“Dune”: The Movie That Brought Me Back to Theaters
Last Saturday, I stepped foot in a movie theater for the first time in nearly 21 months in order to see Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic Dune. It was an extraordinary film that I am glad I had the chance to see in the theater, an experience that I had forgotten how much I enjoyed.
Dune (2021): The Backstory
When visionary author Frank Herbert’s Dune was published in 1965, few had any idea what a cultural phenomenon it would become. The book was set in the far future and chronicled the young nobleman Paul Atreides as he was thrust into the war for the desert planet Arrakis, which is rich in an essential natural resource. It instantly won acclaim and awards and in 2003 was named the world’s best-selling science fiction novel. Herbert wrote five sequels before his death in 1986 and his death his son Brian and author Kevin Anderson subsequently expanded the universe with more than a dozen additional novels.
The initial novel was adapted into a 1984 feature film directed by David Lynch (The Elephant Man, Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive), which was a critical and commercial failure. Rather than mar the legacy of Dune, however, that film seemed to spawn interest in seeing it re-done right. (And the original does have its fair share of fans, who have turned it into a cult classic.) The…
