Writer Chuck Wendig rhapsodizes about the worldbuilding in the new Dune movie.
“Dune as a storyworld has a lot of it,” Wendig says. “It’s actually so crunchy and obtuse I’m not even sure I entirely understood it —Up until now. Until this movie.” Wendig identifies several reasons why the worldbuilding was so successful:
- When the worldbuilding is inessential to the movement of the story, it discards it.
- When the worldbuilding is essential to it, it folds it into the experiences of the characters.
- It does not promote worldbuilding as the story’s priority. It demotes it to being only support.
- Most importantly, (director) Villeneuve trusts the audience.
Wendig notes the habit of some novels and films to show off their worldbuilding, either with a voice-over, encyclopedia references, or a big speech, which temporarily subjugates the narrative drive of the story. “Nobody wants a story to be a lecture, even if that lecture is just trying to teach a class about its own history, culture, science, food, religion, what-have-you,” Wendig says. “In Dune, Villeneuve is glad mostly to expect that the characters of this world know what’s happening, and to just move through it, and past it…Villeneuve trusts you, the audience, to gather the context clues and to move on.”
When the audience can’t make assumptions based on context, Villeneuve uses in-narrative experiences to bring them up to speed. “When it’s time to know what a Stillsuit is, the narrative is allowed do double-duty in the story — it’s about the suit being fitted to the Duke and to Paul, and in that we get a host of vital narrative bits: we meet Liet Kynes; we see how fiercely protective Gurney is over Leto; we see that Paul is able to intuit things about Fremen life and culture, and also that Kynes recognizes it and is aware of the prophecy,” Wendig writes. In contrast, when the audience sees a “sand compactor”, there’s no special explanation of what that is.
“It’s a good approach, because it doesn’t bog you down in details, and it makes sure that the focus of the story is on what matters most in the story: the characters,” Wendig says.
