the movie rarely seems interested in showing off the effect for its own sake. The sandworm is impressive because Villeneuve delays it. We see evidence first. Sand moving. Machinery in danger. People reacting. Scale is established before spectacle arrives.

But Villeneuve’s solution creates another problem: the movie stops

For all the advantages of splitting the book, there is an obvious price. Dune does not really end.

Paul and Jessica reach the Fremen, Paul faces Jamis, Chani tells him that this is only the beginning — and then the movie takes her literally.

For some viewers, that is satisfying. For others, it feels like paying for half a story. The criticism is fair.

Villeneuve solves the compression problem by accepting an incompleteness problem. His film has room to breathe because it assumes another film will eventually finish the breath.

Villeneuve later wrote in Vanity Fair that the first film’s success meant they could make the second movie and complete the remaining half of Herbert’s novel.

So did Villeneuve finally “solve” Dune?

Not exactly.

There are things Lynch’s film does that Villeneuve’s doesn’t. It is stranger. It is more grotesque. Its Harkonnens are unforgettable, even when unforgettable isn’t necessarily the same thing as good. And Kyle MacLachlan remains an interesting Paul precisely because his interpretation belongs to such a different kind of movie.

Villeneuve didn’t correct Lynch as though somebody were fixing a faulty first draft. He had different circumstances, a different cinematic language and, crucially, permission to tell only half the novel.

Herbert’s book needs time for terminology to stop sounding like terminology. It needs enough exposure for Arrakis to become a place rather than a production design. It needs Paul to spend time being a son before becoming whatever history intends to make of him.

Villeneuve gave it that time.

And now Part Two has to justify the gamble

As of October 2023, we still don’t know whether the second half will stick the landing.

What we do know is that the first film created enough enthusiasm for Warner Bros. and Legendary to continue. Dune: Part Two has been filmed, with Villeneuve returning alongside Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem, while Austin Butler, Florence Pugh and Christopher Walken join the story.

It was originally expected in cinemas in November 2023. In August, TheWrap reported that Warner Bros. and Legendary had moved the release to March 2024 amid the Hollywood strikes.

For decades the question surrounding Dune was whether anybody could fit Frank Herbert’s novel into a movie.

Villeneuve’s answer was that perhaps they shouldn’t.

Part One succeeded because it refused to sprint toward the ending. Part Two now has to prove that taking the long road was worth it.