Dune. Third Time The Charm?

Much is made in moviemaking circles of who directs a movie.  As a (never terribly successful) writer I've always found that strange.  If the script is weak, there's not much a director can do, it seems to me.  Sure, a weak director can ruin even a great script but I've always felt that not enough credit or blame is heaped on the writers.

With that thought in mind, I have to wonder just how the currently filming Dune movie will work out.  I know next to nothing about either the writer or director but happen to simply love the source material.  Interestingly, the writing/directing team is branching off from the feature film to add a series to the mix for WarnerMedia.  I am encouraged by the thought that these two artists are engaged enough with Frank Herbert's extraordinary science fiction universe to feel that there's more story to tell than a feature film drawn from the original novel.  As I understand it we're actually going to get two movies from that novel, which seems to be a nod to just how dense and deep Herbert's masterpiece actually is.

I didn't mind director Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049.  It was a little slow and not the most memorable film I've seen but it was beautiful.  I downright enjoyed his sci-fi thinker Arrival.  As for writer Jon Spaihts I find I'm less enthused.  Credits include writing Doctor Strange (probably Marvel's most formula movie to date), Prometheus (not exactly the greatest entry in the Alien saga) and the recent Tom Cruise Mummy movies.  Granted, he's working from a brilliant novel, but also a notoriously difficult to adapt one, full of unspeakably unspeakable dialog that's going to need a lot of massaging to sound and feel natural.

While I'm a big fan of the documentary Jodorowsky's Dune and it's insanely over the top vision of what a Dune movie could have been, I'm hoping that Villeneuve brings us something both more accessible and at least as visually spectacular so as to reach the general public and not just fans like myself.  As much as I enjoy the David Lynch version from the 80s, it's obvious why that movie failed to reach wide audiences.  The second attempt from the Sci-Fi channel went the mini-series route, allowing the story time and space to unfold but suffered from casting and budgetary constraints and again failed to reach the wide audience that the novel reached at its zenith.

I am guardedly optimistic about this third Dune incarnation.  The fact that the writing and directing team have found enough meat on the bones to feel its worth pursuing a secondary avenue to tell more of the story is definitely encouraging and I can honestly see Dune: The Sisterhood being a science fiction successor to Game of Thrones fantasy tour de force.  Done right, the Bene Gesserit and their political, social and psychic machinations are at least as compelling as the battle for the Iron Throne.