The only thing you could fault Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 epic Dune for was also, really, the only reason it worked.
After all, Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi novel, a mythopoeic, quasi-religious, desertpunk, anti-colonial, anti-demagoguery, speculative history masterpiece, was long deemed pretty much unfilmable. Simply making a cohesive movie out of it is the Hollywood equivalent of splitting the atom — and others have tried.
Already saddled with a faithful but bloated 2000s miniseries, one self-described “failure” of a David Lynch movie and another from surrealist director Alejandro Jodorowsky that was somehow so terrifyingly bizarre it was cancelled when his other 1970s desert nightmare, El Topo, made it to theatres, adaptations of Dune carry some bad blood.
Which is why
