Maxance Vincent
How do you fill up an IMAX theater in the middle of the day? Simple: tell people they’re going to see the latest trailer for Denis Villeneuve‘s Dune: Part Three, alongside an exclusive Q&A with the man himself. Warner Bros. is betting big on the movie and is confident it will be one of the year’s biggest events, so much so that they’ve refused to relent amid the potential threat posed by Avengers: Doomsday, which is releasing on the exact same day: December 18.
While Disney has been relatively mute about its promotional campaign for Doomsday, despite a few teasers released before Avatar: Fire and Ash, Warner Bros. has already ramped up the marketing for Dune: Part Three a whopping ten months in advance, first by hosting a launch event for the first trailer back in mid-March, and now for the second trailer, which has dropped today. The fact that Villeneuve also secured a lock on IMAX screens for Dune: Part Three, even over Avengers, shows how confident everyone is in the movie as a must-see theatrical event.
I try not to make any hyperbolic comparisons, especially as we’re many months away from the film’s release and, if you’ve followed me for a long time, my relationship with Villeneuve’s Dune has been conflicted to say the least. As a longtime fan of Frank Herbert’s book, I found the first part to be far denser than it needed to be, and the exposition clunky and overwritten. Villeneuve more than made up for it in the second installment, which knocked the wind out of me so fast I had to see it twice in cinemas.
Watching the trailer and exclusive footage for Dune: Part Three felt like seeing something completely brand-new, as if we were witnessing a generational blockbuster on the same level as Lawrence of Arabia, The Lord of the Rings, and Akira Kurosawa’s Ran. Yes, these are big words, and could certainly be prone to hyperbole, but there was something that felt so magisterial about how the film looked that one could easily compare it to some of the greatest epics of cinema history.
Anyone who has read Dune: Messiah knows that the book itself contains no action and is far more character-driven, focusing instead on the psychological evolution (or regression) of Paul Atreides and the political fallout from the Holy War he started. However, Villeneuve seems very interested in expanding on Herbert’s words and visualizing images stored deep within his mind, which have come back to the fold after he made Dune: Part Two and wanted to take a break before tackling the final chapter of Paul’s journey.
As he explains during a Q&A moderated by Brittany Broski, Villeneuve kept seeing images of a potential third installment in his sleep, which prompted him to adapt Dune: Messiah, a project he had always dreamed of, before moving on to the world of Ian Fleming. The aesthetic palette has also changed, as Villeneuve shoots on film for the first time since Incendies in 2010 and collaborates with cinematographer Linus Sandgren, as Academy Award-winner Greig Fraser is currently busy filming four Beatles movies with Sam Mendes.
Sandgren is no stranger to large-format film, having shot scenes for both First Man and No Time to Die with IMAX 70mm cameras, and Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights on VistaVision. For Dune: Part Three, select sequences were also captured on IMAX 70mm film, and the public had a chance to see exactly what that would look like during an extended prologue premiering next week before Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. No spoilers: it’s unlike anything Villeneuve has ever done before, as he continues to push his aesthetic and thematic boundaries in territories he’s never explored, within the Dune sandbox and beyond.
Speaking of, to reinvent the language of Dune: Part Three, Villeneuve explained that he was partly inspired by experimental films he watched as a child, made in rapid succession by the National Film Board of Canada in the 1960s and 1970s. While he did not specifically cite some examples in mind, one only has to explore the NFB’s website and find real treasures that could potentially point us in the direction of Villeneuve’s conception of esoteric images, but there are so many that he could’ve honestly talked about anything the board distributed at the height of their cinematic powers.
In conceiving these images, Villeneuve says that he “wanted to bring that kind of experimental feeling to Dune: Part Three.” To do so, he created a “very tiny unit of a few filmmakers, and their task was to do experiments in front of the camera to bring some crazy, insane footage that I would use for the movie. That unit was called the Psychedelic Unit, led by two young French Canadians: Kristof Brandl and Salomé Villeneuve. Their task was to bring some crazy images that you will see in the movie.”
One wonders exactly what those “crazy” images are, but as the Dune franchise becomes more visually unwieldy, Villeneuve has to respond accordingly and deliver on things no one has seen in this side of the Known Universe.
As a special surprise, Timothée Chalamet also joined the IMAX event and praised Villeneuve’s commitment to finishing the story and giving audiences something unique for the big screen:
“He could’ve taken years between these projects. Instead, he buckled in, and we got it done right away. I am a huge fan of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and I can’t imagine the last time someone knocked out three things so consecutively. I’m very grateful to Denis. In Denis we trust!”
Chalamet also had much to say about working with his co-stars, in particular Anya Taylor-Joy, who was briefly teased in Dune: Part Two as Alita, Paul’s younger sister. During the Q&A, Chalamet praised Taylor-Joy’s work in the film, saying that “she is breathtaking and unbelievable in this movie. That’s not media hyperbole. She is actually terrifying and amazing.”
The trailer and subsequent exclusive footage gave a good taste of what to expect without giving too much away. From the trailers, it looks like some changes were made from the book to the movie, such as giving Chani (Zendaya) a larger role, especially as her relationship with Paul becomes more fractured in this entry. However, none of what we’ve seen gives anything away, not even the bare bones of the plot, which is a great thing in the era we live in now, where trailers and promotional materials show too much and leave few surprises for the audience to discover on the screen.
If you’ve not read the book, chances are you will be in for the shock of your life when Dune: Part Three releases in cinemas on December 18. It might be the most divisive entry of the bunch, especially for someone familiar with Herbert’s source material. All I’ll say is this: none of us will be the same when this film fills the IMAX temples this Christmas, and The Russo Brothers certainly have their work cut out for them. Doomsday has to be the greatest movie of all time at this point, because I know which film I’m seeing first, and it’s not Avengers.
Desert power!
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