What do you get when you combine a visionary director, two young rising talents on screen, and a popular sci-fi novel? Dune: An incomprehensible mess of a film, the only interesting thing about which is the question of how such a movie winds up being released.
Dune, for all those unfamiliar with the franchise—which includes me; until two weeks ago all I knew about Dune was there was a big worm in it—is a novel by Frank Herbert, published in 1965 and the sort of hard sci-fi that truly devoted nerds bring up when they talk about how popular sci-fi movies like Star Wars aren’t “true” science fiction.
Alec Dent is a former culture editor and staff writer for The Dispatch.
