'Dune: Prophecy' Should Be Wilder and Weirder

HBO’s Dune: Prophecy juggles many elements. On one hand, the show functions as IP maintenance and expansion for the Denis Villeneuve Dune films which adapted Frank Herbert’s Dune novel. On a second hand, it’s adapting the novel Sisterhood of Dune by Frank Herbert’s son Brian and Kevin J. Anderson that sits within a 15-novel span of Dune-branded books written by the pair. On a special third hand, Prophecy is an attempt by HBO to recreate the glory days of Game of Thrones as a genre-fiction adaptation for primetime viewing and water-cooler conversation. On an impossible fourth hand, Prophecy seeks to capture the same fans that made Dune a success. It’s perhaps juggling too much and it may help explain why the series struggles to be interesting.

A great deal of the blame lays on the exposition that’s poured far too thickly, but there’s also a reluctance to get unabashedly weird at play. The magic of Herbert’s original Dune novels was in its deeply, wonderfully strange world: clone-esque creations birthed from “womb-vats” were called gholas, spacecraft navigators do so many hallucinogens that they’ll develop gills to breathe more drugs in, there’s a literal “battle of sexes” in which men and women use sex as a weapon to subjugate and kill one another; the list could go on! Not all these ideas are winners (the war of the sexes deserves significant side-eye), but the willingness to go wild was there. One of the frustrating aspects of sci-fi fiction that the Dune novels addressed was how often the “strange new worlds” of sci-fi media were not so far removed from the world we live in. Dune referenced familiar concepts but remixed or altered them so that they acted like access points into an otherwise unfamiliar universe. Yes, spice is oil and Arrakis is the Middle East, but as thunderingly basic as that is, Dune created a universe of infinite possibilities. For better and worse Dune leaped into truly bonkers territory and that let it stand out from the crowd that can still feel new and exciting.

The recent Dune films successfully balanced the weird with the commercial needs but that Dune: Prophecy is missing the mark so far. It needs to be much weirder! There are moments of promise like whenever the Bene Gesserit sisters activate their truth-saying via quick cuts to their fingers touching, eyes dilating, and breath aspirating. I was also taken with the planetary vistas that show us alien architecture that injects bits of flare into the proceedings. Unfortunately, that’s where my faint praise on this front ends. There was a line spoken by Constantine, the illegitimate but hot son of the Emperor when he’s asked what visiting the Bene Gesserit’s enclave was like: “Fine, if you like piety and minimalism.” And that’s accurate; the BG’s space is often spare and coldly lit, with long looming planes of slate floors and unadorned walls. The issue is that, well, “minimal” could be used to describe virtually all the settings we see. There are so many empty, cavernous spaces with curved walls that it sometimes feels like the whole show was filmed inside one cave system. There’s very little in the way of set dressing or props which makes everything feel stripped of personality. The Great Machine War explains why society spurns artificial intelligence, but did they also outlaw art or wall decoration or like, a splash of color to break up monochrome spaces? Dune’s world is bananas, show it to me!

It’s not just the appearance that feels pedestrian, there’s also the action we’ve seen so far. Outside of a few exceptions, the action of Dune: Prophecy could happen on virtually any other fantasy or sci-fi show. The backstabbing, the plotting, and the ridiculously gratuitous sex scenes, all make the series feel less like a Dune story and more like an HBO show on autopilot with some Dune flavor sprinkled in. It feels too much like too many other shows. Prophecy traces the narrative lines of Game of Thrones way too closely. I get that they want that level of success and that media conglomerates love a formula, but what is the point of adapting something as splashy and imaginative as Dune if you’re only going to sand down what makes it unique? The plotting is the same, the proclamations are the same, the beats are the same, and it gets stale quickly. Even when the characters do sci-fi things, it often feels like a copy/paste from another cookie-cutter genre drama: Princess Ynez steals away to a seedy nightclub with her half-brother where they do space-cocaine and then she has space-sex with her space-sword instructor after huffing some space-poppers together. It feels like we’ve heard this song before, HBO!

The capable recreation of Villeneuve’s style just doesn’t go hard enough to make up for this lack of distinction. The costumes look well-made, but they generally lack details with either thematic resonance or world-building. Princess Ynez’s engagement gown and caged headpiece are stand-outs due to being vibrantly, brilliantly red, and the biggest evidence of some interesting design happening. Otherwise, it’s a lot of charcoal, black, and dove-gray, with a helping of orange-yellow for Arrakis. It’s all too bland to be Dune

Dune: Prophecy is a generic genre drama with so much nothing happening that it fails to be appreciably Dune in plot or presentation. I understand that GoT made crazy money and was a huge cultural moment, but that wasn’t achieved by underbaked, HBO-on-autopilot programming. I am so here for the story of the Bene Gesserit, as a Dune fan and someone who’s starved for femme-forward sci-fi. I wanted to love Dune: Prophecy, but it’s simply not weird enough.