The Dune Trailer

 Here it is!

The movie looks good. I'm a little skeptical about the choice of music (I don't recognize the song, but I guess I'm always just a little skeptical of songs with lyrics in trailers or scoring this sort of movie.)

The beats we see here are all exciting to behold - I love the image of ancient Greek soldiers when discussing the Atreides family - the Atreides trace their house back to Atreus of classical myth (Atreus is the father of Agamemnon,) despite the fact that this far in the future, humans don't even remember Earth is their planet of origin (though given other details, like how the first use of "atomics" was by "House Washington," it's surprising they don't have a better idea of it.)

In the Dune future, the existence of personal force fields has made firearms obsolete, and people are forced to fight with bladed weapons again. We get some pretty cool shots of this style of fighting, which is faster and more frenzied than it's been rendered in the past.

We also start with the famous scene from the beginning of the books - Paul's trial with the Gom Jabbar, in which the leader of the Bene Gesserit (the all-female order that has been bred and trained to have mental and physical capacities that make them practically psychic, and who are the not-so-secret background manipulators of culture and politics in the cosmos) holds a poisoned needle to his neck while he is forced to place his hand in a box-like device that inflicts incredible pain upon him. The point of the test is to determine whether Paul is "human" or "animal," knowing that an animal doesn't think rationally and will just react to the pain, while the human, knowing the danger, will take the pain over the certainty of death.

We get a bit of Duncan Idaho, played by Jason Momoa, the dashing, rugged hero and loyal servant of House Atreides, as well as some glimpses of Paul's father Leto (Oscar Isaac,) Stilgar, the leader of a group of the planet's indigenous Fremen (Javier Bardem,) the Beast Rabban, the member of rival House Harkonnen whose mismanagement of Arrakis was part of the ploy to lure the Atreides there, as well as Chani (Zendaya,) the Fremen woman whom Paul sees in visions before he's even come to Arrakis, and Doctor Yueh (Chen Chang,) whose ultimate role is... spoilers.

But the real money shot is the reveal of the giant Sandworm - the massive monsters who live on Arrakis, and, unbeknownst to most of the universe, is the source of the Spice that allows for interstellar, intergalactic society to exist.

This movie is, I believe, meant to be part one of two, as there's a lot of plot to the original Dune novel (and it divides rather neatly into two parts.) The downfall of House Atreides is pretty much shown by the trailer, when Duncan Idaho refers to Paul as Duke, but given how classic this story is, I don't think spoilers are something people are going to worry too much about.

One thing I think is interesting is that Paul (who's Timothée Chalamet, btw) refers to the upcoming war as a "Crusade," which I think is a very deliberate choice. In the book, what he sees coming is referred to as a Jihad, which fits somewhat with the Fremen's Bedouin/Arabic-inspired culture. However, in the intervening decades, the word Jihad has become pretty loaded here in the west, associated more with terrorism than medieval holy wars. While western culture has often treated crusades as a good thing (Batman's the "Caped Crusader") the truth is that it's really just the Christian equivalent of Jihad. There's a sort of smug cultural superiority in using Crusade as a positive and Jihad as a negative, and I think it's a good choice of words - especially complex given that, as we know, the Jihad/Crusade is eventually waged in Paul's name.

While Paul is a hero we sympathize and root for, especially in the first book, the series ultimately shows that even with the best intentions, the damage he inflicts on the universe (even if the alternative was worse) is utterly horrific. Indeed, much of Paul's journey is not exactly becoming a hero, but reckoning with the fact that he's going to be so important and powerful that all of human history is going to be shaped by his actions, including entire worlds wiped out, religions extinguished, cultures vanished, and staggeringly enormous numbers of lives lost. Frank Herbert's message is that that much power concentrated in one person invariably creates a monster, even if that person genuinely wants to do good.