While Dune: Part Two might currently be the world’s favourite movie, Frank Herbert’s books hint at stranger things on the horizon …
- Spoilers ahead
Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two is currently the toast of Tinseltown, a big-budget sci-fi adventure directed by a Hollywood A-lister and critical darling that has taken the box office by storm and left fans wanting more and more and more. It made more than $180m worldwide in its first weekend alone and inevitably, sequels beckon. Why shouldn’t they, given that Frank Herbert wrote five sequels to his original 1965 tome and Villeneuve has spent the best part of five and a half hours just covering that first book?
Unfortunately, it’s not quite as simple as that. For this is not Lord of the Rings, an epic trilogy with clear character arcs, a linear central quest and little prospect of sequels once ole Sméagol topples into Mount Doom and destroys the One Ring. Nor is it the original Star Wars, which smartly ends with the defeat of the Empire and (until they ruined everything with the prequel trilogy) the sense that everyone will now live happily ever after. This is Dune, a six-book epic stretched over thousands of years and dozens of planets in which major protagonists transform into giant human-sandworm hybrids, sexy witches try to use their auto-pulsing vaginas to (literally) conquer mankind and major characters keep being brought back from the dead as zombie-clone-stooge versions of their past selves. It is beyond weird, and there is a very good reason Villeneuve himself has so far only committed (and it is a very loose committal) to adapting Herbert’s second novel, Dune: Messiah, after this one.
