Dune’s booming thopters are the reason to see it in theaters

Despite dire predictions to the contrary, Dune has succeeded in the post-COVID era, of theatrical shakeup. The film managed the seemingly impossible twins of making Americans return to theaters. and get people interested in HBO Max. He did it with the quiet restraint of his lead performances, a dark, foreboding sense of mystery, and just the sheer, epic scale of it all. At the same time, director Denis Villeneuve did something truly extraordinary.

He finally got ornithopters … Duneawesome dragonfly fighter jets, right?

Also called “thopters”, these planes are one of the overlooked gems of Frank Herbert’s original novel. In the context of the 1960s, when Herbert’s first Dune stories and novels were published, they make absolute sense. Of course, humanity will leave behind the clumsiness of traditional airplanes and helicopters, the fictional experts of the time thought.

Single couple Leonardo Da Vinci’s original designs with some of that new atomic energy and we’re off to the races. But ornithopters, heavier than air travel based on insect-like flight, never really caught on. Here in the 21st century, our army is still trying to make sense of the technology.

DuneThe thopters have never made sense when shown on screen. The 1984 movie was comically wrong in the proportions. The small inert bricks of brass floated in the air, propelled only by the powerful over-acting of Kyle MacLachlan. Meanwhile, in the 1992 video game Dune 2 (the first game to popularize real-time strategy), flitted across the screen like insignificant errors. The legs were too thin, the wings too small, and the engines sadly underpowered.

Image: HBO Max

Villenuve has clearly put a lot of effort into the thopters he created for this movie, which finally feel like airships in operation. One of the first images of a thopter in flight is with Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac) at the controls. The ship is huge, powerful, and loud. At the 4DX theater where I watched the film, the entire building hummed as it rolled up, the syncopated flapping of its wings (thanks to clever fan work) filling the air around me.

Image: Warner Bros. Pictures

In the air, Villneuve’s thopters are anything but clumsy. Leto’s maneuvers are controlled and intentional. The boats do not float in place, but instead carve a gap for themselves from the wind, maintaining their orientation in the air as they move forward with powerful twin engines. Then, when the time is right, they drop their wings back and swoop like raptors to the ground. Their presence makes the rescue of the harvester team at the beginning of the film exciting. Later, Duncan Idaho (Jason Mamoa) runs rampant in a group of Harkonnen landing ships, slipping in and out of the fire as he escapes. Both scenes show the audience what mastery of a thopter in flight looks like, and represent a kind of experience for Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) to grow up.

Image: Warner Bros. Pictures

The Thopters continue to play a significant role in the film’s climax. Watching Paul and Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) endure a sandstorm, I could feel what needed to be done to survive. I found myself sitting there in silence one moment, and the next I was yelling at the screen, “Let go of your wings!”

Paul’s mastery of the thopter in that scene, and the sandstorm itself, feels like the character growing up from childhood to adulthood. He’s not just taking the reins of House Atreides, preserving his bloodline by rescuing himself, his mother, and his unborn sister. He’s putting himself in his father’s shoes by buckling up in that booth.

Ultimately, that climactic scene of Dune Part One it simply wouldn’t be as powerful if Villeneuve hadn’t already shown the audience, finally, how a thopter is actually handled in midair. That successful crash landing represents Paul’s first real steps in his transformation into Muad’Dib, the messiah who will help liberate the entire planet, and he wouldn’t have been as powerful for me without a visit to the theater.