Will Dune: Messiah be Villeneuve’s crowning achievement, or the moment the spice runs dry?
Denis Villeneuve has already done the well-nigh impossible, making two brilliant big-screen versions of Dune, but given the history of sci-fi film sequels, another could be a terrifying sandworm too many
Hollywood has a long history of making great first sci-fi instalments that slowly turn into pompous, inconsequential, and increasingly mind-numbing dross as the sequels keep rolling. The Matrix went from a revolutionary cyberpunk masterpiece to an interminable slog of a philosophy dissertation in which both humans and machines alike seemed to be forever fighting a losing battle with a CGI hurricane. The Terminator franchise started out as a brutally sleek and sinuous time-travel thriller that plucked at the very heartstrings of the eternal fear of the unknown at the heart of the human condition – yet ended up as the living embodiment of what happens when Hollywood repeatedly tears the living skin off its own dead-eyed robo-franchise, as if stuck in some kind of endless corporate judgment day doom-loop. Let’s not even mention Jurassic Park, which began life as an awe-inspiring blockbuster about the dangers of unchecked scientific hubris and ended up as the prosaic tale of dinosaurs just sort-of existing in the background while we all focused heavily on a dull corporate espionage subplot about genetically modified locusts.
All of which is why Denis Villeneuve’s current efforts to bring Dune back to life on the big screen (more than four decades after the late, lamented David Lynch’s version poured psychedelic spice-soaked fever dreams into our quivering mid-80s retinas) are the subject of so much breathless anticipation and existential dread among fans. Because, damn it, Villeneuve has (as anyone who watched any of his previous films expected) done a simply incredible job of adapting Frank Herbert’s sprawling, monolithic space fantasy into not one but two synapse-crushingly epic movies of almost impossible power and majesty – operatic, awe-inspiring spectacles that somehow make interstellar feudalism, giant sandworms, and psychic drug trips feel utterly essential to the very fabric of existence, as though humanity’s ultimate destiny was always to brood majestically in the dunes while contemplating the crushing weight of prophecy.
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