Fantastical Films: Dune & The French Dispatch

What do Dune and The French Dispatch have in common? They are both tropey fantasies that star Timothee Chalamet. I liked one and not the other, but depending on your temperament, you could easily like the other and not the one. Read on to get all the answers you seek.

Dune: Based on the novel by Frank Herbert, this is a classic science fiction fantasy about the young man who is destined to save the universe (Chalamet, natch) and all the machinations afoot to make him understand his place in the great world order. There is a ton of world-building as you need to understand the history of the planet Arrakis, which is a desert where the Empire mines a mystical substance known as “spice” that is critical to space travel. In classic human fashion, the people of Arrakis have been subjugated and ruled over by tyrants who exploited the spice trade for their own gain, but now the Emperor has declared that House Atreides will take over. Duke Leto (the beautiful Oscar Isaac) is the head of House Atreides, alongside his concubine, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), and son, Paul (Chalamet). The Duke plans on being a benevolent ruler but is well aware of all the political entanglements he will face.

Adapted for the screen by Jon Spaihts, Eric Roth, and director, Denis Villeneuve, this movie does a great job of setting up all the random families, planets, and magical powers without having someone talk at you with a list of rules for an hour. I quite enjoyed the subtle (and not-so-subtle) narrative devices employed to deliver all this exposition. But mostly, just let this movie wash over you. You’ve seen all of this before, and it feels very Star Wars. The joy is in the production and costume design and getting to watch a bunch of people run around a desert for two and a half hours. Plus, if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere and starting to get chilly, you could stand to spend some time staring at a scorching desert and vicariously baking in the warmth reflected on the big screen.

Dune is a popcorn movie. It’s not cerebral, but it’s very entertaining, with a classic Hans Zimmer score that is designed to keep you awake (or give you a headache). The actors are all having fun (though I could have definitely used more Jason Momoa and Zendaya), the sets are all spectacular, and just don’t think about it too much OK? Go be entertained, and if the dialogue is periodically unintelligible, stare at the billowy costumes for a bit and soothe yourself. Sometimes, that is the best thing you can get at the movies, and Dune fully delivers on some mindless escapism. 

The French Dispatch: I like Wes Anderson. But when I saw the trailer for this movie, I thought this might be too much Wes Anderson for me to take. And having now watched the movie, I was correct. This is the twee-est film he has created to date, and also seems to firmly establish the fact that he is just doing his own thing and either you’re in or you’re out. Sadly, I was out. But if you’re a die-hard fan (you know who you are), go ahead and lap this up with a spoon. I do not begrudge you your joy.

If you’re on the fence, here are the basics. The movie is framed as the final farewell issue of a magazine called The French Dispatch, which serves as the foreign outpost of a fictional American newspaper called the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun. What follows are a series of vignettes, which represent the articles in this issue, and serve as a not-so thinly veiled homage to The New Yorker. So Anderson gets to tell a bunch of different stories set in France about a motley crew of characters, comprised of the world’s wildest cast, including Tilda Swinton, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Benicio del Toro, Saoirse Ronan, Chalamet, Lea Seydoux, and dozens more. Seriously, if I had to name them all we would be here all night. Also, some of them are meant to be American, but the ones who are meant to be French are still doing their own accents, so YOLO.

This format means Anderson doesn't have to concern himself about plot as much and can be as stylistic as possible with his actors, sets, costumes, and dialogue. Half of the movie is also in black-and-white, with scenes occasionally being suffused in color so you can remind yourself of how much beauty goes into every frame of an Anderson picture, before he snuffs the color out again. I kept perking up at how pretty things looked but then had to settle back down when they went back to grayscale. There was a lot of interminably rambly dialogue and voiceover that had lofty ambitions of being meaningful and instead just bored me to tears. This movie was emphatically not made for me, but it is certainly visually arresting if that's your jam, and has the expected twinkly soundtrack that one expects of any Anderson movie. So try it if you're curious, but stay away if you already know that your mileage may vary. I suspect that for a lot of regular moviegoers, this movie is going to be way too cute to take your fancy.