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He’s known for playing fanatics and murderous psychopaths. In real life, the actor loves his wife (and Brad Pitt) and cries during E.T.
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Javier Bardem Is Menacing and Thrilling in 'Dune: Part Two'—and a Soulful Teddy Bear IRL
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Dune Part Two review: Thrills sure, but not weird enough to be good
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Learning the ways of the desert … Timothée Chalamet as Paul Atreides
Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Directed by Denis Villeneuve
In cinemas from 1 March
So here’s where we’re at, in the concluding half of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune.
Cast into the wilderness of arid planet Arrakis by the invading force of House Harkonnen, young Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) learns the ways of the desert, embraces his genetic and political destiny, and becomes, in one swoop, a focus for fanaticism and (with an eye to a third film – an adaptation of author Frank Herbert’s sequel, Dune Messiah) the scourge of the universe.
From Alejandro Jodorowsky’s mid-1970s effort, which never came to fruition (but at least gave Swiss artist H.R. Giger of Alien fame his entrée into movie design), to David Lynch’s 4-hour-plus farrago, savagely edited prior to its 1984 release into something closer to 2 hours that approached (but only approached) coherence, the industry assumption has been that Dune is an epic too vast to be easily filmed. However, throw enough resources at it, goes the logic, and it will eventually crumble.
That this is precisely the wrong lesson to draw was perfectly demonstrated by John Harrison’s 2000 mini-series version for the Sci Fi Channel and its sequel, Children of Dune – both absurdly under-resourced, both satisfying stories that the fans paid attention to, even if the critics didn’t.
Now we have Villeneuve’s effort. Like his Blade Runner 2049 (which, by the way, is by far the better movie), it uses visual stimulation to hide the gaping holes in its plot. Yes, the story of Dune is epic. But it is also, in the full meaning of the word, weird.
It is about a human empire that has achieved cosmic scale, and all without the help of computers, thinking machines and conscious robots, which were overthrown long ago in some shadowy phase of the Dune universe known as the “Butlerian Jihad”.
In its rise, humanity has bred, drugged and otherwise warped individuals into becoming something very like gods; in conquering space, it teeters on the brink of attaining power over time. The drug-like “spice” mined on planet Arrakis isn’t just a rare resource over which great rivals fight, but the spiritual gateway that makes humanity, in this far future, viable in the first place.
Leave any one of these elements undeveloped (or, as here, entirely ignored) and you’re left with an awful lot of desert to fill with battles, sword play, explosions, crowd scenes and giant sandworms – and here an as-yet-unwritten rule of special effects cinematography comes into play, because I swear that the more those wrigglers cost, the sillier they get. Your ears will ring, your heart will thunder, and by morning the entire experience will have evaporated, like a long (2-hour-and-46-minute) fever dream.
As Beast Rabban, Dave Bautista outperforms the rest of the cast to a degree that is embarrassing. The Beast is a Harkonnen, an alpha predator in this grim universe, and yet Bautista is the only actor here capable of portraying fear. Javier Bardem’s desert leader Stilgar is played for laughs (but let’s face it, in the entire history of cinema, name one desert leader that hasn’t been). Chalamet stands still in front of the camera; his love interest, played by Zendaya, scowls and growls like Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz.
Dune: Part Two is an expensive ($190 million) film that has had the decency to put much of its budget in front of the camera. This makes it watchable, enjoyable and even, at times, thrilling. Making a good Dune movie requires a certain eccentricity, though. Villeneuve is, on the contrary, that deadening thing, “a safe pair of hands”.
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‘It is all but impossible life exists, and yet it is here’
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“Humans are midway in scale between subatomic particles and the observable universe.” The Milky Way galaxy.
Shutterstock/nednapa
It’s sometimes claimed that, measuring by orders of magnitude, humans are midway in scale between subatomic particles and the observable universe. (Or, to put it another way, that we fall halfway between nothing and everything.) Whether or not this claim is strictly true, it’s arresting and resonant in all sorts of ways. Each of our lives might feel like a whole universe – surpassingly important and infinite in scope – and yet from another perspective, each is utterly trivial and ephemeral. It’s an impossible paradox, this state of having both a surplus and redundancy of value, and it brings with it certain creative and moral opportunities. I’m interested in how these opportunities might be explored in fiction, how scale can defamiliarise human life, and indeed all life, reminding us of the infinitesimal nature of its expanse, and the improbability and wonder of its existence.
In each of my novels, and especially In Ascension, I have placed non-intuitive spatial and temporal perspectives next to the more mundane concerns of my characters. Telescopes and microscopes recur, as do deep time, evolution and the life cycles of parasites and viruses. Alongside this, characters are eating, walking between rooms, anxiously going over circular thoughts, worried about their families, or bored. The lens zooms in and out, from “domestic” to “alien” scenes. I’m not doing this to mock or belittle my characters, but rather to try to evoke something of that paradoxical quality in which we are both infinite and infinitesimal, equally close to something very large and very small.
I’ve always been drawn to fiction that attempts this. When scenes with very different perspectives collide, the effect can be startling, exhilarating, unforgettable. My favourite example is in Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse, which I first read as a teenager. In the 134 pages of its opening part, “The Window”, Woolf gives us, through the character Mrs. Ramsay, a consciousness so luminous it seems impossible to define or limit. In the following part, “Time Passes”, the perspective undergoes a radical shift. The house is empty, the people long gone; Mrs. Ramsay, we are informed in two short lines enclosed between brackets, like an afterthought, is dead.
I will never forget the shock and thrill of first reading this. I didn’t realise fiction could do this; Woolf’s audacity and ambition took the breath away. She had shown, tragically, the power and precarity of every consciousness. It’s a truism that cannot be repeated enough: life feels infinite, and it’s gone in a second. Much of Woolf’s fiction is interested in this dissonance, and it is not coincidental that, as well as experiencing both world wars, she lived through radical advances in telescopic power that changed all understanding of the size of the universe. And it should be no surprise – though it apparently still is to many people – that Woolf was not just an avid reader of astronomy books and science fiction, but saw herself engaged in a lifelong project of writing that bore comparison to the most ambitious works of SF.
The protagonist of In Ascension, Leigh Hasenbosch, is a microbiologist who travels into deep space. She experiences not only astonishment at seeing the whole Earth, but dejection at seeing the planet disappear. Anthropocentrism – unarguably the default perspective in English language fiction – has never looked so absurd. Approaching the Oort cloud, she is aware of the other orders of life around her, from algal food stocks to the colonies of bacteria travelling between her and the other crew. Beyond the composite walls of the ship, there is nothing.
Since childhood, after an epiphany while almost drowning, Leigh has pursued the origins of life, absorbed by the theory of symbiogenesis and struck by its improbability. It is all but impossible life exists, and yet it is here. At the same time, she interrogates her own childhood and the formative influences on the person she has become. Her life and work gather around this ambiguous pursuit of origins. Which scale, then, is “correct”? Which story is she really invested in – the universal, or the personal? The answer, of course, is both – neither answer alone can be sufficient.
Martin MacInnes’s In Ascension, published by Atlantic Books, is the latest pick for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up and read along with us here
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Read an extract from In Ascension by Martin MacInnes
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“I was pressed against a teeming immensity.” A river underwater.
Alamy Stock Photo
From age ten I was allowed to swim in the Nieuwe Maas on my own. The cold water shocked me and soothed me and took my mind away. I would enter the water and lie back and close my eyes and drift. Afterwards I came stumbling back along the stony beach, my feet blue and insensate from the cold. I perched with a towel around me, shivering, my head on my knees. As I tipped the water out of my ears the sound of the traffic came back. I didn’t want to go home, and it took a long time to persuade myself to get up again. The stones pressed through my thin soles as I put my weight down, and every time I left the beach I told myself all I had to do was put those same stones in my pockets and walk out into the water and I would never have to go home again.
It was an effective fantasy; I was able to carry on because I knew I didn’t have to. Every time I swam a little further, the stones cutting deeper into my feet as I clambered back ashore. One afternoon in early autumn I felt particularly hopeless. I saw no realistic escape from the situation with Geert and I lived in constant terror of him. Storm clouds were approaching and the beach was deserted. I felt a dangerous sway, the freedom of disregarding my own safety, and I marched into the water, a grimace on my face. The water burned me, sending a startled energy whipping through my body. It was so cold. As I reached the point where my shoulders became submerged, my chest started to convulse and I swallowed mouthfuls of bitter water, and very faintly, as if from a great distance, I sensed that I was about to give way.
I plunged under the water, eyes open, burrowing and kicking out all the way down. It was only a few metres deep, but I felt as if I was tunnelling further, that I had entered a chasm and was swimming in a new territory, a secret chamber of my own. The water was cloudy from the movement of my limbs, but when I stopped I could suddenly see everything very clearly. The larger rocks on the river-bed studded with worms, sponges, limpets and lichen. Beyond them the tufts of floating green and purple riverweed. Nothing made the slightest sound; no thudding in my ears from the water pressure, no chattering voices competing in my head. I gazed at the scene, hanging horizontally, suspended beneath the surface, no further movement to cloud my vision, and as if from nowhere I realised, suddenly, with appreciation, that absolutely everything around me was alive.
There was no gap separating my body from the living world. I was pressed against a teeming immensity, every cubic millimetre of water densely filled with living stuff. These organisms were so small I couldn’t see them, but somehow I felt their presence, their fraternity, all around me. I didn’t look through the water towards life, I looked directly into water-life, a vast patchwork supporting my body, streaming into my nostrils, my ears, the small breaks and crevices in my skin, swirling through my hair and entering the same eyes that observed it. In what felt like minutes, but must have been only seconds, I saw a completely different world, a place of significance and complexity, an almost infinite number of independent organisms among which I floated like a net, scooping up untold creatures with every minor shift and undulation of my body.
Extract taken from In Ascension by Martin MacInnes, published by Atlantic Books. In Ascension is the latest pick for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up and read along with us here
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The best new sci-fi this month from Jasper Fforde to Hugo-nominated Daniel Polansky
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A priestess can manipulate space-time in Meredith Mooring’s debut novel
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Now we have finally moved on from an interminable January, it is time to see what science fictional delights February has in store – and it’s a varied line-up this month. I am looking forward to some enjoyably disastrous-sounding postapocalyptic novels from Daniel Polansky and Paul E. Hardisty – I love a good tale of a world in ruins – and I’m also going to make time for the latest novel from Jasper Fforde, a writer who I have loved ever since The Eyre Affair came out in 2001. Top of my list to track down, though, is Meredith Mooring’s Redsight – starring a blind priestess who can manipulate space-time.
Nothing can cheer me up more than a good post-apocalyptic romp, and the new novel from Hugo Award nominee Polansky sounds like a corker. Manhattan has been enveloped by the funk, a “noxious cloud” that separates it from the world and mutates its population. Generations on, those who remain are focused only on surviving, when the first tourist in centuries arrives on the Island.
This is waiting on my desk at home for the moment I get a minute to read it. It is the prequel to climate emergency thriller The Forcing, and sees Kweku Ashworth, who was born on a sailboat as his parents fled disaster, setting out to uncover what led the world to cataclysm. More post-apocalyptic disaster – great!
This is the sequel to Fforde’s bestselling Shades of Grey, set in a society where hierarchy is determined by the colours you can see, following “Something that Happened” 500 years earlier. When Eddie Russett and Jane Grey discover this might make no sense at all, and could potentially be unfair, they investigate.
Unemployed and in debt, Jonathan Abernathy takes a job as a dream auditor, which will see him entering workers’ dreams to remove their anxieties so they can be more productive. I love this brilliantly sinister idea, and this novel has been described by one reviewer as the “spiritual sibling of Severance, but creepier”, which is right up my street.
This sounds delightfully weird: plastic girl Erin lives in a plastic world, where she sells her fellow plastic people a form of wearable tech called a Smartbody, which allows them to fully immerse themselves in a virtual world as a refuge from real life and its wars. “Profound, hilarious, wrenching, bizarre, about an imaginary universe with incalculable complexities that is also somehow our own broken world,” says author Elizabeth McCracken.
Redsight by Meredith Mooring
I like the sound of the heroine, Korinna, in Mooring’s debut novel: she is a blind priestess who can manipulate space-time, but who has been raised to believe she is weak and useless. When she takes a job as a navigator on an Imperium ship, she discovers she is meant to become a weapon for the Imperium – but then her ship is attacked by a notorious pirate, Aster Haran, and Korinna’s world changes.
Exordia by Seth Dickinson
“Michael Crichton meets Marvel’s Venom,” says the publisher of this story of Anna, a refugee and survivor of genocide, who joins a team investigating a “mysterious broadcast and unknowable horror” as “humanity reels from disaster”. I’m loving the drama we are being promised here.
Tipped by our former sci-fi columnist Sally Adee as one to watch out for in 2024, there are two Earths in this set-up, existing in parallel, which “shifters” can cross between. Canna and Lily are the same person, shifting randomly between worlds, lives and families, but they need to settle in one of them – and how can they prepare their loved ones for their final disappearance?
Maybe this debut novel isn’t science fiction per se, but it is fiction about science and it sounds intriguing, so I wanted to mention it. It sees young physicist Helen, who is on a quest to save the planet, decide to follow her mentor (who has been involved in a sex scandal with a student) to an island research institute giving safe harbour to disgraced artists and scientists.
The Bone Hunters is loosely inspired by the life of 19th-century palaeontologist Mary Anning
Alamy Stock Photo
Again, not science fiction but fiction about science, and pitched as The Essex Serpent meets Ammonite, so hard to say no to, for me at least. Loosely drawing from the life of the pioneering 19th-century palaeontologist Mary Anning, this is set in 1824 Lyme Regis, Dorset, UK, when 24-year-old Ada Winters uncovers some “unusual fossils” on the cliffs.
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