The Man Who Finally Made a ‘Dune’ That Fans Will Love
Earlier this summer, sitting in a London cinema for a screening of Denis Villeneuve’s hugely anticipated, pandemic-delayed adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel “Dune,” I found myself unexpectedly close to tears. I’d not been in a movie theater in almost two years, and I’d forgotten what it was like. Forgotten how the light inside a big auditorium always feels dusty and late-night weary, no matter what time it is. Forgotten the particular smell of popcorn and carpet cleaner, how it evokes a childhood memory of brushing my fingers across the static on the glass of a just-switched-on TV set; forgotten the vertiginous scale of the space and the screen.
When the film began, I heard the thump of a heartbeat working in counterpoint to my own, bursts of percussive discordance as Hans Zimmer’s score cut in, and then harsh desert light was burning the backs of my eyes and I was somewhere else entirely, witnessing the brutal quelling of an insurgency on a distant planet — and after a while, I realized I was whispering, “Oh, my God” under my breath over and over again. Afterward, I walked along empty streets with my head full of deserts and burning date palms, vast ships, monstrous sandworms and a sense of wonderment that the book’s visions had been so exquisitely realized. Josh Brolin, who plays the warrior-minstrel Gurney Halleck in the movie, took a lifelong “Dune”-fan friend to a screening in New York, and at the end of the movie the friend started screaming: “That was it! That was it! That’s what I saw! That’s what I saw when I was a kid!”
Read https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/magazine/dune-denis-villeneuve.html
