Let’s break down the Dune trailer shot by shot

We take a close look at the Dune trailer. Get to know the Atreides and Harkonnens, the Sardaukar and the Bene Gesserit, and the sandworms and the spice.

The trailer for Denis Villeneuve’s take on Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi classic Dune is here, and it’s magnificent, give or take the Pink Floyd backing track:

Dune is a famously dense story. In brief, it’s about Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), the scion of a noble house who travels with his father Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac) and mother Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) to the desert planet of Arrakis, aka Dune. The Atreides family has been assigned by the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV to rule the planet and oversea the production of melange, also known as the spice, an incredibly valuable substance only produced here.

But their assignment is fraught with peril, whether from the rival Harkonnen family, the massive sandworms that roam the desert, the native Fremen people, or even the Emperor himself, who may have ulterior motives for giving Leto this assignment.

All of that and more is present in the trailer. Let’s walk through it and see what we can glean.

Beware SPOILERS for Dune below!

We start with a shot of Paul looking pensive as sand batters him in the eyes. “There’s something happening to me. There’s something awakening in my mind.”

Image: Dune/Warner Bros.

Indeed, Paul is no ordinary teenager. (Or at least, he’s a teenager in the book; we’ll see if they age him up, although 24-year-old Chalamet looks young enough to go book-accurate if they want.) He has visions of the future, as for example seeing the Fremen girl Chani (Zendaya), a crucial character who will play a big part in the story to come.

(L-r) TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET as Paul Atreides and ZENDAYA as Chani in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary release. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures

We see him wake up in his bed on his home planet of Caladan, indicating he hasn’t even left for Dune when he sees Chani in his dreams. Where do his powers of prescience come from? Stay tuned.

Image: Dune/Warner Bros.

Not all of his visions are so pleasant. “There’s a crusade coming,” he says as we see a vision of destruction.

Without giving too much away, Paul will become a leader of men before the story is over, gaining followers who worship him as something close to a messiah. But one of the themes of the book is that charismatic leaders can’t always control what their followers will do with their example. Throughout the novel, Paul is plagued by visions of a brutal crusade (called a “jihad” in the book) eventually carried out in his name, and endeavors to chart a course to a future where it doesn’t happen.

To be specific, Paul may be a messianic figure known as the Kwisatz Haderach, although it has many names. His mother, the Lady Jessica, is a member of a powerful sisterhood known as the Bene Gesserit, who exert a lot of influence on rulers throughout the galaxy. Through their long-running breeding program, they hope to produce the Kwisatz Haderach, and Paul might just fit the bill.

(L-r) TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET as Paul Atreides and CHARLOTTE RAMPLING as Reverend Mother Mohiam in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary release. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures

The Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam (Charlotte Rampling) comes to Caladan to test Paul to see if this is indeed the case. Her test is cruel: she has Paul put his hand in a box, and holds a poison needle — the Gom Jabbar — to his neck. If he takes his hand out of the box, she kills him. “What’s in the box?” Paul asks. Her reply? “Pain.”

She’s not kidding:

Image: Dune/Warner Bros.

Part of the Reverend Mother’s test is to find out whether Paul is “human.” “An animal caught in a trap will gnaw off its own leg to escape,” she says. “What will you do?” This isn’t something Paul will soon forget.

In contrast to Dune itself, Caladan is a lush world full of greenery and water. Not much of that where Paul is going.

We also get a look at Paul and his tutor Gurney Hallack (Josh Brolin) sparring. They use something called “shields” to protect themselves during combat. This is a pretty cool way to render them:

Image: Dune/Warner Bros.

Duke Leto can look pensive, too:

OSCAR ISAAC as Duke Leto Atreides in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary release. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures

Paul’s mother, the Lady Jessica:

REBECCA FERGUSON as Lady Jessica Atreides in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary release. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures

Jessica is key in bringing out Paul’s messianic potential, something she does in contravention of her Bene Gesserit masters, who ordered her to have a girl rather than a boy. The Bene Gesserit have a reputation for being loyal to the sisterhood before all else, but Jessica seems like she’s ride-or-die with Leto and Paul. But amid the fraught political atmosphere on Dune, her loyalties may be questioned, possibly by Gurney Hallack, and possibly by the affable Atreides family swordmaster Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa):

Image: Dune/Warner Bros.

Another household figure worth considering is the seemingly kindly family doctor Yueh (Chang Chen):

CHANG CHEN as Dr. Yueh in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary release. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures

The family’s arrival on Dune is visually stunning:

Image: Dune/Warner Bros. Image: Dune/Warner Bros.

And the costumes, my word:

Image: Dune/Warner Bros.

Once on the planet, Duke Leto reaches out to the Fremen people, establishing a relationship with planetary ecologist Liet Kynes (Sharon Duncan-Brewster), who lives among them:

SHARON DUNCAN-BREWSTER as Dr. Liet Kynes in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary release. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures

But as we said, the situation on Dune is precarious. As we hear on the trailer, “Arrakis is a death trap.”

This looks like a group of soldiers loyal to House Harkonnen:

Image: Dune/Warner Bros.

Or could they be the Emperor’s elite Sardaukar soldiers, or perhaps both mixed together?

“This is an extermination,” Paul says later, as we see soldiers eerily floating down from the sky:

Image: Dune/Warner Bros.

Indeed, there’s a point in the book where House Harkonnen mounts an assault against House Atreides. Looks like it’s gonna be a scene to remember:

Image: Dune/Warner Bros. Image: Dune/Warner Bros.

During the scrum, Duncan Idaho fights like a demon:

JASON MOMOA as Duncan Idaho in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary release. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures, Chiabella James

And just who are the Harkonnens? Well, we have Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård), a malevolent genius so fat he must use anti-gravity suspensors to move around:

STELLAN SKARSGÅRD As Baron Vladimir Harkonnen in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary release. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures

And here’s the Baron…taking a mud bath? I dunno, the guy has some weird habits, many far more unsavory than this:

Image: Dune/Warner Bros.

There’s also his brutish nephew Glossu “the Beast” Rabban (Dave Bautista):

DAVE BAUTISTA as Rabban Harkonnen in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary release.. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures

After the attack, Paul and Jessica must flee into the desert, fighting their way through a sandstorm:

Image: Dune/Warner Bros.

Eventually, they take refuge among the Fremen people, with a group led by Stilgar (Javier Bardem):

Image: Dune/Warner Bros.

This is when Paul meets Chani in the flesh:

Image: Dune/Warner Bros.

She’s wearing a stillsuit, a special outfit that recycles the body’s water, water being in incredibly important commodity on the arid planet of Arrakis. Paul and Jessica will wear stillsuits, too, but first they have to prove the Fremen shouldn’t just kill them and drain them for moisture. Things can get dicey:

Image: Dune/Warner Bros.

The trailer ends with one of the classic lines from the book: “”I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.”

Well, it actually ends with a million-foot sandworm emerging from the ground and threatening to kill Paul and his mother as they flee through the desert. These guys are probably the most iconic thing to come out of Dune, and it looks like the movie will get the right:

Image: Dune/Warner Bros. TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET as Paul Atreides in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary release. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures

There are a couple more images worth taking note of, like this striking shot of palm trees on fire…

Image: Dune/Warner Bros.

…and the movie’s depiction of ornithopters, aerial vehicles kept aloft by mechanical wings:

Image: Dune/Warner Bros.

And of course, we have a shot of the spice, which suffuses Arrakis and makes it possible for people who imbibe it to do amazing things…if only it weren’t cripplingly addictive.

There are some big bits from the book missing. There’s no glimpse of Feyd-Rautha, for example, Baron Harkonnen’s other, more cunning nephew. In fact, we don’t see much of anything from the back half of the novel, no doubt because this movie only covers the first half of Herbert’s book. We’ve been assured that the first movie is “a fully standalone epic” — and indeed, Dune is more than rich enough to be worth dividing in two — but I hope we get the full story sooner or later.

It may depend on how well the movie does. Dune comes out on December 18!

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