Oscar Isaac teases Denis Villeneuve’s “nightmarish” Dune movie
This holiday season, Oscar Isaac will return to the big screen as Poe Dameron in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. After that, he’s scheduled to appear in another blockbuster science fiction film. Director Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movie will drop in December of 2020, and Isaac is playing Duke Leto Atreides. The patriarch of House Atreides, the Duke takes his family to the desert planet of Arrakis, aka Dune. There, they manage the flow of the planet’s coveted resource: Spice, a highly addictive substance that extends a person’s lifespan as well as giving them limited prescient powers.
Discussing The Rise of Skywalker, Isaac was asked to describe Villeneuve’s vision for Dune. “It’s just a wholly, wholly different thing,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “I couldn’t imagine anyone more suited for the tone of the original Frank Herbert novels than Denis. There are some things that are — for lack of a better word — nightmarish about what you see… There’s just this kind of brutalist element to it. It’s shocking.”
"It’s scary. It’s very visceral. And I know that definitely between Denis and myself and [stars Timothée Chalamet and Rebecca Ferguson] as the family unit, we really searched for the emotion of it. I’m beyond myself with excitement. I think it’s good to feel cool, unique, and special."
As a fan of Herbert’s Dune novels, hearing Isaac describe the movie like this is exciting. Between the bloody machinations of the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård), the scheming of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, and the trials endured by Paul Atreides (Chalamet) and his mother Jessica (Ferguson) among the Fremen people of the desert, there’s plenty that could be considered “nightmarish.” And Villeneuve, who’s directed modern sci-fi classics like Arrival and Blade Runne 2049, is exactly the right guy to tap into this story. The only probably is that we have to wait a whole year to see what he and his team came up with.
Hopefully a trailer will come long before that.
Next. Dune 2020 has an embarrassment of stars—How well do they match their roles?. dark
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