Mechanical symbolism in Dune
Dune Part 2 (and Part 1) did something I don't notice much of and don't see nearly enough of, and that's characterizing factions and characters through their equipment. I'm not even talking about costumes, I'm talking about the ship baybeee.
House Atreides has ships, aircraft, and armor that are very angular and square-ish. Their spice harvesters look like NASA crawler carriers, very mundane, very mechanical. Their ships aren't the biggest or most powerful, but still dwarf all the locals when coming in for a landing. Their interior design is likewise fairly minimalist. Their aircraft are ornithopters, which stay aloft using good-ol-fashioned aerodynamics and hard-working nature-mimicking flapping rotors (albiet twice as many rotors as the dragonflys they're based on). If we think of a square as a perfectly "ordered" shape, and nature's methods of flight as the 'ideal', we can see House Atreides, with their endless trapezoids, as the closest this world has to the "good guys." An unassuming, honorable, humble dukedom, though still mired in politics and corruption, still a little (maybe a lot, maybe not enough) too big for their britches. All that communicated by their vehicles.
House Harkonnen is their contrast in every way. The book gave their baron a 'suspension rig' to float around because he was so fat, but the movie ingeniously gave that same tech to their troops as well. They float around effortlessly, climbing mountains with a thought, not even engaging with the terrain, perfectly mirroring their attitude and the superior power they represent. They wear black, the categorically worst color for the desert, and their soldier's faces are obscured, almost inhumanly. Their ships are round, bulbous, shaped like rolls of fat, and so darkly-colored and confusingly-shaped that it's hard to even make out their intricate and crowded details except that they're bristling with guns. Their aircraft use lifting gas balloons. Their spice harvesters are so huge and tall and fat with machinery that they need silly legs just to stay upright. Now of course from all this, we can tell that the Harkonnen are so proud that they consider themselves too good for the ground itself, so rich that they don't have to touch it, so powerful they don't think they need to, so disconnected that it's made them weak.
The Fremen are the simplest and most obvious of course; they have nothing. Their technology is simple. We don't see much of it. I wish their thumpers and compasses looked a little more obviously mechanical, but I can forgive that because they look very simple. The only aircraft we see them using are tiny 2-seater ornithopters with only 4 rotors; a copy of nature's dragonfly, no frills. The instruments onboard look like something out of WWII. Just perfect.
But my favorite of all is the scene where the emperor arrives. The movie shows him going through the flames of reentry, which isn't something movies often show; the director put it in deliberately, because the very fact that he's entering the atmosphere, that he's coming down to the planet at all, is a thing of much importance, spectacle, and monument. And then his ship itself is an enormous shiny chrome sphere. Because of course it is! What symbolism could possibly be better? When you look at him, you can't even see him without just seeing yourself smaller. But as the ship comes in for a landing (and it doesn't even land, it just perpetually hovers) you can see that the mirror isn't perfect. You can see the seams between the mirrors, see it's just square paneling. The emperor is a powerful and proud and magnificent invisible god, except he's NOT, you can see all that splendor and hubris and pride, and see that beneath it all he's just a mortal man, just by looking at his ship. I have never seen that done in quite this way before. Spectacular.
And then and THEN the next time we see the emperor's ship, it's after it's unpacked all its cargo, into this huge palace, complete with a complement of battleships and thousands of ground troops. My first thought was "hey how did all that fit onboard? That should be a literally impossible construction. Oh well, it's just a movie, who cares." But then the Fremen attack happens. A nuclear strike destroys the defenses, and then the sandworms come in, and something hits the palace, and the entire thing shakes and rattles! Because of COURSE it's not an actual building! Of COURSE all that could fit onboard, because it's just a shaky, fragile house-of cards! Sheet metal held together by rivets and a prayer, because he wanted to appear magnificent on his visit! The imperial rule makes a big talk, but it's all bark and no bite and it's fragile enough to be done in by a stiff breeze, and you can tell all that from the mechanical design alone!
GOSH these movies are good.
