After Alejandro Jodorowsky’s abortive 15-hour version and David Lynch’s tailspin of an attempt, it is Denis Villeneuve’s turn to ride the sandworm
It’s easy to imagine why
Hollywood felt it might take a maverick genius to film Dune, Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi/fantasy opus. The novel, and its five sequels, are phantasmagorical and psychedelic in the extreme, like
Star Wars on acid. In fact, George Lucas borrowed much from Herbert’s story: the witchy women of the Bene Gesserit are not so far from the wise, all-seeing Jedi (though Lucas wisely ditched the former’s freaky, eugenics-influenced breeding programmes). The planet of Arrakis, where the novel’s hero Paul Atreides finds himself caught up in a devious aristocratic plot to bring down his family’s noble house, resembles the desert planet of Tatooine where we first meet Luke Skywalker.The first maverick to take on the task was the controversial Chilean-French film-maker Alejandro Jodorowsky in the early 1970s. Jodorowsky duly dreamt up a proposed 15-hour film in which Orson Welles was to play Baron Harkonnen, and Salvador Dalí the emperor, Shaddam IV. HR Giger, the Swiss artist who would later create the xenomorphs for Ridley Scott’s Alien, was brought in to work on the central building, the Harkonnen castle, while Pink Floyd were recruited to help with the soundtrack. Naturally, nobody wanted to fund this insane venture, whose passing into myth is chronicled in the fascinating 2013 documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune.