The highly anticipated third movie of the Dune trilogy will be released this December. Fans of this adaptation have awaited this release since the first movie aired in 2021, but fans of the Dune story itself have been waiting even longer. Dune takes place in a futuristic society where humans have colonized and govern planets. The story follows Paul Atreides, a duke’s son. The Atreides family has been chosen as stewards of the planet Arrakis, a desert landscape with a valuable space-travel resource called “spice.” The first Dune book was released in 1965 and has been incredibly influential in science fiction. References to Dune appear in films ranging from Star Wars to Blade Runner. Denis Villeneuve, the director of the current Dune trilogy, is not the first to bring Dune to the big screen. In 1984, David Lynch directed his own version of the story starring Kyle MacLachlan. This earlier adaptation received overwhelmingly negative reviews at its release but has gained a cult following over time. The movie took on a very long story, the entire first novel of the book series, but Lynch was forced to cut the original run time of about four hours to a more audience-friendly two hours. This made the movie appear clunky and too fast-paced for viewers to enjoy. Villeneuve has remedied this by splitting the story of the first Dune book into three parts. Although the first movie in the trilogy was largely setup and may have felt a little slow-moving, it gave necessary context for the next two movies that Lynch couldn’t provide in his shorter version. So far, Villeneuve’s Dune has been received much more positively than Lynch’s, but we still don’t know how viewers will react to the trilogy’s ending. The upcoming Dune movie is one of the year’s most anticipated releases, and fans hope Villeneuve will continue to do justice to the iconic story.
