Denis Villeneuve’s Dune gets a spicy first trailer

While the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic has large­ly gut­ted the release cal­en­dar for 2020, the plan­et has still reached a junc­ture of con­fi­dence and secu­ri­ty from which the block­busters we were promised for this year can be trot­ted out with a ten­ta­tive caution.

Today, this proves for­tu­itous news for Tim­o­th­ée Cha­la­met super­fans and devo­tees of sci-fi/­fan­ta­sy alike, as the first trail­er for Denis Vil­leneuve​‘s adap­ta­tion of Dune arrives to announce that not even a glob­al cat­a­clysm can keep Hol­ly­wood from erect­ing its tentpoles.

Cha­la­met leads the film as space prince Paul Atrei­des, put in charge of the desert plan­et Arrakis, a for­bid­ding land nonethe­less tac­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant for its nat­ur­al resources of the drug mélange, or ​“spice,” which extends the lifes­pan and invig­o­rates the mind and enables tele­por­ta­tion (referred to as ​“fold­space” trav­el). View­ers who enjoy grad­u­al­ly fig­ur­ing out what region­al­ized slang and jar­gon actu­al­ly mean will be in luck!

Paul’s father (Oscar Isaac) vacates the plan­et, leav­ing young Paul with moth­er Jes­si­ca (Rebec­ca Fer­gu­son), men­tor Gur­ney (Josh Brolin), and loy­al ser­vant Dun­can Ida­ho (Jason Momoa) for a momen­tous mis­sion that will bring them into the Arrakis hin­ter­lands, home of the indige­nous peo­ple known as Fre­men and Paul’s even­tu­al love inter­est Chani (Zen­daya). They will have to unite if there’s any hope of defeat­ing the nefar­i­ous Baron Harkon­nen (Stel­lan Skars­gard) and his rabid flunky Glos­su (Dave Bautista).

That’s a lot of ground for the trail­er to cov­er in terms of plot, so the mar­ket­ing team instead empha­sizes the indeli­bil­i­ty of images – omi­nous armies wait­ing in Riefen­stahlian for­ma­tion, the glis­ten of mélange in the Arrakian sand, and of course, the mam­moth sand­worms for which the prop­er­ty is best known. The char­ac­ters do a lot of somber star­ing against back­grounds of vary­ing grey and orange, an aes­thet­ic known to some as the ​“Vil­leneuve touch.”

But in terms of sheer block­bust­ing scale, the mag­ni­tude of which the forced clo­sure of movie the­aters effec­tive­ly erad­i­cat­ed from this past sum­mer, this feels like a wel­come return. Tenet broke open the gates, and now the movies are free to be big once again.

Dune will come to US and UK cin­e­mas on 18 December.