In the much-anticipated “Dune,” a young man embarks on an epic journey to the arid planet of Arrakis. What unfolds isn’t just a standard hero’s journey, but a commentary about greed, war, and colonialism.
Critic and essayist Bilal Qureshi wrote about this for NPR:
The film’s allegiance is with the natives, and certainly with cultural humility toward the unfamiliar and the unknowable. Colonizing another is a brutal if not a fatal mission. There is also a palpable fatigue and exhaustion from waging distant wars that haunts the soldiers of Dune. Unseen but ever-present forces make Arrakis a graveyard of Empires – and an ambivalence about heroism makes Dune a quite rare mainstream Hollywood epic for and about the world 9/11 made.
For this month’s Movie Club, we’re headed to the desert to discuss director Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 adaptation of “Dune.”
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