Dune: Prophecy can’t match the ambition of the franchise

While Dune: Prophecy is a (very loose) literary adaptation, the HBO series ultimately defines itself by its ties to Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movies. In and of itself, that’s no big deal. 2024 has seen a now-standard flurry of shows released under the Star Wars, DC, and Marvel labels (to name just a few) — all of them spinoffs, prequels, sequels, or reboots of franchises that originated on film. Hell, DC Studios relaunched its cinematic universe with a streaming joint! 

Yet Dune: Prophecy is innately different to these other small-screen offshoots of big-screen blockbusters, because, unlike them, its cinema roots are baked into its very DNA. And now that the dust (or should that be spice?) has settled on Dune: Prophecy season 1, it’s painfully clear that trying to shrink Dune’s inherently filmic nature — its sheer “bigness” — is a task not even the Lisan al Gaib himself could accomplish.

[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for Dune: Prophecy season 1.]

At this point, longtime Dune devotees are probably crying foul. “What about the two miniseries, Frank Herbert’s Dune and Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune, that aired on Syfy in the 2000s?” these fans ask. “Weren’t those successful?” And indeed they were, both critically and commercially; these Dune adaptations rank among Syfy’s most-watched original productions to this day. But here’s the thing: Those productions were built from the ground up for the small screen. Sure, they aspired to cinematic sensibilities, but there’s no mistaking their made-for-TV origins. The acting is uneven, the scripts are deliberately paced and exposition-heavy, and most of all, the spectacle is hemmed in by a basic cable budget.

In that sense, Dune: Prophecy is arguably much closer to cinema than these earlier efforts. Certainly, the HBO series’ visual effects, costumes, and sets are light-years ahead of anything Syfy mustered. The performances are more consistent, too; the divide between Hollywood veterans and TV regulars is less pronounced. And showrunner Alison Schapker and her team follow the Great Schools of Dune trilogy’s storyline far less slavishly than the Syfy adaptations’ blow-by-blow approach to their source text, Frank Herbert’s first three novels. Even so, Dune: Prophecy season 1 is a claustrophobic, small-scale affair. Valya Harkonnen and her allies and enemies wheel and deal primarily in the backrooms and corridors of the universe. The only major action set-piece we get, a flashback to the Butlerian Jihad, is a handful of shots during the prologue. Even the thematic meat of the piece — supposedly a deep dive into power, truth, and systems of control — is handled perfunctorily, as if only there to jazz up a relatively inconsequential narrative. It all feels so contained; it feels like TV.

Contrast this with Villeneuve’s Dune: Part One and Part Two. Here we have two of the biggest movies to ever movie. The cast is uniformly excellent. The storytelling (particularly in Part Two) moves at a brisk clip and keeps the expository dialogue to a minimum. The production values are exactly what you’d expect from a combined price tag north of $350 million. The scope is mythic. The themes, covering everything from the perils of superhero-type leaders to free will versus determinism, are painted in vivid, operatic strokes. Watching these films — especially in oversized IMAX format — goes beyond mere immersion and verges on a religious experience. It’s a vision of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi universe that’s defiantly geared toward the theatrical experience in an age of smartphones and streaming platforms. “Frankly, to watch Dune on a television, the best way I can compare it is to drive a speedboat in your bathtub,” Villeneuve told Total Film in 2021. “For me, it’s ridiculous. It’s a movie that’s made as a tribute for the big screen experience.”

In short? The Dune franchise under Villeneuve is incompatible with TV — which might explain why the Canadian filmmaker bailed on Dune: Prophecy before cameras rolled. (For what it’s worth, the official reason is that Villeneuve bowed out to focus on Dune: Part Two’s sequel, Dune Messiah). The gulf between film and television — even prestige television — is simply too great. Not that Dune: Prophecy season 1 does itself many favors. To Schapker’s credit, Prophecy leans into the strengths of TV as a medium, rightly recognizing that directly mapping a cinematic blueprint onto six hour-long installments is impossible. But the way this is rolled out is so low-stakes (and at times, cheap-feeling) that it diminishes Dune’s world, rather than expanding it. 

Take the Desmond Hart plot thread. This mystery box finally gets (partly) opened in episode 6, but what’s inside — ocular nerve implants and shadowy Bene Gesserit haters — is oddly pedestrian. There’s none of the intellectual and emotional oomph of Dune: Part One and Part Two protagonist Paul Atreides giving the green light to galactic genocide for the greater good. It’s more akin to a plot-centric season finale reveal you’d expect from, say, Agents of SHIELD or Fringe. No shade on either show; it’s just that no one would mistake either for a cinema-grade epic. Similarly, episode 5’s procedural elements involving Tula Harkonnen, Raquella/Lila, and a generic “science lab” set are the kinds of scenes that would happen off screen in Villeneuve’s films, and with good reason; CSI: Wallach IX is decidedly less compelling than the soaring grandeur of Paul’s subversive hero’s journey. And let’s not forget season 1’s wider, dual-timeline narrative, which makes an already busy story even busier (and slower) — all while filling in gaps in the Dune mythos that arguably functioned better left unexplained.

These shortcomings would be enough to curdle most shows. But foist them onto the Dune universe and they become twice as glaring. Because they don’t merely tarnish the franchise’s brand — they reduce its outsized ambitions. Where Dune: Part One and Part Two paid off a cosmos-wide, multi-millennia master plan, Prophecy’s first season gave us sub-Game of Thrones intrigue and a vaguely defined threat to the Sisterhood’s future (effectively a moot point, thanks to the movies), most of it playing out in the same confined locales. Schapker and co. fuss over the how and the why of it all, failing to grasp that the more granular Dune: Prophecy becomes, the further away from Villeneuve’s (and Herbert’s) big ideas — so fundamental to this brainy sci-fi saga — it gets. For all its spaceships, Shai-Hulud cameos, and funky footwear, Dune: Prophecy just doesn’t feel like Dune.

Again, the odds of that happening — of any TV show sitting comfortably alongside Dune: Part One and Part Two — were always stacked against HBO. Even if Dune: Prophecy season 1 had nailed every aspect of its execution, even if it had been one of the best shows of the year, it still wouldn’t have been a movie. As a result, the folks behind Prophecy were always going to have to scale back its big-screen counterparts’ cinematic essence to produce something more TV-friendly. But that’s the problem: Shrinking Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is like trying to preserve a snowflake on the desert world that lends the franchise its name — doomed from the start.