The cast of DUNE is incredible, right? And when you have so many talented people in a big tentpole film like this, what can happen is a bunch of them really don't get used much. It's a kind of studio bloat: "We want this film to do well, so we spent all the moneys and got all the peoples."
It makes sense on paper, in a way--More is More! But it can be kind of disappointing as audience. Seriously, you marketed the fuck out of Insert Your Favorite Star Here and then they had a walk on?
DUNE looks primed for that kind of critique, not only on paper but in practice. Dave Bautista is in like two scenes. Josh Brolin, not much more. Zendaya doesn't even show up in real life until the very end of the film--and she was the narrator at the beginning. It's weird. It shouldn't work.
But in addition to the clarity of the motivations of many of the supporting characters, which I wrote about yesterday, I also wonder if part of its strength lies in the fact that even the characters who really are more minor are sufficiently interesting that we immediately get locked in on them. Josh Brolin has one main scene, and it's tons of fun, him being a badass teach-fighting Paul. Dave Bautista gets to strut around shouting like Bluto. Stephen McKinley Henderson has some kind of cool mental/supercomputer power. Plus they give him that parasol.
In some ways the parasol is this trick in a nutshell. It's just a tiny detail, but it's so specific and interesting it makes you want to know more. Vulture did an interview with Henderson about this role and others, and the headline was all about the parasol.
So a second theory as to why the film works as well as it does: It uses the limitations of its character real estate to its advantage, making the characterizations so detailed and interesting we end up hungry for more rather than disappointed with what we got.
The tl;dr writing tip: Give your characters their own version of a parasol.
I feel like I've been nibbling at the edges here, talking about the supporting characters and not Paul. Tomorrow!
