[COLUMN] Denis Villeneuve's Dune Owes As Much to The Godfather as to Star Wars | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

NOTE: This piece contains spoilers for Dune, Dune: Part Two, The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II.

Star Wars is a default point of comparison for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films. This makes sense. Star Wars is shorthand for science-fantasy space opera in the popular consciousness, and Frank Herbert’s Dune was a significant influence on George Lucas’ epic blockbuster. However, watching Dune: Part Two, it is obvious that Star Wars is not Villeneuve’s primary cinematic or narrative influence in crafting his adaptation. Villeneuve is aiming at another New Hollywood classic: The Godfather.

On the surface, this might seem like a strange comparison. After all, The Godfather is a period piece about an immigrant crime family set against the backdrop of mid-20th-century America, while Dune is a futuristic epic that unfolds across multiple planets and features gigantic sandworms. In terms of genre and aesthetic, the two projects are literally worlds apart from one another. However, Francis Ford Coppola’s crime classics undoubtedly inform Villeneuve’s adaptational choices.

This is most obvious in the film’s closing moments. Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) has conquered Arrakis and forced the Emperor Shaddam IV (Christopher Walken) into supplication. Shaddam falls to his knees and kisses the family ring on Paul’s finger, a gesture of complete submission. Paul’s partner, Chani (Zendaya), looks at what her lover has become. She decides that she wants no part of this. She walks out of the royal chamber, into the desert. She sets herself apart.

The sequence evokes the classic final scene of The Godfather, in which Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) has managed to protect his family from all external threats. He holds court in his father’s office. Peter Clemenza (Richard Castellano) bends over to kiss the ring on Michael’s finger, a tradition that the real mob would later adopt from the movie. Michael’s wife, Kay (Diane Keaton),watches from outside the study, realizing what Michael has become. A door closes between them.

Both The Godfather and Dune: Part Two close on a close-up of the face of their female lead, a choice that underscores the movies’ central themes, inviting the audience to look at the film’s male lead through a different set of eyes. It’s a reframing of perspective that communicates a profoundly tragic idea. These men have become powerful and influential. However, in doing so, they have alienated themselves from the women that they purport to love.

To be fair, Villeneuve is obviously very heavily influenced by Francis Ford Coppola. In particular, he shoots Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård) in a manner that directly invokes both Captain Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen) and Colonel Walter Kurtz (Marlon Brando) in Apocalypse Now. “I think that was one of those movies I saw three times as a kid, because I was so blown away by it,” Villeneuve admitted. “Little did I know, years later I'd be tapping into it. It's all derivative, right?”

As much as Dune evokes fantasy epics like Lord of the Rings, its structure is closer to that of a Greek tragedy. After all, Atreides is a Greek surname, tied to the myth of Agamemnon. In The Oresteia, a trilogy of plays written by Aeschylus, Agamemnon was a military leader who took the prophet Cassandra as his concubine in the aftermath of the Siege of Troy. Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to reach Troy, prompting his wife Clytemnestra to betray and murder him in turn.

Frank Herbert’s son, Brian, has argued that, through Dune, his father was “cautioning against pride and overconfidence, that form of narcissism described in Greek tragedies.” There are any number of obvious echoes, even beyond the family name. Like Cassandra, Paul is destined to see the horrors that wait in the future and largely powerless to avoid them. Sworn to avenge the murder of his father, Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac), Paul must do terrible things.

In broad terms, this is very similar to the plot of The Godfather. Critics have also identified a thematic overlap between The Godfather and The Oresteia. The idea of The Godfather as “a Greek tragedy” is so ubiquitous that it is even repeated by producer Al Ruddy (Miles Teller) in The Offer, Paramount’s celebratory miniseries about the making of The Godfather. Like Paul, Michael is a son motivated to avenge the attempted murder of his father Vito (Marlon Brando) by a sinister conspiracy.

Early in Dune, there is a conversation between father and son, in which it seems like Leto might want something different for Paul. When Leto describes Paul as “the future of House Atreides”, Paul responds, “What if I’m not, dad?” Leto considers the question. “I told my father I didn’t want this either,” Leto admits. “I wanted to be a pilot.” He reflects that Paul will be called to lead. “And if your answer is no, you’ll still be the only thing I ever needed you to be,” Leto admits. “My son.”

There’s a similar dynamic between Michael and Vito. Michael was always kept separate from the family business, even going so far as to enlist in the army. “I never wanted this for you,” Vito admits to Michael late in the movie, after Michael has already been drawn into this cycle of perpetual violence. “I don't apologize, that's my life. But I thought that when it was your time that you would be the one to hold the strings. Senator Corleone. Governor Corleone, or something.”

Both The Godfather and Dune: Part Two are tragedies about young men trying to chart their own course through the world, but who find themselves inevitably drawn back to violence and brutality to protect their family. Villeneuve has even acknowledged the similarities. The central tragedy of both Michael and Paul is that they become monsters through this process. They end up destroying the very thing that they love and alienating the people that they are trying to keep safe.

In The Godfather, Part II, Michael asks his mother (Morgana King), “What did Papa think, deep in his heart? He was being strong, strong for his family. But by being strong for his family could he lose it?” In Dune: Part Two, when Paul realizes what he will have to do to triumph over the Emperor, he confesses to Chani, “I’m afraid I’ll lose you.” Chani assures Paul, “You will never lose me, as long as you stay who you are.” That’s the tragedy of both Paul and Michael; they can’t stay who they are.

Both The Godfather, Part II and Dune: Part Two build one of the central thematic preoccupations of Greek tragedy: the spilling of familial blood and the collapse of the family. At the climax of The Godfather, Part II, Michael oversees the execution of his brother Fredo (John Cazale) for betraying the family. At the end of Dune: Part Two, Paul executes his grandfather Baron Harkonnen and murders his cousin Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen (Austin Butler) in ritual combat.

There’s also a broader sense in which The Godfather and Dune aren’t just individual or familial tragedies. They are epics that play as grand commentaries on contemporary American self-image. The Godfather is a movie about American capitalism, to the point that its first line is “I believe in America.” As Manohla Dargis argues, The Godfather speaks “to a truth about the American character.” The Godfather, Part II is a film obsessed with the fall of Rome, the decline of an empire.

Dune is grappling with similar ideas. The first film held its North American premiere on the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, and its depiction of the fall of House Atreides on the deserts of Arrakis resonated uncomfortably with the contemporaneous withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan. If The Godfather was an allegorical American tragedy for the era of Vietnam and Watergate, then Dune served a similar function for a country still reeling from the War on Terror.

There are other ways in which Dune draws from The Godfather. Villeneuve’s director of photography, Greig Fraser, has cited Godfather cinematographer Gordon Willis as a major influence on his work, admitting of The Batman, “You can’t do a film with darkness without referencing the master, can you?”Dune adopts a similar approach to its cinematography, painting with light and shadow. The sepia-tinted light of Arrakis and deep shadows of Geidi Prime both evoke the look of The Godfather.

Even the casting of Christopher Walken as Shaddam IV is an example of this influence. In Star Wars, the Empire is populated by British character actors like Peter Cushing, Julian Glover or Richard E. Grant. The Emperor is played by Ian McDiarmid. On the other hand, not only is Walken distinctly American, he’s representative of the kind of actors who thrived in the New Hollywood era. It would not be surprising if Al Pacino had been the first choice. Early in Dune: Part Two, it’s acknowledged that Leto was “like a son” to the Emperor, and Leto is played by Oscar Isaac, an actor often positioned as “the heir to Pacino.”

Indeed, Walken won his Oscar for his work in Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter. Not only was that part of the same wave of Vietnam movies that included Apocalypse Now, it also co-starred Godfather veterans Robert DeNiro and John Cazale. Walken is not an actor who disappears into roles, particularly in his old age – this year there was an entire Super Bowl commercial about Walken’s inherent Walken-ness. His casting tethers Dune to a particular tradition of Hollywood filmmaking.

Villeneuve’s Dune films are a triumph. They are rightly being discussed in terms of George Lucas’ Star Wars. However, they’re also best understood in the context of other films of that era. Villeneuve has hybridized the scale and the spectacle of Star Wars with the grand tragedy of The Godfather, and in doing so has crafted two gigantic blockbusters that feel like worthy successors and companions to some of the best films that Hollywood ever produced.