A tale in the desert avatar3/18/2023 ![]() You never want your nobles to threaten your power as an absolute monarch otherwise, you’re gonna get yourself a Magna Carta. One of the inciting factors in the plot, however, is that they have gotten a little too good at running their planet and making alliances with various other houses, and that has made the emperor uncomfy. The family and planet are sort of styled around Spain in Herbert’s writing: They like a good bullfight and have a lot of water. They’re one of the “major” houses within Dune’s whole galactic empire, which is ultimately run by the Padishah Emperor, who’s the supreme head of the galaxy. How important is the Atreides family in this universe? Sorry, this is a sci-fi universe and their names are Paul and Jessica? In the beginning of the novel, Paul is turning 15 (Can Timothée still pass for a teen? Ben Platt seethes somewhere) and is nervous about assuming his familial duties and mastering the witchy skills he has inherited from his mother. ![]() Rebecca Ferguson of lip-syncing that one song “Never Enough” in The Greatest Showman fame. Oscar Isaac in space-daddy mode, and his official concubine, Lady Jessica, a.k.a. Paul is the son of Duke Leto Atreides I, a.k.a. By “dude,” of course, I mean the heir to the House Atreides, which runs the planet Caladan as its fiefdom. ![]() So who is our protagonist, Timothée, playing? It’s all put together by me, someone who read Dune in advance of seeing the movie Dune last fall because I had a lot of extra time in 2020. Or you could want to do that, run out of time and/or desire to do so, and read this helpful summary of the key aspects of the Dune universe you’ll want to understand instead. Or you could read the book before watching it and get all the references. If you’re in the latter camp, you can experience the movie on a purely sensory level and just let the montage of concept-art-style tableaux and the blaring Hans Zimmer soundtrack wash over you (this may be better if you’re high), ignoring the specifics of the plot. Herbert’s book and its sequels are stuffed with details about the interplanetary conflicts that precipitate its plot as well as stray details about desert survival, a group of witches who want to manage the universe’s bloodlines, and the spice trade. The people who are going into theaters (or probably the glitchy frontier that is HBO Max) who are like, I know Timothée Chalamet is in this and nothing else, may miss a lot. That is to say, the people who happen to have read Frank Herbert’s dense, multigrain-loaf-size sci-fi novel about a desert planet may get the details. The marketing for Dune promises that Denis Villeneuve’s upcoming sci-fi epic is for the fans, not the critics - though our critic did indeed like it.
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