K and I watched Dune Part 2 last week, and my thoughts on this one are largely the same as my thoughts on the first one.

It’s beautifully designed and mounted, with great sound design. I’ll definitely be buying the Art of book, as I did with the first one.

Going in, I was worried about was the pacing of the film. The original novel has a badly rushed second half, Lynch’s adaptation compounded the mistake by adding that strange sound-based weapon thing without fixing the issue at all. Dune Part 2, on the other hand, actually shows us Paul’s campaigns, his adoption of the Muad’Dib identity, and his ascension, while giving us hints of the palace intrigue in the Emperor’s court. If I had to quibble, I’d say the climactic battle has a few too many moving parts, but it’s a minor nitpick.

The largely brown colour palette, though, isn’t going to age well – you could argue it is an aspect of Villeneuve’s style rather than him following the current colourless trend in films, but it feels limiting. He uses colour to distinguish between different locations, and to set tone, but not for much else, and even that is limited to the desaturated side of things. This adaptation is as close to “definitive” as it’s going to get for these books, and twenty years from now, that choice is going to stand out, in a bad way (along with another, discussed below).

The other thing about this adaptation, of course, is the matter ethnicity and religion.

The Discourse is trying to categorise the choices made here, and therefore the film itself, into straightforwardly good or bad, but it’s a bit more convoluted than that.

First of all, there is the idea that you could adapt Dune today without it being “problematic” in any way. This is nonsense.

If, instead of a white filmmaker like Villeneuve, you installed a MENA filmmaker and asked them to make a Dune movie, this wouldn’t magically solve anything, because now you’re saddling this person with a book written by a white man from 50 years ago and asking them to “fix” the ethno-religious perspective, rather than create something that speaks to their own perspective. And mind you, this is not even considering whether you’re asking this of a native MENA person or someone who grew up in the West, given those are very different backgrounds.

Frankly, if a person from that background was writing a book with the same nominal plot, I can guarantee you it would be a very different book. I’d rather read that than see such a person saddled with adapting Dune. (This tends to be my problem with most modern attempts to adapt old material “non-problematically” – it’s an act of bowdlerisation.)

And I hate to say this, but in doing so, you’d be losing what makes Dune what it is, which is a manifestation of one man’s decades-long hyperfocus on a religion and culture that is contiguous to his own but which he is alienated from in key ways. Which means that Frank Herbert’s intelligent white American perspective is very important to how this story works, and to how Paul is treated as a character, and to how the Fremen culture is deepened and flattened at the same time.

Now, the question is, should this white Western perspective be privileged at our current moment? Therein lies the problem – the question here is, then, should a 50-year-old sociopolitical science fiction novel be adapted into a film in 2024? And that is a moot question. You can buttress any answer to that with several reasons, and we’d be here all week. As the Germans say, das ist egal.

All this lets us do is get some insight into the specific choices Villeneuve makes to do with the design of the culture and the language. For one, he adds a “secular” dimension to the Northern Fremen, which brings their culture more in line with how End-of-History liberals view culture – there has to be a “reasonable” section of people, where reasonable stands for something close to secular liberalism. This is good and bad – it adds diversity, but of a beige variety.

Next, he excises hot-button words like “jihad”, and keeps the Fremen brown but, for some reason, not cast from MENA actors. The conlang created for the Fremen’s Chakobsa is excised of all but the essential Arabic words, because, as per Dune conlang consultant, there’s “no way” Arabic would have survived that far into the future in a recognisable form, but for some reason, Mandarin would?

These are all haphazard choices, but they are all made with one aim – to make the film less discomforting to a mainstream (read Western) audience. It is aimed at making the book palatable to a specific, current audience. It is, aesthetically, another version of the brown colour palette. Something that will marginally help the film’s popularity now, but will date badly, especially since Herbert himself was pushed to make the same choice by his publishers and refused.

And this is where the failure truly emerges – the novels are idiosyncratic, weird, messy and gnarly, because they are the idiosyncratic vision of a single creator, which is the nature of art. You are making something, and it is a reflection of you, in all your complexities and darknesses. This is why art made by committee doesn’t have rough edges and goes down smooth – that’s what it’s built to do.

This is why, for example, the character of Wonder Woman doesn’t work outside of William Moulton Marston and Harry Peter’s original stories – she is too much a reflection of Marston’s specific fetish of rope-based domination and his idea that the world would be better if it was ruled with a firm feminine kindness. You turn her into a generic hero in a high-cut swimsuit, and she’s any other male-oriented fantasy character. You sand down the BDSM and bring her in line with modern feminism, and she’s a political warrior princess. You put her in a jumpsuit and take away her powers, you have a kung fu-flavoured Mrs. Peel. Nobody but that person can do it “right”, because “right” includes some stuff that’s very specifically wrong. Grant Morrison tried to bring back the bondage element in their Wonder Woman: Earth One series with Yanick Paquette, but that still feels like it’s an act of ventriloquism with the heart taken out.

Here we simply hit against the problem of adaptation, particularly that of a novel, which is executed entirely by one person. You cannot take someone’s creation, give it to several dozen people who translate it out of its original medium, and expect what comes out to be in a meaningful way the same thing. It will be a strange hybrid, the new creators’ filter laid over the original, with limbs missing and extra ones added.

It is not even really a version of the original thing anymore. It is an act of fan fiction, of sanctioned plagiarism, and that’s how it should be seen.

And when it comes to eccentric works like Dune, it’s like a fetish film made by someone who doesn’t actually share the fetish. It might walk the same and talk the same, but it lacks the right kind of stink.