CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR DUNE 2
Dune as a franchise is profoundly anti-colonial and anti-imperialist. Its storyline is about the dangers of idolatry, how religion can be used to control the masses in order to further ambitions that aren’t necessarily theirs. It discusses openly the dangers of the ‘white saviour’ trope in the form of Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), who comes from outside their culture and weaponises it in order to start a galaxy-wide religious war.
Yet there is a boycott movement for it on social media, claiming it profits off of Middle Eastern culture, and features no Middle Eastern actors, it has also been labelled as insensitive due to the conflict in Israel and Gaza. Additionally, there are calls for Timothee Chalamet specifically to be cancelled for telling a distasteful joke, that he didn’t write, on SNL (the joke being a wordplay on Hamas). Moreover, when I left the cinema after seeing the movie, I heard several people praise the movie as being entertaining but calling it ‘dodgy’ because Chalamet leads a ‘bunch of brown people as a white guy’.
The main cast of characters are white because the main characters are privileged people coming to a land foreign from theirs and harvesting its natural resources or weaponising its people, to the detriment of the indigenous population. Meaning this movie is anti-colonial and therefore not insensitive to the situation in Gaza. If you look at the joke told on SNL, it is hard to label it as intentionally offensive. Distasteful? Yes. Unfunny? Also, yes. But this is SNL we’re talking about. Chalamet’s views are in actuality, aligned with the rest of the cast and director of the movie (who are vocally pro-Palestine). And finally, Chalamet leading the Fremen as a white person is bad because guess what? He isn’t actually the good guy.
It surprised me that Dune 2 has had a rather mixed reception, especially considering it doesn’t pull its punches around the messages it’s portraying , whereas the Barbie movie has an overwhelmingly positive reception and no real backbone when it came to representing real, palpable feminist ideas. I’ll be the first to admit that I was excited for the Barbie movie, it had an incredible cast, good set design and Greta Gerwig at the wheel. However, I left the theatre feeling profoundly disappointed, as it turns out that the American multinational mega-corporation’s take on a feminist movie would actually be lacklustre at best.
There are several things about the Barbie movie that I don’t like, but to summarise… Capitalism and corporatism are directly opposed to the core principles of feminism (those being equality and institutional change for said equality). Most of the pro-woman sentiment was weak and poorly developed. Ken (not Barbie) was the focal point of the film and by far the most memorable. I feel those are pretty cardinal sins for a ‘feminist’ movie. Yet it is hailed by the general public as being the pinnacle of modern female empowerment. Why?
My theory is that Barbie markets itself as what it wants to be, a feminist movie, whereas Dune 2’s marketing makes it seem more like a sci-fi or action film rather than the highly political movie it actually is. Therefore, people are more likely to not watch the movie at all or go into it with prior misconceptions about what the movie is aiming to achieve. However, the large disparity in reception cannot simply be down to marketing. Unlike Barbie, Dune and its ideas as a whole are implicit and complex, the audience isn’t told how to think or feel. They are presented with the situation and given the choice to decide how to feel about it and why. So, if people think that the white saviour trope is ‘dodgy’. They’re right, they just need to notice that may be the point.
