A movie I've been looking forward to since it was announced, after a sort of teaser-ish earlier trailer, this is the primary one, giving us some character introductions and some really awesome imagery.
I don't know what it is about the production design that we've seen so far - the brutalist architecture, or what - that seems to really nail the imagery as I imagined Arrakis reading the novel.
For the most part, I think we're looking for just a good straight adaptation of a Sci Fi classic, which this trailer seems to be promising. While the David Lynch movie from the early 80s had fine production design of that classic late-70s-early-80s sci fi style (which is a classic look,) that movie got bogged down in how to adapt a story about extremely smart people all maneuvering around one another. (I honestly wonder how well the movie would be remembered if they hadn't literally just had someone explaining the world for the first fifteen minutes of the movie.)
Visually, this looks as epic as Dune ought to be. What I'll be curious to see is how much the film deals with the subversive themes of the novel, which become more explicit in the later parts of the series. In the initial novel, we're generally meant to view Paul as a classic hero on a classic hero's journey, facing down a grave evil in the form of the Harkonnens (side note, it seems that Josh Brolin's Gurney Halleck says it "HAR-kon-nen," as opposed to what I've always heard, which is "har-KON-nen." Not super important, but slightly jarring.)
Of course, as we discover later in the novel
Er, spoilers for a novel from the 1960s
As we discover later in the novel, Paul's mother Jessica is actually the daughter of Vladimir Harkonnen, the novel's primary antagonist. Neither she nor Paul are aware of this when the story starts, and it's all part of the weird eugenics program of the Bene Gesserit. But not only does this mean that it's his own grandfather who threatens him, but it's also implied that Paul has inherited some of his grandfather's ruthlessness, in contrast to his nigh-saintly father. (The dark realpolitik of the setting suggests that Paul might only succeed because of this ruthlessness, and Leto's lack of it is why he winds up dead.)
Paul eventually becomes a messianic figure to the Fremen, who go from an oppressed people struggling on a desolate world to the dominant military force in the Imperium, waging a genocidal religious war in order to spread and cement Paul's holy empire.
Paul is complicit in this war, the "Jihad," though I think the movie's going to be calling it a "Crusade" in order to avoid an Islamophobic interpretation. Because of his prescience due to the genetic manipulation and his consumption of the Spice, Paul has seen countless branching paths for humanity, and believes there is only one "Golden Path" that will avoid our extinction - and that the horrors of the Jihad are part of that path, unfortunately.
In the later novels, after Paul has died, his son Leto II undergoes a horrific metamorphosis to become a human-sandworm-hybrid, and reigns as God-Emperor for over a thousand years - his intention to be the most brutal and totalitarian tyrant that humanity has ever known in an effort to forever disabuse us of the desire for messianic saviors. I'll confess that it was in the fourth book, which details this era, that I found myself struggling for motivation to continue, in large part due to the fact that it was so far in the future that nearly every familiar character was long dead (though Duncan Idaho, despite dying in the first novel, is brought back as a "ghola," a kind of clone that retains memories of the previous life, several times, so that he actually winds up being the longest-running character in the series.)
Anyway, while there's a sympathetic reading for Paul and Leto II, which is that they are doing what has to be done to ensure humanity's survival, there's also a potential read that they are just arrogant and power-hungry, and using this as a justification for their lust for power and influence.
One of the things that I find really interesting in speculative fiction is how scale can make our ordinary sense of morality and philosophy warp. Just as physics at the subatomic level and at the astronomical level starts to act differently than our ground-level Newtonian intuition tells us, when you're dealing with the vastness of the cosmos and the infinite abyss of time, what exactly is moral?
If you kill a billion people in order to ensure that a trillion people will live five hundred years later, is that the right thing to do?
The first novel only barely hints at these sort of philosophical questions, because the immediate danger demands attention. I'm given to understand that the film will actually only adapt the first half of the novel - the Atreides' arrival on Arrakis, the initial assassination plots against Paul, and then the full Harkonnen invasion that leaves Leto and most of the Atreides forced dead and has Paul and Jessica fleeing into the desert.
There's no lack of story to tell in that span, though I imagine that it will make the emphasis on Chani and the Fremen in the trailers a bit of a misdirect.
Anyway, I'm excited for this movie.
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