Spice sans dessert

Come the second official trailer for Dune Part Two, defining features remain the same: Villeneuve’s take at Dune is intentionally dark, austere, barren and bland, prone to endless half-empty spaces. Arrakis coloring that he has chosen sometimes gives me vibes of the Second Battle of Winterfell from Game of Thrones, instead of vivid fiery brightness I come to expect in headcanon.

Now, examples of Dune-themed color grading which you won’t ever obtain from Villeneuve:

Villeneuve’s only truly delightful decision, to me, is to shift of Duke Leto’s motto words Here I am, here I remain from the (deleted) scene of banquet towards final moments of Leto’s life, when he is ready for assassination of triumphant Harkonnens. It’s downright hard to invest more attention in great Herbertarian setting if 2021–23 Dune is your first gateway into this universe. Me, definitely, wouldn’t. I’m happy to have started from Lynch version and miniseries along with the book itself.

More interestingly, it is miniseries that remains the closest possible implementation of the book to date. I always considered (Frank Herbert’s) Dune as a surrogate chronicle about distant past (as it could have been seen in-universe from the times of Scattering), not the future, or, more precisely speaking, future that had been artificially regressed to some form of retrofuturism after Butlerians destroyed machine civilization. Hence a healthy bit of intentional archaisms, such as style of play evoking dramas of classical Antiquity, seems appropriate.

I wonder whether Dune is at all filmable in a form of a stand-alone work. Virginia Madsen-narrated prologue to Lynch’s Dune is deceptively elegant, but even it lacks cross-structural support function that epigraphs provide in the book.

(Casting Florence Pugh as Irulan is something that borders on personal insult, by the way.)