Yesterday I went to a screening of the movie, Dune 2. What got me up from my cozy Sunday morning comfort was the added opportunity to attend the live interview with co-star Javier Bardem after the movie viewing. I navigated  L.A traffic and got there just before they closed the doors and enjoyed watching a screen on a screen about a hundred times larger than my normal viewing purview, the trusty bulk of my old iPhone 7S. 

Dune 2 is a follow up of its epic predecessor, Dune 1, which, by the way, I hadn’t seen. This fact should illustrate the lackluster motivation the project itself held for me. I’m more of an indie film micro budget connoisseur. But the only expense I incurred was gas and time and I did have an agenda that compelled me to spend two hours and two minutes sitting among a throng of strangers.

Arriving with just enough time to secure my favorite movie viewing perch at the rear of this state of the art industry specific facility, I was happy as a clam. Then with a bombastic crescendos of image and sound the desert planet of Arrakis took over the little room for the next 122 minutes. 

Around minute 70 my body started signaling me that it had had enough sand blown war images and mutilation of still warm corpses with water extraction needles. I needed to hitch a sand worm myself and escape Arrakis and probably would have hit pause if I’d had the choice but sandwiched between my peers I didn’t and anyway I was there to observe Javier Bardem without a camera lens between us.

As an actor who had created a terrifyingly real creature in the form of Anton Chigurh in the 2007 Cohen Brother’s film No Country for Old Men, embedded in his post-Beatles machine-like persona was a mechanism that grabbed my psyche and followed me home from the theatre, lurking in the shadows of my life for months afterward. Bardem’s personification of the underbelly of violence’s source reached an archetypal universality that in person he was reluctant to assess or even acknowledge to a useful degree.

So, I was excited to see what he’d provide in the way of cathartic fodder this time. As often happens when I attend live events, the reason I thought I was spending a large chunk of my precious Fall weekend ensconced in the confines of a Hollywood high rise was off base. My professional agenda was to acquire some insight into the intersection of craft and persona when applied to the portrayal of evil, but I ended up uncovering a vastly different and more personal raison d’etre for my attendance.

Before moving forward I feel compelled to balance things out a little about my Dune 2 experience. I would be negligent if I didn’t say that creating such a world as this production succeeds in doing is nothing short of majesty. The mark of the talent above the line and below is astounding in breadth and depth. Having said that, I think the impact could have surpassed it’s momentary entertainment value and addressed the shape of the world as it is today pre-Arrakis.

Therefore, permit me to delve into what feels missing form the overall effect of yesterday’s viewing while it’s still fresh in my mind and alive in the recesses of my sensibilities.

Another caveat: Part of my opinion is informed by age which creates a container of years from which emerges an editorial awareness of the limits of time and space. Film creates illusions of both to varying degrees of success. It is because of the aging experiences racked up from watching films shift technologically and thematically over the decades that I find myself plucked out of the current target audience’s mindset.

Contrary to popular marketing manifestos, I don’t crave something different than Dune 2 as much as I want Dune 2 to aspire to more than it does. My eyes appreciate the ostentatious beauty, make no mistake, it’s seductive qualities enthralled me visually.

For instance, the choice to cast and film women real looking women while avoiding the gratuitous exposure of female flesh freed me from the cringe response to the masculine gaze in many male dominated, 85% in the U.S., film enterprises. But what goes beyond age and gender is something much more relevant to the import of story; it’s what the Freudian protege and later psychological renegade Carl Jung called the collection unconscious. 

From the Jungian perspective, the psyche we all share as a species is ageless and not bound by time but naturally insinuates itself astride authenticity in the neurologically centered process of storytelling. Dune gets the repetitious layer of humanity’s downfall right but fails because it has plowed over the microcosmic reality underneath that bubbles up through the essence of life. It’s a mystery. No one has cracked the code of what existence actually revolves around.

We guess endlessly about life’s underpinnings while we create images that plant our ideas in the unconscious of culture via the power of the most penetrating pictures, the ones moving through our eyes and into our brains with a minimum of 24 per second.

As we continue to build on the legacy of this practice with franchises that last over the decades improving on their ability to entrain the human mind, it is technological hubris to miss an opportunity to advance human awareness of itself in the process.

Without the intention or rather, the responsibility to the past and the future we who take part in disseminating story and hold its reins misfire the potent trigger of influence. From prehistory forward our days culminate around a central sun where sharing stories by the fire of existence forms a bond that keeps us going forward. We aren’t separated from the wild animal nature we harbor but through our creativity our survival provides a canvas upon which we communicate what it means to go beyond merely making it one more day. We inspire. 

Frank Herbert’s world centers around the fractured status of harmony, a timeless theme that all of human history makes manifestly evident. In the recent cinematic retelling of the original 1963 analog form.  Disharmony is ageless in its impact and makes for great story conflict.

However, 60 odd years later much has changed technologically but the feature of Dune 2 hearkens back to the beginning of life. Water is at the center of Villeneuve and Jon Spaihts, adaptation of the story for film.

Unfortunately, as Bardem recounted in his conversation yesterday, the effort to bring human qualities like humor to the script is paramount to believability and not available enough in Dune 2 to counteract the film’s self consciousness.

Bardem’s effort to perform the quality of levity amidst the hubbub of giant cinema is waylaid by the overweight production value of this leg of the burgeoning adaptation of the Herbert book. Most likely compelled by the need for a decent box office return at a time when the heyday of the contemporary Hollywood I knew as an ingenue in the 80s is all but kaput, the target audience for a blockbuster, now more than ever, is young and mostly male.

Here’s where I think the movie’s plot missed out on a cutting edge opportunity. What could have helped build a world that encapsulated Bardem’s vision of his mission to portray villains  and heroes alike with humanity is something Herbert would have embraced had the discovery arrived in the early 60s when he was envisioning the future.

The fantastical world Frank Herbert created during my childhood was effective then but does not stand the test of time in the arena of mega movie success. It could have done so, though. Villeneuve needed to be more aware of the micro aspects of the world he was creating, the sensibilities of nature as they are being expanded in contemporary science were waiting for his very real opportunity to transcend the schlock and shock toxicity that technology encapsulates as it embeds in the cultural unconscious as a meme of progress and most threateningly as a vision we all carry about future-time.

If at our core the elemental need for water alerts us to our focus for survival as the movie implies and ancient Greek philosopher, Thales of Miletus theorized as the “arche” or essential principle of life, then going deeper into its essence provides a key component of reality that could even transport the jaded media consumer of the 21st century.

Although my generation is not the target of this particular flick, even though the franchise’s initial incarnation did coincide with my adolescent bracket back in ‘79 and ‘84, the opportunity to combine entertainment with awe was available to the creators of Dune 2. Scientific advances in the the propensity of water to reach beyond what we learned in school way back when Herbert was writing the original book, that water can flux between the states of solidity, liquidity, and, gaseousness ( Is that a word?) were sorely absent from the life of water in this world set in 10191. 

It’s called EZ water, and it stands for “exclusion state” because Gerald Pollack realized through he and his team’s work that water actually has the ability to mobilize itself. Think of a tree; water comes up through the roots and spreads through the trunk toward the limbs as they reach skyward. Pollard wants to articulate  the phenomenological  engineering behind this ability and is well on his way to a wider reach with his discovery. 

The latest discover about water is being called the Fourth Phase of Water and what a good way to begin what Bardem declined to confirm but even from the back of the theater I could swear I saw the corner of his mouth curl up as it did in the embodiment of Anton Chigurh underneath the frame of that post Beatles mop top.

Just as this new dimension of water helps build resilience in the body of humans, its use in the upcoming version of Dune could propel a tired story into  a world of opportunity for talents like Bardem to explore the human capacity for humor amidst adversity. We could use some new material about how to nurture human resilience about now.

* Listen to Pollack’s own explanation of EZ water in this podcast interview.