The first shot of Glossu Rabban (Dave Bautista) is the whip that he wears on his waist. Chani’s opening narration contextualizes the history of Arrakis as one of colonial oppression. The film is cognizant of the abuse and violence perpetrated in such a society. The film takes place in a future with a rigid class system, one arguably even more codified than the wall that “separates kind” in Blade Runner 2049. The film ultimately finds K proving his own humanity.ĭune inverts this somewhat. K was a “skinjob,” treated as inherently lesser than his organic counterparts. Denis Villeneuve’s previous film, Blade Runner 2049, imagined a future “built on the back of a disposable workforce.” The film focused on K (Ryan Gosling), a synthetic human who was used to hunt other synthetic humans. Many stories that explore what makes a person human often filter the question through the prism of an oppressed underclass. Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac) is presented as an outlier for his promise to “respect the personal dignity of any man who respects (his).” The world of Dune operates on a similar premise. Even the Magna Carta, often cited as the cornerstone of human rights, only extended procedural protections to barons rather than serfs.
In Western societies, the modern conception of human rights would not emerge until much later. This invocation of medieval iconography is revealing. Lords survey their domains in ceremonial armor. Personal shields have seen a return to swords and daggers as the primary weapons in person-to-person combat.
Dune is set in a far future where humanity has reverted to a sort of space age feudalism. This makes a certain amount of sense given the film’s setting. Still, Dune is very much engaged with the question of what it means to be a human being. After all, Paul Atreides’ (Timothée Chalamet) arc has only really begun by the closing credits of the film, with Chani (Zendaya) promising, “This is only the beginning.” There are a lot of rich themes to be found in Frank Herbert’s Dune, but the film adaptation is structured in such a way that, while Dune: Part One seeds them, they only truly come into focus on the ( still hypothetical) Dune: Part Two. This is largely a result of the structural choice to split the adaptation where they do.
Like a lot of science fiction, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is fundamentally about what makes a person human.
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