If the embed won’t play, the final trailer is also here on YouTube.
Warner Bros. has delivered the final trailer for Dune: Part Three, which is the studio’s way of announcing that the drip-feed is over and the hose is now on full. It follows a fresh batch of character posters, and a moody image of a lone figure in a sandstorm, released a day earlier, and it lands a little over seven weeks before the film opens in UK cinemas and IMAX on 18th December.
It has been a long campaign. Arrakis has been fed to us in careful portions since March, which is at least in keeping with a people who spent generations planning to turn a desert green. We did say, when the TV spot turned up, that it was only the bread basket. This is the main course.
The studio’s synopsis sets the film nearly two decades after Paul Atreides seized the Imperium. He is now a ruthless Emperor, haunted by visions of imperial collapse, with old allies returning, new threats gathering and betrayal promised in every shadow. Anyone who has read Herbert will know that betrayal is more usually found in the soup. Zendaya’s Chani sits at the heart of the conspiracy, and the whole thing is adapted from Dune Messiah.
That is the interesting part. Herbert’s sequel first appeared in Galaxy magazine in 1969, serialised across five instalments, and cinema has never filmed it. David Lynch’s 1984 Dune ended with rain falling on Arrakis and a sequel that never got made. Television got there first in 2003, when the Sci-Fi Channel folded Messiah into Children of Dune, but it has taken forty-two years for a cinema audience to be shown what the hero did next. The answer, as Herbert intended, is nothing you would want printed on a poster.
The Atreides court remains gloriously overstaffed. Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya lead, with Florence Pugh, Rebecca Ferguson, Isaach de Bankolé, Charlotte Rampling and Javier Bardem in the corridors of power, Anya Taylor-Joy stepping into Alia, Robert Pattinson as the shape-shifting Scytale and Jason Momoa back from the dead as Hayt. Denis Villeneuve directs from a script written with Brian K. Vaughan, Linus Sandgren is behind the cameras, and Hans Zimmer returns on music.
All of which arrives on the same day as Avengers: Doomsday, a collision that has already acquired the nickname Dunesday. Dune is bringing a sober treatise on power. Marvel is bringing the multiverse, and reportedly an early lead in advance sales.
Here at SFcrowsnest we find something rather splendid in all this. Dune Messiah began life as a pulp magazine serial, written to leave readers faintly queasy about having cheered the first book. Fifty-seven years later it arrives with IMAX screens, a worldwide marketing push and a cast that could buy the original magazine’s entire print run before breakfast. Pulp has done well for itself.
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