Mark Strong

Do you remember that nagging sense of mild disappointment as you sat through Dune 2? You’d been impressed by Dune: bit of a recondite plot if you hadn’t read the book but great to look at, with an austere art-house aesthetic, like Star Wars for people with an IQ. But then the sequel sold out. It turned a minor character from the book into the heroine of a stereotypical Hollywood romance, which not even the excitement of the sandworm-riding scenes could quite redeem. No disrespect to Brian Aldiss,but I think of ‘Brian’as a sort of joke name Anyway its latest screen incarnation, Dune: Prophecy, is worse, much worse.

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films represent two of the more remarkable turnarounds in recent Hollywood history. After the failure of David Lynch’s ambitious but deeply, deeply flawed Eighties attempt at filming Frank Herbert’s sprawling sci-fi epic, the project was seen as all but impossible, being both vastly expensive and presumed to be of interest mainly to the kind of young men who prefer to watch films in their parents’ basements rather than at their local theater. It also didn’t help that the first film was released day-and-date with the HBO Max streaming service; the fact that it made more than $400 million at the box office was, under the circumstances, something of a miracle.