Today’s Reading Club selection was a translation of an English story, Adventure by Sherwood Anderson, about a girl who watches her youth waste away as she awaits the return of a childhood crush. It’s a sad story, but worth reading. I’ve linked the English version above; it’s only six pages long.
In the afternoon, I went to see Dune at the movie theater in Tuxtla (technically, I saw Duna, the Spanish-dubbed version). Dune is one of my favorite books, and the things I like about the book are impossible to capture with the medium of film (There’s a David Lynch adaption from 1984 that’s horrendous), so I knew I would be disappointed by the movie somehow, nonetheless, I was excited to see how they would try to adapt it.
The highlight of the film was that I could understand it, even in Spanish. This is a compliment both to me and the director. The book Dune includes a lot of complicated world-building; there’s a glossary in the back of the back that’s essential to reading. This is part of what makes it such a difficult adaption. The 1984 Dune failed (in part) because it couldn’t figure out how to explain everything via film. There’s a lot of voiceover, but the movie still ends up being completely incomprehensible. The 2021 version is being split into two movies, and the result is much more coherent. I think the greatest success of the movie is that you could probably follow the plot without having read the book.
All that said, I was still disappointed by the movie. Despite a two hour, thirty-five minute runtime, and a proposed sequel, the pacing still felt rushed. Scenes never lasted more than a minute. Characters would enter a room, say a few words to move the plot forward, and the film would cut to a different location. The design of the world was super cool (probably my favorite thing about the movie), but you never get to spend enough time in any particular location for it to feel significant.
Related to the problem of pacing was that of sound. The whole film feels like it was edited around the Hans Zimmer score. Not a single scene goes by without frantic chanting or a crescendo of brass. The soundtrack is cool, but it never lets up, and the lack of contrast grows boring. What was lacking were the quiet moments that give the loud moments meaning (“a true artist respects the silence…”). The result was a project that felt more like a really long music video than a movie.
Visiting the dunes of the Sahara desert remains the most sublime experience of my life thus far. At night, the endlessly rolling hills of sand call to mind the waves of the ocean, but one is struck by the absence of movement or sound. The overwhelming sensation is that of stillness. In two-and-a-half hours, mostly set in or near the desert, Dune was unable to capture this. Every moment was one of maximum tension: Big battles! Blaring music! Constant motion! The book’s themes of self-control and transcendence were lost in the noise. Dune 2021 has some very cool-looking spaceships and battles, but the things I loved about the original story were the conversational subtleties and nuanced political intrigue. The film’s blockbuster impulses drowned out anything unique it had to say. 5/10.
AdamFendos.blog 