The Megastructure in ‘Dune’: Epic Grandeur

Adapted from Frank Herbert's "Dune" series, the film version of "Dune" has been in theaters for a week now, sparking a rich array of discussions online and diverse reviews from viewers with different backgrounds. Unless you're a science fiction enthusiast, you might not grasp the weightiness of director Denis Villeneuve's "completion" of this film. The original novel and the process of adapting it into a movie have inspired many, including well-known IPs like the "Star Wars" and "Alien" series. Despite the originality in concepts, world-building, imagery, and visuals being borrowed, developed, and reimagined by various other sci-fi films, the universe of "Dune" has never been fully realized.

"Dune," the original novel, was first published in 1965 and has been around for over fifty years. Yet, it's still considered a work that's challenging, if not impossible, to adapt into film or television.

Set ten thousand years in the future, amid humanity's interstellar expansion and the post-artificial intelligence era, what does that distant world look like? What level of technology exists? Will the social system change? What about humanity itself? Creating the "Dune" film requires the boundaries of imagination to be translated into visuals through words, demanding creativity and the reasonable technical ability to express those boundaries.

Sci-fi is humanity's self-imagination of its future civilization and the arduous practice pursued to chase that imagination, driving technological advancement while reflecting on it. Regardless of individual assessments of this film, good sci-fi works deserve respect. The creators of sci-fi works engage in both grand imaginations of overall human existence and specific technical practices to verify and continually expand the boundaries of human civilization across time and space. They are pioneers, and we are all participants.

This article will focus solely on megastructure architecture in the film "Dune," aiming to express respect and introduce "Dune" to more people.

The trailers released before the "Dune" film was screened already contained many scenes and buildings ripe for analysis, but a movie is not meant to be watched frame by frame. Stripping away the film's rhythm prevents us from grasping a certain feeling— the epic grandeur born from "grandness." This has been a frequent topic of discussion since the film's release, with many expressing dissatisfaction with its pacing, which is sluggish and tiresome. However, viewers familiar with director Denis Villeneuve's works, such as "Blade Runner 2049" and "Arrival," will know that his method of presenting grand scenes with a subdued tone is consistent. Even though all three of these works contain breathtaking elements, there's no deliberate attempt to awe the audience.

As the protagonist, Paul Atreides is about to leave his family's home planet, Caladan, the interstellar fleet slowly ascends from the sea level, only shown in a distant view. Similarly, on Arrakis, the dune planet where the story unfolds, whether it's the departure of the Harkonnen fleet, the vast terrain upon the arrival of the Atreides family, or the city castles nestled in the mountain gorges, all are silently presented, either in aerial shots or as they sweep past. Whenever these grand scenes are depicted, it feels like we've entered a 0.5x speed time and space, where enormity and grandeur are already present.

Sudden awe would disrupt the film's epic grandeur. Faced with the story of "Dune," spanning millennia and requiring space folding for interstellar travel, the extraordinary temporal and spatial spans are expressed in a cold, restrained manner. There are no flashy camera tricks or editing gimmicks, leaving enough space for the marvelous elements to speak for themselves. Just as monuments must be erected in large squares to create memorability, Denis Villeneuve's subtlety and "grand squares" serve a similar purpose, allowing "grandness" to speak for itself— a great epic is a self-proving epic. "Annotations" would seem redundant.

If one pays attention to the scenes in the film, one will notice that both the base buildings and the spaceships are massive, simple, and object-like in their design. Contrasted with the human scale— unquestionably "gigantic," perhaps different people have different standards for "simplicity." I want to introduce the discussion on "order" and "decoration" in architecture to prove the concept of "object-likeness" while explaining what "object-likeness" means.

"Objects" are "manufactured," just as expressions acquire the properties of "order," born out of chaos. As expressions of order, material formations— the universe being taken out of chaos. The qualitative nature of our understanding of matter is fundamentally geometrical. Geometry is the knowledge form that measures order, enabling the understanding of matter.

The geometric solid definition in the film "Dune" defines spaceships and base buildings as a "creation." The less "decoration" they have, the stronger the sense of order. The more precise and "simpler" the content expressed by the material, the easier it is for us to recognize and remember it, distinguishing it from the cosmic environment or the natural geographical environment of the planet, forming cognition, and reinforcing its "gigantic" features.

If you don't understand this self-proving aspect, it's okay. We can also accept it directly as an aesthetic known as "BDO" (big dumb object), a classic sci-fi aesthetic: a gigantic object that remains silent due to a lack of information from excessive "simplicity." It is manufactured, but the technological knowledge level of the civilization that created it far exceeds our understanding. This gives rise to a mysterious sense, an awe of the power behind the unknown. As the saying goes, Human fear stems from the unknown. Tightening it further is the fear of the unpredictable power behind the unknown.

Different from the mysterious monolith that runs from beginning to end in Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," or the silent alien spaceship appearing in "Arrival" above the Earth, most of the "BDOs" in "Dune" are known as creations of highly advanced human civilizations, eliminating the fear and mystery caused by the unknown. After demystifying, we will refer to them collectively as megastructures for convenience.

I believe this setting is the source of the grand epic feeling in the film: megastructures are directly used as symbols of power, and megastructures are the "visualizations" of power in the movie. Some have summarized the movie "Dune" as a combination of "Blade Runner 2049" and "Game of Thrones." To understand the megastructures and power stories in "Dune," and even more the symbolic use of megastructure imagery in many more sci-fi films, further understanding of the relationship between megastructures and "power" is needed.

• Analysis of Megastructure and Power in ‘Dune’