Since August, I’ve written over a dozen news articles about Dune, the big-budget Warner Bros. film adaption of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi literary masterwork. Yesterday (or today, depending on how you look at it with the time difference), I had one more article go up, while the movie itself became available as a premium purchase or VOD rental in the U.S. iTunes Store.
This post contains links to my complete news coverage of Dune, directed by Denis Villeneuve. But first, I want to discuss Arrival, the 2016 film that marked Villeneuve’s transition from thrillers into science fiction (picking up eight Academy Award nominations in the process).
In ‘Arrival,’ Time Is the Universal Language
Arrival came in at #2 on /Film’s list of the Best Movies of the 2010s, where it was second only to David Fincher’s The Social Network. I’m more partial to Sicario, the last thriller Villeneuve made before he went sci-fi, so I wouldn’t necessarily rank Arrival that high. However, it is a film that I once used as a discussion topic back when I was teaching a Movie Dialogue class at an English conversation school in Tokyo.
In the movie, U.S. linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) and physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) are sent to communicate with aliens in one of twelve spaceships that’s hovering over different sites around the globe. The scene I taught was the one where they discuss the “theory of linguistic relativity,” as it’s sometimes called.
IAN: You know, I was doing some reading, um, about this idea that if you immerse yourself into a foreign language, then you can actually rewire your brain.
LOUISE: Yeah, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It’s the theory that, uh, the language you speak determines how you think.
I asked my students, all Japanese, if they felt that speaking English ever changed the way they thought. Some felt they could express themselves more openly about certain things in English, whereas they wouldn’t necessarily be as straightforward about saying the same things in Japanese.
Arrival puts a different spin on the idea of language. As Louise deciphers the palindromic symbols that the aliens use to communicate, it changes the structure of her thoughts and she begins flashing forward, having “memories” of the future.
The audience, trained to recognize flashback scenes in movies, doesn’t realize the true nature of Louise’s memories until the end. Time loses all meaning in her and our perception, but its effects — the way it subjects loved ones, bodily, to decay and death — are still felt as an ever-present emotional reality. For Louise and the widowed Chinese general, Shang (Tzi Ma), the ravages of time not only overcome the language barrier; they transcend all human boundaries. In Arrival, time is the universal language.
The ‘Dune’ News Archive
Five years and one global pandemic after Arrival, I started venturing out to the movie theater again, first with the James Bond film, No Time to Die. It was October 2021, and I hadn’t been to see a movie on the big screen since masking up (appropriately) for Christopher Nolan’s Tenet a year earlier.
Now, I live within walking distance of a theater, so I don’t have to ride the train anymore. That’s a plus, given the Covid situation and the recent Joker-inspired train attack, which made international headlines. It happened on the Keio Line, just two stops away from where I live in Chofu, Tokyo.
Since I didn’t die after watching No Time to Die, I decided to bring my double-masked, double-vaccinated self to see Dune two weeks later. As it turns out, fear is the mind-killer and I needn’t have worried, since I was the only person in the theater for Dune.
Days later, I went in for throat surgery, with the ravages of time, teaching, and esophageal reflux having finally caught up with my own body, like some stray character from Arrival. All that was missing as I entered the hospital was Villeneuve and Hollywood’s favorite misery-porn music cue, “On the Nature of Daylight,” by Max Richter.
To pass the time in the hospital, I reread Dune. Below, you can see the reverse-chronological feed of all my Dune-related movie news articles for /Film. The one marked “exclusive” even has a Japan connection.
[Update: FEB. 13, 2022. Adding in one more new article here:]
Dune Star Josh Brolin Is Also Unhappy About That Denis Villeneuve Oscar Snub
Denis Villeneuve Drew Storyboards For Dune As A Teen, Because Of Course He Did
Dune Director Denis Villeneuve Teases New And Familiar Characters In Part Two
Akira Kurosawa Was One Of The Many Inspirations For The Costumes Of Dune [Exclusive]
Dune Part Two Is Already Far Along In Development, Could Shoot Next Fall
Denis Villeneuve Is Ready To Make Dune Messiah After Dune Part Two
Rebecca Ferguson Says Her Dune Voice Was Basically 'Donald Duck Sounds'
Denis Villeneuve Explains Why He Insisted On Dune Being Framed As 'Part One'
Dune Featurette Teases A Wildly Ambitious Sci-Fi Epic
Dune Could Still Get A Sequel Even If It Underperforms Thanks To HBO Max
Dune Director Denis Villeneuve Wanted To Make A Movie For Hardcore Fans...and Also His Mother
Dune Director Denis Villeneuve On How You Design A Sandworm
'Dune' Director Denis Villeneuve Calls The Film "The Toughest Thing I've Done"
That Behind-The-Scenes 'Dune' Book Has Its Own Alternate Score From Hans Zimmer