DUNE
Herbert gets his just deserts
RELEASED 22 OCTOBER
12A
155 minutes Director Denis Villeneuve
Cast Timothée Chalamet, Oscar Isaac, Rebecca Ferguson, Josh Brolin, Jason Momoa, Zendaya
The sheer scale of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is almost overwhelming. Monolithic spaceships fight for space with the heavens, and win. Gargantuan sandworms swim through the desert like sharks, emerging from the earth with mouths like black holes. And then there’s the desert planet setting itself, whose surface stretches for eternity into a vast unknowable nothingness.
However, it’s not just size that makes Dune one of the greatest science fiction blockbusters of recent years, but how it elegantly balances that alien scale with smaller moments of humanity. There is of course a bladderbusting price to pay for this – but it’s one well worth paying.
Adapted from Frank Herbert’s 1960s opus, Dune tells the sprawling story of Arrakis, a planet whose abundance of a psychoactive drug called spice – integral to the galaxy’s economy – has made it a vital resource for many of the dynastic families that co-exist under a galactic empire called the Imperium. One such dynasty is House Atreides, whose leader Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac) has been instructed to take over Arrakis from their arch enemies House Harkonnen (led by Stellan Skarsgård’s floating Baron).