Dune Part Two

Dune 2 just works. 

It's immersive in the way that the book is immersive; but it's a piece of cinematography, not a crib-sheet for the book or a gallop through the major plot points. We engage with Stilgar and Irulan and the Emperor as characters in this movie; not as more or less successful translations of literary figures. Huge machines lumber across a desert landscape without making us wonder about models or see gee eye. We flash away from the main action to breathtaking vistas of alien otherness but there is never any sense that we are being shown spectacle for the sake of spectacle. I couldn't say if Timothée Chalamet embodies the Paul Atriedes of the book; because the Paul Atriedes of the book is either a held-at-arms-length construct; or else a printed-in-italics stream of consciousness. No-one in the movie thinks in italics. Kyle MacLachlan was absurd, and I have already forgotten Alec Newman. Chalamet is older than I recall the character in the novel being; but he has an androgynous youthfulness, so that even in the final scenes he feels like a child thrust into a role he is terrifyingly good at but at the same time far too small for. When the spice runs out, perhaps he could go into the confectionary business, though ideally not in Glasgow.

We are very definitely watching Dune Part Two; not Dune II or Dune - the Sequel. Like Les Trois Mousquetaires it's a long adaptation of a very long book split into two more or less manageable chunks. (Cinema Buddy said she could follow it perfectly well having so far avoided part one.)

Denis Villeneuve has taken five hours to adapt a 500 page novel; where Peter Jackson spent about nine on a book which runs to around 1300. Put another way, Jackson spent two and a half minutes on each of Tolkien's pages, where Villeneuve spent a minute and a half on each of Herbert's. But Jackson's ring trilogy always felt rushed, breathless, frenetic. Villeneuves Dune feels leisurely, even slow. Granted, more happens on any one of Tolkien's pages than on any three of Herbert's. Dune, is, in the end, a contemporary novel with a contemporary novel's pacing, where the Lord of the Rings is (the Professor always insisted) a "prose romance". But there is more to it than that. Villeneuve omits; Jackson condenses. Tolkien himself in his lifetime said that omission was the way to go. Jackson looks at a crowded house and feverishly tries to stuff everything into the van, along with some new things that he thinks might come in useful later on. Villeneuve steps back and tries to see which pieces of furniture to keep and which to discard: retaining only what is essential to allow the room to continue to look like itself. Jackson tried to translate the Lord of the Rings into the language of a Hollywood blockbuster, which was always going to be a poor fit for his source. Legolas became a swashbuckler and Aragorn became a romantic lead because movies require swashbuckling heroes and romantic leads. But that meant that Jackson had to create completely new material which isn't in the book to provide a pretext for swashbuckling and heroism, which meant in turn that he had to rush through the stuff which is in the book even faster.

Dune is no a Hollywood blockbuster. It is quite clear from the opening seconds that it is the kind of historical epic that they don't make any more. It has more in common with Spartacus or the Greatest Story Ever Told than with Indiana Jones and the Temple Of Doom. Since Dune was always a pseudo-historical novel, the translation to cinema far less painful. It may not be a coincidence that Dune Part Two hits the cinemas in the same month that the gore-soaked Shogun remake finds its way onto Disney Plus. The two books occupy not entirely dissimilar ballparks. James Clavell spent the 1970s on the same spinner racks as Frank Herbert.

People returning to Dune after a long absence -- and people coming to the film without prior knowledge of the book -- are likely to look at the deserts and the great big machines and think "Gee, this is awfully like Star Wars." And in one way, it is. It's hard not to look at desert dwelling nomads and not think of Tusken Raiders; it's hard not to wonder if Uncle Owen's moisture 'vaporator is preserving the precious water of the tribe; and it's hard not to suspect that the spice that Han was smuggling for Jabba the Hutt had something to do with the psychotropic melange that the galactic empire depends on. Tatooine isn't Arrakis -- it clearly owes a very great deal to the desert kingdom of Mongo -- but Dune was clearly one of the many streams which fed George Lucas's imagination. 

In the first film, Luke mentions in passing that he hunts local fauna from his T16 spaceship; and examples of the creature were spliced into the "special" edition of the movie. They look quite a lot like the kangaroo mice that Muad'dib takes his name from. Maybe there are only so many way you can CGI a desert dwelling rodent. If Luke Skywalker had needed a "battle name", Womp Rat would have done the job very well. In World War 2, the Seventh Armoured Division called themselves the Desert Rats. The Gerbils wouldn't have sounded nearly so macho.

But Villeneuve never plays up to any of this. Where Peter Jackson seemed to quote Star Wars excessively, one never feels that Villeneuve is particularly pointing outside the film or asking you to smile with recognition or even borrowing shots from older movies. There are big ships; there is an emperor; there is a princess; and (for good and adequate reasons) the heroes of both franchises use blades; but the visual vocabulary never bleeds from one movie to the other.

If there is such a bleed, or inadvertent retrospective quotation, then the film which interposes itself between Dune and the viewer is Life of Brian. It's more or less impossible to look at middle-eastern religious mobs in a desert landscape and not find yourself wondering whether, perhaps, Paul is after all not the mahad but merely a very naughty boy. When Stilgar literally and in so many words says that Paul must be the messiah because he denies that he is, a certain frisson of recognition goes through the audience. (It overshadows a very good plot point. In the previous movie, Paul's father said the same thing: the best leaders are the ones who don't desire it.) I never believed that Cleese and Palin ever had et al had a conscious political motivation, but their film has created a sort of psycho-historical ripple that makes religion, or at any rate cinematic religion, almost impossible to approach with a straight face. I don't recall Herbert himself describing the Fremen of the South as "fundamentalists", but desert dwellers in robes obsessively chanting Muad Dib! Muad Dib! have unfortunate contemporary real world resonances. One or two people online have already described it as irreducibly That Culture Appropriation Movie.

There are small plot changes: it may be that proper serious Dune Geeks are as annoyed by the movie as proper serious Tolkien Geeks were by Lord of the Rings. It seemed to me that on the whole, details were being polished, clarified, and spelled out; and that the less cinematic ideas were gently pushed into the background. We are told that Alia becomes sentient in utero, and that she communicates with Jessica and Paul telepathically; but Villeneuve very sensibly spares us a talking baby. The novel is framed with endless commentaries by Princess Irulan about the life and teaching of Muad'dib, but the princess herself barely registers as a character in the actual narrative. Chani is a similarly passive figure, the book ending with Jessica's assurance that although Paul is going to make a dynastic marriage to the Princess, posterity will regard Chani as a wife, not a concubine. The film (like the old sci-fi channel TV show) gives both women considerably more agency: indeed, the final shot of the movie is a disgruntled Chani turning her back on Muad'dib's jihad and riding back to the desert on one of the sandworms.

The film makes some sensible choices about which plot points to underline: what the story loses in ambiguity it gains in clarity. We are told directly and early on that the prophecies of the mahdi were planted on Arrakis by the Bene Gesserit; and that Paul himself does not believe in them. (David Lynch, weirdly, ended his movie with Paul supernaturally bringing rain to the desert world.) The film presents the Bene Gesserit as directly running the whole show from behind the scenes, where the books leave one thinking that they are merely one powerful faction among many. Herbert as a slight tendency to murmur about Reverend Mothers and the Water of Life and leave the reader to infer what the heck he is going on about. Villeneuve sensibly lets us overhear characters explaining details to one another. We are shown a Fremen drowning a baby spice worm and harvesting the Holy Poison from it, answering the question "Water of excuse-me-what-did-you-say?" without giving us the feel that we are being info dumped. In Part One, Paul says directly that he is going to make a play for the Emperor's job; at the end of film 2, we positively see the old emperor kneel and kiss his hand. The film ends with the Fremen going off to war against the Great Houses and Jessica saying "Begun these Clone Wars have" (or words to that effect). That's pretty much what happens in the book; but there it's presented just that little bit more elliptically.

Are books factual accounts of What Happened, or verbal constructs built in particular ways by particular authors for particular effects? (This question recently became slightly controversial in Another Place.) Frank Herbert completed six volumes of the Mighty Dune Trilogy and due to the sterling work of his literary executors, the Trilogy now runs to a concise twenty two volumes, which possibly makes it a icosikaidology.

Opinion is sharply divided about the merits of the various humous and posthumous volumes. I am one of a minority who thought Children of Dune was a bit all over the place, but really liked God Emperor. It seems to me that if Frank decided to end Dune on the eve of the Big War and begin the sequel when the Big War had long since finished, that was probably because he thought that leaving the big war off stage was the right way to tell the story he wanted to tell. Son Kevin evidently knows better, and has Andersonned no less than three books to plug the "gap" in the original saga. I have not read them. People who have done so say they are by no means the most hateful of the sequels and prequels. I assume that if no-one was reading them, no-one would be publishing them.

Villeneuve is pretty clear that there is going to be a third film, but probably none after that. This makes a good deal of sense. Frank Herbert's own sequel, Dune Messiah, could be read as an extension of the original novel, where Children of Dune and the latter volumes introduce a lot of new, and increasingly whacky, ideas. If Villeneuve was reluctant to show us a talking baby, he would certainly baulk at Paul's son covering himself with leeches and turning into a Sandworm/Human chimera. And the (spoiler alert) death of Paul is as good a place as any to end the trilogy.  (Spoiler alert: he gets better.)

But Kevin Herbert's name appears on the credits as an executive producer, and Kevin J Anderson crops up in the "special thanks" section.

Please Reverend Mother, tell me that Dune Part 3 will be an adaptation of Dune Messiah as opposed to Paul of Dune, Winds of Dune, Princess of Dune or Tasteful Yellow Lampshades of Dune. 

Read: The Pirate Planet Parts 1-4 

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Book Are One of A Number of Quite Good Things That There Are In the World

Book-Enjoyers Bingo

Have you done any of these slightly amusing things in the context of a book? 

If you can answer “maybe” to at least several or more of them, then you may be a book-liker! 

But on the other hand you may not be. 

Or maybe you can tick off some different things which aren’t on this list. 

Really, it’s fine.

The Ribos Operation (2)

The Ribos Operation is not about the Graf. It is barely even about the Doctor. It's about two con-men, Garron and Unstoff. It begins with them bantering wittily as they break into the royal treasure house. It ends with them bantering wittily about how well or badly their heist has worked out. It's their story.

Garron is played by Iain Cuthbertson, the nasty squire from Children of the Stones. He was originally going to be Australian, but his accent shifts between stereotype cockney and stereotype cockney trying to sound posh. Although he's a galactic rogue only two degrees removed from Han Solo, he's also clearly a cockney barrow boy. The home he wants to return to isn't Coroscant or Trantor, but Hackney Wick.

Unstoff is played by Nigel Plaskitt. In 1978 it would have been impossible to see him without muttering "course-you-can-Malcolm" under your breath. He'd been in a very irritating series of adverts for patent cold remedies. The BBC was pernickety about product placement; but it is a heck of a coincidence that Ribos is stuck in it's winter season and Unstoff spends the opening scenes complaining about the weather. Plaskitt also voiced and operated Hartley Hare on Pipkins (and I believe subsequently worked with Jim Henson) so presumably he felt right at home sharing the stage with the shrivenzale.

Plaskitt plays the part absolutely straight while Cuthbertson teeters permanently on the brink of pantomime. Robert Holmes is far too clever too hammer the point home, but the relationship between the know-it-all youngster and the seen-it-all-before veteran closely mirrors that of the Doctor and Romana. One assumes that Big Finish made two hundred CDs about the pairs further adventures? They are far more original and funny then Jago and Litefoot ever were.

Garron's scheme is pretty clever and great fun. He started his career doing the venerable old trick of selling bridges he doesn't own to unwary tourists; but has moved up in the world and now sells planets. Unstoff breaks into the castle strong room and instead of stealing the crown jewels, plants a lump of precious metal in the vault. Garron "accidentally" gives his victim papers to show that the planet has vast unexploited mineral wealth; so his mark will be prepared to buy the valueless planet at an inflated price.

Who are they trying to swindle? Obviously, the Graf Vindar-K.

It's a weirdly brilliant set-up. A classic con-trick being perpetrated on a classic space-opera bad guy by a couple of classic con-men in a classic fantasy medieval setting. It's as if Grand Moff Tarkin arrived on the set of Hamlet and Del Boy tried to sell him Westminster Bridge. (This was before Del Boy, but after Moff Tarkin.)

The Plot Device leads the Doctor and Romana into the epicentre of the scam: the strong room where Unstoff has planted the precious jethric. But this in itself doesn't particularly embroil them in the story. They spend the bulk of the first two episodes pressed to the edge of the narrative; watching the scheme unfold and unravel. Romana directly says that the main action of the story is "none of their business" and that they should ignore Garron -- clearly the protagonist of the episode -- and concentrate on getting the first segment out of the strong room.

The Doctor briefly proposes one reason to become involved. He does not say that it is their moral duty to prevent the Graf being swindled; or, indeed, to prevent him from getting his hands on the valuable jethric. But he does suspect that Garron is "after the same thing" as he and Romana are. This would have been in line with Graham Williams' original concept: the Doctor and the agents of the Black Guardian in a race to find each precious Segment. But the story -- and very possibly Robert Holmes -- resists this resolution. Garron is not an agent of the Dark Side, even unwittingly. And he is not, in fact "after the same thing". In fact, he already possesses the segment, and has placed it in the reliquary, unaware of its value.

At the time of Ribos Operation, many of us were for the first time discovering Dungeons & Dragons. Heroes went into labyrinths (which did not exist for any reason) and faced perils (which did not exist for any reason) and obtained treasures (which did not exist for any reason). The Dungeon was, in effect, a physical embodiment of the Plot. There was no need for a plausible narrative to explain how the heroes came to be negotiating a pit full of spikes; or trying to avoid a dragon's fiery breath: they were doing it because that was what there was at the end of the corridor.

At the end of Episode Three, Unstoff stumbles into what is unmistakably a Dungeon. Surprised by the Ribos guards while trying to retrieve the jethric, he escapes into a series of caves and tunnels which just happen to run under the city and to be accessible from the strong room. They are completely impossible to navigate without supernatural or technological aid (meaning that he can stay lost for as long as the Plot requires.) They are home to a colony of fully grown shrivenzale (and can therefore provide peril and cliffhangers when called to do so). They are a hiding place for fugitives and outcasts (and can therefore introduce new characters into the story without any further explanation). Once Unstoff is lost in the Plot (the caves) with the MacGuffin (the jethric) the Doctor is obliged to go in after him.

In case we are in any doubt about what is going on, the Ribos guards enlist a lady witch doctor. It is agreed by all parties that there is no way of finding Unstoff in the caves without her aid. She's an odd fit to the overall story: a figure in a mask who keeps doing strange dance moves, a little like the Sisterhood in Brain of Morbius. She provides the Plot with a completely arbitrary end-point, "prophesying" that only one person will emerge from the Dungeon in one piece. She has exactly the same narrative function as the Tracer, and is in fact referred to only as the Seeker.

The Doctor does manage to claw back some of his status as the show's hero from Romana. But it is worth, once again, looking at what does not happen. It does not turn out that his poor exam results were the consequence of him being too cool for school; or that he was thrown out of college for tampering with knowledge that man was not meant to know; or that he is far more than a Time Lord and has a history that Romana can only guess at. But it does turn out that he has been round the galactic block a few times. He spots things that Romana misses. When Garron puts on a silly Mummerset accent, the Doctor notices that it is an earth accent, not a Ribos one. Romana is taken in by Unstoff's cock-and-bull story about an abandoned mine "because he has such an honest face": the Doctor points out (pityingly) that you can't be a successful crook with a dishonest face. (If all smugglers looked like smugglers, sir, my job would be a lot easier.) Romana assumes that the Crown must be the First Segment, because it is the most valuable thing in the strong room. The Doctor realises that it must in fact be the jethic. The audience have got there already: it has to be the jethric because the jethric is the main driver of the Plot. But the Doctor spots that the segment was moving between locations when the Tracer detected it; and Garron brought the jethric to Ribos from another star system (whereas the crown jewels are hardly ever moved). Romana thinks that this very obvious deduction is "brilliant".

And while this clearly restores the Doctor to the role of central character, it still represents a fundamental shift in the Doctor / companion dynamic. The Doctor is the street savvy one, the voice of common sense and intuition and occasionally local knowledge. Romana remains the clever, scientific one; and she still looks down on him.

But this can only go so far. The Doctor may no longer be wandering; he may be trying his hardest not to get involved; and he may have an assistant who is reluctant to assist. But he has one thing on his side: the format of Doctor Who. Episodes have to end with cliffhangers; and cliffhangers require the Doctor to be the Doctor. Romana, to her credit, does not scream when she is (inevitably) threatened by the shrivenzal. But she does call out "Doctor, I'm over here" and actually hug him when he frees her. "Are there many such dangerous creatures in the universe?" she asks, and the Doctor relishes the moment. "Millions! Millions! You shouldn't have volunteered if you are scared of a little thing like that."

No Doctor Who story would be complete without a little light capital punishment. At the end of Episode Two the Graf orders that the Doctor, Romana and Garron be executed by firing squad. But the Doctor entirely refuses to take the cliffhanger seriously. In the next episode he says, in effect "Please stop" and they stop, whereupon he and the Graf get involved in a mutual face-slapping routine straight out of the Marx Brothers. They are all held prisoner (while Unstoff gets lost in the Plot Dungeon) and the Doctor spends a fair chunk of the episode chatting with Garron about the heist.

"Doctor, there are men out there planning to kill us, and you're just sitting here chattering" complains Romana.

"When you've faced death as often as I have, this is much more fun" he replies.

More fun. It isn't merely that the Doctor is braver and less afraid of dying than Romana. It's that he doesn't take the universe entirely seriously. Which makes sense once you've realised that his meeting with the Guardian is essentially a con flab with the Author. He knows that he is the hero of the story, and that he can't be killed off. He probably even knows that the story is closer to being a comedy than a tragedy.

There is one last element to consider.

When Unstoff sets off into the impenetrable story-cave, he encounters Biro The Heretic. Biro fits into the story precisely nowhere, and is therefore, almost by definition, the best thing in it.

He's a stock character. I suppose his ultimate source is Benn Gunn, the castaway in Treasure Island. He reminds us of characters who Blackadder and Robin of Loxely encounter in prison cells; and the poor chained up fellow who has to push the pram a lot. (This was before Blackadder and Robin of Sherwood.) Old, beardy, raspy, dressed in rags, apt to talk to rats and not entirely sane: I suppose the purest version of the archetype was Geoffrey Bayldon's time shifted wizard in Catweazle. But this pathetic figure is Ribos's Galileo or its Darwin: pronounced a heretic for declaring the truth about the universe for the first time.

It's another strange structural moment. The crazy mad scientist is a little bit like the Doctor; and the fresh faced guy with the bunged up nose is a little bit like Ian or Harry or any number of straight men. But Unstoff is to Biro as the Doctor has been to so many mortals: the one who tells him that, yes, the world is round; yes, the lights in the skies are other star systems and yes, travel between the worlds will one day be possible. (No-one seems to care very much about the Prime Directive: at any rate, honest-looking con-men don't.) Reviews at the time, in fanzines, pinpointed the Unstoff/Biro scenes as being good examples of the Magic which Doctor Who didn't have any more. They are certainly good drama and good writing played straight by two good actors.

Tom Baker's Doctor is sometimes said to be a little callous: not psychotic like Colin's version but looking at humans from a slightly elevated perspective. But the ending of Ribos Operation is surprisingly cruel. The Seeker has predicted that only one person will survive the caves. After Sholakh dies, the Graf consciously tries to bring the Plot to its foreordained ending. He hands his remaining guard a bomb, and walks away: the guard gets an honourable death, and he himself gets to leave the catacombs in one piece.

He is ranting movingly about past battles, and talking about Sholakh as if he is still alive. One half expects him to say that he has nothing left but his panache. But the guard is the Doctor in disguise (of course); and the Doctor has switched the bomb for the jethric (of course). The Graf blows himself up and the Doctor gets the segment. We shouldn't mourn too much for Vinder-K: he was a bad man who had it coming; but it's a cold thing for the good guy to do. But then, Ribos is a very cold planet. Perhaps the Doctor could do with some Vicks Sinex.

But our focus is not on ridding the universe of nasty but impotent bad guys: it's on the Doctor getting his hands on the Plot Coupon. We head straight for a comedy climax. Garron switches the jethric for some worthless stone, but the Doctor switches it back again. Garron is cross, but only a bit cross; you imagine he starts planning his next hustle right away. The final lines; as the Doctor secures the First Segment in the TARDIS safe, slightly undercuts the adventure. "Simple wasn't it. Only five more to go."

A chap at a Doctor Who convention at the time told me that "the magic of Doctor Who" comes down to "how Doctor Who makes you feel". That's probably about right. Our joy in the show is subjective rather than objective: it's a romantic, rather than a classical engagement.

What is Doctor Who? Chases down corridors; old fashioned theatrical actors; chases down corridors; special effects departments doing the best they can; chases down corridors. Ribos Operation has them: Pirate Planet will have more of them; Power of Kroll will have very little else. The question is never what Doctor Who irreducibly is; but what the Doctor has at a given moment become. The disruptive figure, arriving on a planet and shaking everything up? The saviour, arriving at the moment of crisis? Or merely the curious, benevolent wanderer?

Professional fans at the time of Deadly Assassin complained that there was too much hyperbole. The Doctor no longer rescued individuals or cities or even planets: He only ever saved The Universe. Which may be one of the problems the Key to Time sets out to solve. The action is tiny: a small lump of precious rock; a swindler; a posturing noble. But the stakes are as ultimate as they can possibly be.

If we wind back to when Anthony Coburn created Doctor Who, single-handedly, by himself, without input from anyone else [is this right? -ed] the show was about two things.

It was about the idea of Space: the idea that this earth, containing everything we have ever known, is really a tiny part of the universe, and a wardrobe in a junk yard could contain everything. Ribos puts us on a planet which doesn't even know that space exists and shows us the Copernican moment when the ice crystals turn into stars and the universe turns out be bigger on the outside than the inside.

And it was about a sense of place: about spending long enough on Skaro or the Stone Age or Ancient Mexico that we started to feel at home there -- as at home as we did in the foggy London streets or the London secondary school. Robert Holmes, cleverly, wittily and economically draws us into the Ribosness of Ribos. This is not a story that could have been set anywhere else.

And perhaps that is another function of the Anti-Plot Device. For this season at least, the Doctor's function is to arrive, grab, and leave, and try not to get involved. Perhaps that enables us to see Ribos as Ribos would have been even if the Doctor had never shown up.

Don Quixote; Tristan Shandy; Hamlet -- even Watchmen. There is a longish lineage of work which set out to undermine a genre and end up becoming the perfect example of it. The Key To Time is the product of Graham Williams' disillusionment with the the whole idea of Doctor Who (and Holmes irritation with the idea of an Umbrella Setting.) But it's not only the best story of the season; it is, in anyone's book, one of the finest entries in the entire Canon.

Coming soon: The Pirate Planet.

Read: The Pirate Planet Parts 1-4 

Read: Andrew's opinions on Doctor Who's Sixtieth Buy Beautiful Shiny PDF booklets of Andrew's reviews of Tom Baker's first four seasons.

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