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PRINTER-FRIENDLY VIEW 
Review of Dune (2021) (Hans Zimmer/Various)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... if you believe that intentionally abrasive sound design
can function well as film music, Hans Zimmer's endless hunt for radical
new synthetic manipulations defining this overhyped score.
Avoid it... on any of the score's insufferable album presentations if you expect to hear effective music that speaks to interpersonal relations, political intrigue, or most of the other fundamental appeals of Dune.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
Dune: (Hans Zimmer/Various) Long considered one of
the finest literary achievements in science fiction, Frank Herbert's
1965 novel "Dune" has served as temptation for filmmakers ever since.
Cinematic failure awaited the concept in the 1970's, and David Lynch's
1984 adaptation, while ambitious, is best appreciated while on
hallucinogens. Somewhat mediocre versions on television in the early
2000's failed to satisfy as well, and when the rights came available for
a Denis Villeneuve film based on the novel in the late 2010's, a mammoth
effort was made to finally realize the scope of the story on screen.
With a story destined to be divided into two films, 2021's Dune
covers the first half of the tale, establishing the desert planet of
Arrakis as the lone provider of a spice mineral that essentially allows
interstellar travel. Various political houses battle over the planet,
placing a young future messiah in a position to not only take control of
Arrakis' native populations and elements but thus rule the galaxy as
well. The story is filled with interpersonal intrigue, betrayal,
mysticism, romance, and battle, and the 2021 movie takes the plot up to
the point where the messiah, Paul Atreides, joins with the planet's
local population, the Fremen, to fight off the invading forces of the
House Harkonnen and a duplicitous Emperor of the known universe.
Intriguingly, for many readers and viewers, most of the best story
points in Dune come during its first half, so this initial movie
frontloads much of the conflict and intrigue while postponing the
romance for the second entry. Critics and audiences were generally
pleased with Villeneuve's vision, praise for the visuals of the film
widespread. The split release between theatres and streaming exclusive
to one provider didn't allow Dune to hit early grosses that were
expected of it, but Warner Brothers did not hesitate to continue moving
forward with the sequel. Composer Hans Zimmer had collaborated with
Villeneuve on Blade Runner 2049, and the two men share similar
notions of how futuristic and otherworldly film music should sound and
function, so it was no surprise that Zimmer bypassed Tenet to
tackle Dune. The composer had also been a life-long fan of the
novel, though he confessed to having never seen the 1984 film.
Just as 2021's Dune as a movie experienced an extensive marketing blitz, so too did Zimmer's music for it, his hype machine cranked up to the max for what he considers one of his finest experiments. These kinds of soundtracks from Zimmer are challenging to approach, for the composer and the press will attempt to convince you that the music exists in an awesome realm somewhere between revolutionary and sophisticated, post-modern and progressive. If you bypass all that overbearing promotion, you encounter a surprisingly predictable Zimmer score when considering his methodology and basic strategic tendencies. He remains a composer searching for a better answer to a question already answered brilliantly by other composers in the past, striving to blaze a trail that not only pushes film music in new directions but also affirms his personal efforts to innovate new sounds and different processes. When hearing Zimmer and those he inspires talk ceaselessly about finding "new" sounds with which to populate a film score, a listener cannot help but roll his or her eyes at the extent to which the results of these efforts fail to really push any envelope whatsoever. No vaunted creation of an all-new sound, manipulating an organic, real-life tone into something "futuristic," can achieve greatness unless a composer knows how to wield that sound in a way to touch the heart and reinforce a narrative. All the best musical technology and experience in the world does not matter when the finished result fails in its fundamental purpose as a film score. How you accept Zimmer's approach to Dune depends completely on whether or not you subscribe to the philosophy of ambience that Zimmer and Villeneuve firmly believed was the best fit for this concept. They very intentionally abandoned the traditional norms of space opera science fiction scoring, opting against an orchestral presence, easy tonalities, and cohesive thematic identities for characters and locales. Their decision to use music as a vague ambient sound effect throughout the film, highlighted by occasional bursts of traditional applications, yields a result that is not truly a film score. In part due to Zimmer's methodology, the music is applied just like sound effects are adapted from a library of options, presenting almost no opportunity for his work to enjoy the benefits that countless other, properly spotted and developed scores have proven successful at supplying. Unfortunately, Dune is a score of only emotional immediacy at a primordial level and not much more. It seeks to extend general feelings rather than provide specific depth to the narrative. For some listeners, this choice will indeed seem compelling, especially when paired with the visuals on screen. They might agree with Zimmer that foreign worlds deserve bizarre and otherworldly music. After all, music in that universe and time period may not resemble anything of ours. But that argument has been lost time and time again, because Zimmer and Villeneuve forget that film scores don't exist to accentuate bizarre concepts on screen; rather, the music helps translate them for us to understand. After all, Dune is still essentially a story about people, and film music traditions, include leitmotifs, accessible tonalities, and narrative evolution are all key in assisting the music reveal that the world of the Atreides, Fremen, and Harkonnen experiences all the same perils of life that we do. By supplying a score that offers no such connection for the listener, Zimmer tells us that not only are the worlds unrelatable, but the characters and their relationships are as well. It's a frustrating strategic misadventure for a composer to assume that a different universe needs different music, and that point is proven in excess by Dune. No, doubt, Toto ran into this problem with the Lynch film in 1984, and yet the band managed to offer a hybrid of new age, rock, and orchestral themes that served the concept surprisingly well. Zimmer never consulted Toto's score, as he is, presumably, beyond needing such reference. But for all the ills of the 1984 film, Zimmer could have indeed learned from the triumphs and mistakes made by Toto and crew, for his choice to abandon the orchestral force and rock coolness in favor of solely the new age sound design is a catastrophic error, one conveniently reinforced by Villeneuve. Zimmer's preferred methodology fits perfectly with this unwise tact by the director, too, allowing Villeneuve and his editors to butcher what little cohesive narrative had actually existed in the early development of Zimmer's music. The composer no longer writes music to the actual picture, which sets up disasters like this score to happen. His long concept suites for Dune did have the nascent makings of a more thematically tight tapestry, but very little of that thought survived into the finished score. Some listeners might blame Zimmer's collaborative production habits for such faults, too. The finished recording for Dune has 61 cues, only two of which executed solely by Zimmer, and the others are fleshed out by David Fleming (22 cues), Steve Mazzaro (15 cues), Andrew Kawczynski (15 cues), and Steven Doar (4 cues), among a few others. Also brought on board was Klaus Schulze of Tangerine Dream to contribute one concept track as a nostalgic nod. Zimmer's role as lead composer and producer on the team yielded original adagio-style music for the film's teaser trailer, as well as an adaptation of "Eclipse" by Roger Waters for the fuller trailer. Neither recording has anything in common with the finished score. The composer's enthusiasm was so great that he even arranged his music into a background listening experience for a book about the film, and perhaps not surprisingly, he had already written 90 minutes of music for the sequel by the debut of Dune. This labor of love led to a result that stands among the composer's least accessible and enjoyable career works, a result of all the things Zimmer didn't want in his score. Foremost, there would be no orchestra. In fact, there are no tonally organic sounds at all in this score, everything manipulated to their detriment. He takes recordings of an electric cello, electric guitar, various brass, Armenian duduk, Scottish bagpipes, and female voices and alters them in grating ways so that they sound like all-new synthetic modules. These efforts yield one of the composer's truly silly, mind-boggling, media-whipping quotes: "It's an electronic score, not an orchestral one, but in a peculiar way it's one of the more organic scores I've done." (Say, what?) This score led to several other amusing Zimmer quotes about instrumentation as well, including this gem: "Part of what makes all of this so much fun is the misuse of acoustic instruments. Curiously, the rhythm of the drums and the percussion keeps appearing as organized chaos. I tried to think of something that maybe in 10,000 years you would think of it as a good groove, but right now you'd just hear it as a little iconic motif played by percussion, like weird code." Or, if that quote requires too much drug use to appreciate, you could enjoy the following indulgence: "I just tried to do things that are humanly impossible by pushing the envelope of technology. I asked for more things to superimpose the sonic quality of one instrument onto another so you would [create] these impossible sounds." You cannot blame some listeners for trying to tune out such pompous drivel. Amazingly, another aspect of successful film music that Zimmer did not want to develop in Dune was a thematic core, aiming his motifs instead at abstract concepts. Quotes about this topic from the composer are even more odd given that his composition actually did include several themes, including one primary idea that does loosely tie the score together. Another feature that Zimmer didn't seek in this score was a clear tone of voice. He and Villeneuve concentrated on several female vocalists for the score, which makes sense given that women hold so much power in the story, but their recordings are so badly manipulated throughout the work that they lose all the romance and elegance inherent in it. (Brian Tyler didn't make this mistake in his fantastic Children of Dune.) Zimmer spent a whole year recording these women, including Gladiator co-writer Lisa Gerrard, and yet their final form in the recording is often disruptive, rough, and annoying. Incidentally, Zimmer also wrote songs using lyrics from the Herbert novel and recorded actor Josh Brolin performing them, but they never made the cut. Nothing about the score is meant to be accessible, so it's no surprise when the work leaves you cold. It is, most amazingly, the kind of work you would expect to hear from a new age artist totally out of his league scoring a feature film. The soundtrack album is thus the basic key, and it was up to the filmmakers to apply it reasonably to the film. This review will cover all three soundtrack albums released for Dune in 2021 (the first two re-issued together by Mondo in 2022), a sum of more than four and a half hours that accomplishes surprisingly little in that running time. Despite all that length, only in the final cue of the film, "My Road Leads Into the Desert," does Zimmer present his first meaningful catharsis with any theme. Careful listeners will note that Dune's themes and instrumental motifs do exist, but they're terribly mismanaged. Because Zimmer didn't want his themes or ethnic instrumentation to be readily identifiable, he intentionally states them in obtuse layers of dissonance and at excruciatingly slow tempos. Be prepared for melodies in this score to convey notes at a pace of one every 20 to 30 seconds, explaining why a concept cue that could have been four minutes long ends up clocking in at fifteen. Extraordinary patience is required for a listener determined to make sense of the thematic aspects of this music, with the film's placement of cues not always sensible and the albums' terribly slow pacing not illuminating much, either. The main theme of Dune is nowhere near as catchy as Toto's simple and memorable identity for the 1984 film. Instead, Zimmer offers three related ideas as the representation of Paul Atreides and his destiny, and these together form the main "theme." Some listeners have speculated that this idea is a generic representation of the Kwisatz Haderach (messiah) concept, its repeated ascending phrases suggesting greatness to come. Occasionally, the two offshoots of this idea make welcome appearances, one a major-key passage of sensitivity (perhaps a fledgling love theme) and the other a rising dramatic figure coincidentally similar to Toto's main theme but functioning more like that score's prophecy theme. The main idea itself is obnoxiously derivative of the lamentation theme from Zimmer's The Peacemaker when performed by solo female voice and Ennio Morricone's The Mission when slowed down in phrasing. In the score proper, this main theme emerges in "Herald of the Change" via masculine contemplation, with bass dwelling and a lack of sophistication that sounds constipated, as if it cannot give birth to something more substantial. At 1:13 into "Gom Jabbar," the only album cue credited solely to Zimmer, a sharply distorted wailing woman performs the main theme along with an abrasive crescendo; for the purposes of this review, this destiny-specific performance of the main theme will be referred to as the Wonder Woman theme, not the one written by Zimmer, ironically, but the equivalent catchy call of the siren heard excessively and humorously throughout Tom Holkenborg's Zack Snyder's Justice League earlier the same year. No ethnic associations were apparently intended. Listeners seeking the clearest definition of the theme will encounter it in the deep, bass string-like performances of "The One," which leads to the touch of major-key hope at the end, perhaps a romance identity, that remains all too rare in this score. In "Ripples in the Sand," the theme is conveyed on solo voice and processed duduk as an interlude to rumbling atmospherics with hints of the sandworm elements. The rising figures resembling Toto's Dune return in "Visions of Chani" but dissolve into pointless rumbling until 2:24, when the major-key alternation of notes returns from "The One;" the main theme is reprised more formally, though only slightly, to conclude the cue. Without much fanfare, "Holy War" shifts from shades of the Atreides material back to the main theme at its start. The main theme suffers most in the middle of Dune, very subtle, strummed, and plucked without much emotion in "Sanctuary" and hinted barely in the middles of "Premonition" and "Sandstorm," the latter cue concluding with wretched, analog-like sounds. A touch of major-key elegance again recalling the 1984 score breaks up the very slow, inconsequential monotony at 3:30 into "Stillsuits." More than its peers, very little happens in this cue to advance any musical narrative, but the tide turns in "My Road Leads Into the Desert." While the majority of this cue also accomplishes nothing, a loud electric, voice, and brass-like burst slows the main theme dramatically at 2:28. It's the score's one moment of truly engaging connection even if it retains minimal forward movement. The wailing Wonder Woman version of the main theme serves as a nicely tonal conclusion to this chapter of the story. The main theme and its variants exist throughout the Zimmer concept album called "The Dune Sketchbook," a product that follows his Wonder Woman 1984 mould fairly closely and has become the subject of its own unsupported hype, but these performances of the theme meander without any more sense of satisfaction. It is heard on solo voice about a minute into "I See You in My Dreams," a track that is easy to digest until the 13-minute mark, when intrusive synth pulses and rhythms lead to spoken words in its final passage that are distracting. (Some listeners might mistake parts of it for a 1990's Enigma song.) While "The Shortening of the Way" deals more with the Aquaman-inspired slurring of pitch that supplements the Atreides material in the score, the rising main theme figures that recall the 1984 score's prelude return at 7:36. Low key vocals and then solo electric guitar carry the theme in "Paul's Dream," with the same phrase repeated over and over again under the guitar and only mundane chord shifts to move things along. At 4:47 into that track, Zimmer returns to the Wonder Woman motif for Paul's destiny, this time along with clanging Atreides percussion. The slight distortion to the voice really hampers these performances, making it sound unrefined and grating. A reprise of the idea in "The Shortening of the Way" is heard in "Moon Over Caladan" while the atrociously incomprehensible "Mind-Killer" finishes its insanity with even more manipulated renditions of the Wonder Woman wailing version of the main theme. Zimmer's inability to clearly enunciate this rather simple theme is baffling, and its applications to the film are only barely functional. The music for House Atreides in Dune is split between the pairs of ascending notes that relate to Paul's material and a more specific piece written for noble bagpipes at Villeneuve's request. In between, Zimmer offers the Aquaman techniques of electric guitar coolness as in "Leaving Caladan," though slapping rock percussion and cymbalom-like effects are pushed at excessive volume, too forceful and inelegant to be cool. The slurring Aquaman melodrama continues in "Armada," one of the score's better cues, the bagpipes making only a cameo in a brief interlude. Good passages early in this cue are ruined by demonic groaning later, a technique Zimmer maintains mostly for the evil Sardaukar warriors. Zimmer seemingly can't resist some deep male choral phrasing in "Blood for Blood," though the cue transitions to the more familiar female wailing. "The Fall" continues the fragmentation from the prior cues with quiet suffering. On the Sketchbook album, "House Atreides" summarizes this material with solo female voice layers to open the theme. The track is either extremely subtle or loud, sound effects of chains rattling and slapped wood at 3:35 unnecessarily intrusive. The electric guitar blasts that follow are joined by bagpipes in an especially awkward pairing; the attempts by Zimmer and crew to make bagpipes sound muscular are outright hilarious. A reprise of the Atreides slurring of pitch effect continues in "The Shortening of the Way." Meanwhile, House Harkonnen receives a pounding, static motif that plods up and down around key. It sometimes sounds distractingly like Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" when notes are repeated in a variant, making one wonder if the Harkonnen baddies meant to go to the vault at the Nakatomi Plaza instead of Arrakis. The idea is hinted in the latter half of "Armada" on organ-like tones and stews throughout "Burning Palms" on fake brass in a long crescendo of layers. For some reason, the fake lower brass tones sound like an approaching propeller plane at the end. The theme returns at 0:56 into "Holy War" and occupies most of the cue's middle without going anywhere, and it opens "Premonition" with Sardaukar-inspired demonic voices in the background, stewing for a while before taking a loud, angry, and mostly unlistenable stance at the end of the cue. On the Sketchbook album, this Harkonnen theme is particularly shortchanged, appearing only in simplistic and brutish tones lacking any style or substance at 8:09 into "The Shortening of the Way." The Bene Gesserit witches of Dune receive a somewhat intriguing vocal approach that promises far more intelligence that it delivers. In "Bene Gesserit," the motif overshadows the main theme at the outset of frantic whispering; most of the cue is inaudible in between the early stewing portions and later vocal outbursts that are extraordinarily irritating. Anyone dying to hear more of this disturbing salad mix of vocal turbulence will appreciate "Song of the Sisters" on the Sketchbook album. Not only does this track feature one of the worst openings in all of film music history, but the recording is either inconsequential, inaudible sound effects or truly awful, pounding chants, with nothing in between. The track is more cohesive in its latter half, but its annoying layering keeps it from being decent music. One would expect the sandworms of Arrakis to receive some kind of motif, but Zimmer struggles here. On the sketchbook, you can hear the composer playing with ideas in "Shai-hulud," atonal, vague atmosphere with rattling and spoken effects not yielding any discernable motif. In the score proper, this material doesn't do much to inform "Ripples in the Sand," which instead concerns itself with mostly the main theme. Instrumental applications sometimes stay consistent to a concept in the story, such as the throat singing for the Sardaukar warriors, metallic percussion for the orange spice, and the duduk for Arrakis, the last of which surprisingly stereotypical to the environment and not befitting as a result of Zimmer's brainstorm when he travelled to the deserts of Utah for inspiration on this score. Altogether, these themes and instrumental motifs are haphazardly applied to the film and accomplish almost nothing aside from minimal immediate needs until the final cue. More problematic is Zimmer's absolute failure to modulate the impact of his music in the transitory modes. He either stews in slow, often incomprehensive atmospherics or he dials the intensity up to ten and blasts you with extraordinarily tough dissonance. There is no middle in this score, and that is why it is poor film music. Zimmer detractors will note the presence of a few of the composer's long crescendos here, a technique that is increasingly tiresome with each successive score. While movies often try to stage their scenes so that a crescendo is appropriate, life doesn't always work that way, nor does the narrative often support the technique. The composer's only alternative is to underplay the music's dynamism, producing detached and ineffectual boredom for major swaths of the work. The primary album for Dune offers some tracks that are fairly unique outside of the passages that touch in some basic way upon one of Zimmer's undercooked themes, and they include some of the product's easier and tougher listening experiences. Opening the score in highly obnoxious fashion is "Dream of Arrakis," which explores the rattling effects tied to House Atreides in some applications but extends beyond that once on Arrakis. There are some shades of dissonance for the sandworms in this cue, but on the whole it is a massively wasted opportunity to establish some of the score's core identities. The only solo Zimmer track on the main album is "Gom Jabbar," an underwhelming cue to say the least. Pointless rhythmic thumping, rattling, and fake string dissonance is an annoying method of accompanying "Arrakeen." A few pleasant chord shifts await in "Night on Arrakis," but the cue is ultimately equally pointless. Its bass pulses and later whispering voices are offered with unnecessary doses of distortion. In some ways, the prettiest cue is "Stranded," but it remains orphaned in the presentation. Of moderate interest is "Ornithopter" in that it uses voices to emulate the sounds of insects, but that technique, along with mostly rattling effects over random chord shifts, makes for terrible music. These cues don't offer much assistance to the overall narrative of the main album for Dune. Whereas the Sketchbook product at least offers extremely long tracks as a method of building a mood, the main album doesn't function well as a more traditional narrative conveyance of the music. Normally, with four and a half hours of music available on album, one would imagine that a decent compilation of highlights could be assembled into a memorable suite of music. But with Dune, highlights for such suites are hard to come by. In fact, there are few individual cues to recommend as an addition to a Zimmer compilation. This isn't to say that this score is as awful a listening experience on album as Dunkirk or Chappie. Rather, it strays closer to Widows territory in that it suffers bursts of irritation in an otherwise completely boring atmospheric haze. Zimmer did make his albums available in surround sound if you desire a fully immersive experience with his sound design. And the score really is just that: sound design. One of the ironies of film music of this era is that many of the most prominent scores released in surround sound are for productions associated with or inspired by Zimmer's sound, leaving the most dynamic orchestral music to a pair of channels. Zimmer was so enthralled by Dune that he arranged his music into a third album to accompany a book, "The Art and Soul of Dune," written by one of the movie's executive producers. This "companion book music" is clearly meant to be heard while reading the book, and it is thus the easiest listening experience of the three albums. Don't expect any significant thematic development here, though, as it's purely an atmospheric endeavor. "Foreword" offers pleasantly light vocal ambience of no thematic significance while the moody "This is Only the Beginning" has extremely long sustains with vague main theme references, accomplishing almost nothing narratively in over 14 minutes of music. The pleasant ambience of "Caladan" follows the ascending pairs motif but at a very, very slow tempo. Failing to qualify as music is "Giedi Prime," which sounds like releases from compressed air canisters. The latter half of this track seemingly uses under ten notes in five minutes along with distorted throat singing. Also not music is "Salusa Secundus," which is creepy ambience of otherworldly groaning akin to the vintage noises one heard while waiting in line within Disneyland's Space Mountain circa 1985. "Arrakis" has vague connections to the score's main theme, but they are too slow to easily notice, so excruciatingly deliberate that they are devoid of any depth of emotion. Slight dissonant tension rumbles for six minutes into "The Attack," followed by the distorted Wonder Woman motif at the end. "Deep Desert" offers very slight solo female elegance but is mostly useless, sustained synth notes. Finally, the 27-minute track "Fremen" opens with very slow, repeated main theme statements on mutated solo voices. Secondary phrasing inhabits the middle of the seemingly interminable cue, but with sequences that rely upon one note per 30 seconds, it's impossible to appreciate. More lyrical than the other tracks, "Fremen" does present a satisfying ending even if not accomplishing much. Compared to the other two albums, that of "The Art and Soul of Dune," released without the book for those not inclined to read, is especially pointless. An epic of the size of Dune requires music that actively engages the listener rather than trying to disorient or accentuate the strangeness of foreign worlds. It must bring heart to the interpersonal relations of the story, and Zimmer fails miserably at this task. Toto's 1984 score was intentionally campy; Zimmer's is unintentionally campy, if even that. The former ironically served its purpose far better. In a perfect world, Bollywood maestro A.R. Rahman would have scored this film, and he would have done so without allowing his hype to guide his artistry.
TRACK LISTINGS:
2021 Regular Album:
Total Time: 74:13
2021 Dune Sketchbook Album: Total Time: 101:45
2021 Art and Soul of Dune Album: Total Time: 103:33
2022 Mondo Deluxe Album: Total Time: 175:58
NOTES & QUOTES:
The packaging of the regular and "Dune Sketchbook" albums
contain the same interior artwork and text, with only very minor
differences. The artwork on the main album is crooked. Surprisingly,
neither booklet contains any additional information about the score
or film. The 2022 Mondo album's insert offers no such information,
either, and it contains multiple errors in the track listings on its
back artwork.
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The reviews and other textual content contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Christian Clemmensen at Filmtracks Publications. All artwork and sound clips from Dune are Copyright © 2021, 2022, WaterTower Music (Sketchbook), WaterTower Music (Regular), WaterTower Music (Art and Soul), Mondo (Deluxe Edition) and cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 11/7/21 and last updated 11/10/22. |
