But it didn't work out because it really felt like at the very end of two hours and a half, you were suddenly starting a new story – which is the one of Paul and Jessica being introduced to Fremen culture and being accepted by the Fremen. Because in the book, there's a natural moment – there's like a two-year gap or something like that. And then we tried also to break it a bit later.
Read the edited highlights here – talking the nature of Paul’s dreams, the mystery of Spice-driven space travel, and characters who may appear in the next film – and hear the full conversation on the Spoiler Special podcast channel now.ĮMPIRE: Did you always know exactly where you were going to break the book?ĭENIS VILLENEUVE: My first intuition was to break there. By which we mean, we had a spoilerific chat about the events of Dune: Part One (as it’s actually called), without straying too far into Part Two territory, on the Empire Spoiler Special Podcast. So naturally, Empire leapt at the chance to sit down with Denis Villeneuve and talk spoilers – to an extent. From its mind-blowing sense of scale, to its epic story, and incredible performances from the entire cast – including Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atreides, Rebecca Ferguson’s Lady Jessica, Oscar Isaac’s Duke Leto, and an array of favourites from Jason Momoa’s Duncan Idaho to Zendaya’s Chani – it’s an instant sci-fi masterpiece. With the arrival of his cinematic adaptation of Dune (tackling the first half of Frank Herbert’s sprawling sci-fi novel), the filmmaker took audiences on a thrilling trip to desert planet Arrakis for an adventure packed with Spice, sandworms, and subterfuge. He is a grotesque vision of rampant, unbridled capitalism.Contains spoilers for Dune: Part One – but no major book spoilers.Īfter spending much of the past two years in our own homes, Denis Villeneuve gave us all what we needed. Their cruelest enemy, the consummately evil Baron Harkonnen, symbolically dwells in darkness, surrounding himself with swirling smoke and completely hairless attendants.
Instead, characters nobly pontificate or murmur gnomically about whether the young hero, Paul Atreides, is or isn’t the Kwisatz Haderach, the promised warrior prophet who will lead the tough and fiercely independent Fremen to victory over their brutal oppressors. Life is real, life is earnest and nobody has much fun. Like Herbert’s book, the film is also deliberately majestic in its pacing and virtually without humor. It is, however, packed with eye-popping visual spectacle, notably speedy little aircraft that resemble mechanical dragonflies and enormous space cruisers as sleek as any on the cover of an old issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. It’s more like a Wagnerian music-drama, a somber story built around intimations of doom and orchestrated with a soundtrack of pounding drums and high-pitched wailings and ululations. Unlike “Star Wars,” though, Villeneuve’s “Dune” isn’t a sparky, upbeat space opera. Overall, the “good” characters are preternaturally gifted, some with witchy mental powers, others with samurai-like fighting skills, while the “bad” are obscene monsters of sadism, greed and ambition. The book’s plot - to which the new film sticks closely - features a galactic empire riven by intrigue, a shadowy sisterhood called the Bene Gesserit, gigantic sandworms that surface from underground like Moby-Dick rising from the deep, subtle political maneuverings and shocking betrayals, a native population called the Fremen who await a promised messiah, and, not least, the young Paul Atreides, who is troubled by strange dreams and, perhaps, an even stranger destiny. For those who don’t know anything about “Dune,” whether the new film by Denis Villeneuve or the classic novel first published in 1965, let me just say that the title refers to the desert world Arrakis, which produces “spice,” a psychotropic drug essential to space travel and a source of almost unimaginable wealth for its supplier.