Trailer for Denis Villeneuve’s “seminal” Dune movie will arrive this month

The art director on the new Dune movie thinks it’ll do for movies today what The Lord of the Rings did for them in the early 2000s.

Dune, Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi masterpiece about humans living among the stars in the far future, has never had a great adaptation. Alejandro Jodorowsky tried and failed to make a Dune movie in the ’70s, David Lynch had a swing and a miss in 1984…and now, Arrival director Denis Villeneuve is trying his hand at this difficult material, and it’s looking really really good.

Timothée Chalamet looks great as Paul Atreides, the scion of a noble house who gets involved with the native people of the desert planet Arrakis, aka Dune. The aesthetics look wonderful, and Villeneuve’s slow burn storytelling style is a perfect fit for Herbert’s expansive vision.

Speaking to KIDS FIRST! Film Critics, supervising art director Tom Brown is only adding fire to my hype pyre: “The great thing about this is that it’s so realistic,” Brown said of the spacecraft in the movie. “The attitude that Denis and [production designer] Patrice [Vermette took] was, what would happen if these things could actually fly? Unlike a lot of spaceships that just sort of lift off and fly, these have an incredible realism to them. Even though some of the spaceships are the size of skyscrapers, others are two-seater vehicles.”

The look of a movie isn’t everything, of course, but for Dune, which was way ahead of its time, it counts for a lot. Lynch’s Dune movie was visually fascinating, at least:

Happily, Brown has a lot of confidence in the rest of the movie, as well. “I think what Denis Villeneuve is doing is what’s called a seminal version of this story,” he said. “I don’t think it will be topped, to be perfectly honest. The sheer scale of it is going to be daunting. But I do think it’s going to be extremely special. I heard in the paper the other day that they’re looking at [it as] the new ‘Lord of the Rings,’ and I firmly believe that. I think it’s going to be up there with those kinds of films, really.”

One quirk here is that Villeneuve’s movie will only cover the first half of Herbert’s book. We’ve been told that the film will stand on its own, but I don’t like that there’s no firm word on a follow-up.

Maybe we should just focus on the first film for now. And it sounds like we’ll be getting a trailer very soon, if Chalamet is to be believed:

The trailer may even come out as early as tomorrow, attached to a theatrical rerelease of Christopher Nolan’s Inception. Stay tuned…

Dune will debut in theaters on December 18, coronavirus permitting.

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h/t IndieWire