The Final Trailer for ‘Dune’ Teases the Biggest Movie of the Year

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• Dune, Denis Villeneuve's highly anticipated adaptation of Frank Herbert's novel has been delayed until 2021.

• The movie stars Timothée Chalamet as intergalactic traveler/royal Paul Atreides, as well as Jason Momoa, Josh Brolin, Zendaya and more.

• Here's what we know about the Dune movie so far.

Frank Herbert's 1965 novel, Dune, the first in a sci-fi series spanning several works combining for well over 4,000 pages, has been nearly impossible to adapt for film. But director Denis Villeneuve is going to try with his upcoming movie (stuffed with a host of Hollywood megastars), which will be the fourth attempt at bringing the book to cinematic life.

Dune is notable for its socio-political complexity and massive world-building, a behemoth which predated and even directly inspired many of the hit sci-fi franchises of that century. To slightly bastardize the plot, while putting it into mainstream terms: Dune combines the best desert-focused frontiers of the original Star Wars trilogy with a more exciting iteration of the prequel's council-heavy power politics. It's a lot of pew pew pew and also talk talk talk. Which makes it a pretty formidable source material.

So formidable that, for many filmgoers, there hasn't been a successful adaptation. (In some editions, the novel runs nearly 900 pages. Who wants to tackle that?) Hopefully that's all about to change very soon, as Warner Bros. Pictures seems to have put together just about the perfect team of creators and actors to get the job done.

Here's everything we know about the newest Dune movie so far.

When is Dune set to release?

The Dune movie will be split into two–kind of like Stephen King's IT and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The first part of the movie was originally set to release on December 18, 2020, but we know how that

Dune now has the official release date of October 22, 2021. It will premiere both in theaters and on HBO Max. After multiple delays, this should be the real real premiere date, so mark your calendars optimistically this time.

Is there a trailer for the Dune movie?

Hell yeah there is. A new full length trailer for the film was recently released.

There's obviously lots to unpack. First, we should note that the film was shot (almost) entirely on location, and with very limited green screen use (so think of it as closer to the original Lord of the Rings films and not the Hobbit CGI environment fest), which makes the scale of the desert appropriately ginormous.

It's also important to note the trailer's fidelity. Every scene shown on screen (as far as we can tell) has basis in the novel. Even the dialogue between Paul and the Reverend Mother, as seen in earlier trailers, seems faithful.

The teaser (for the trailer) also featured an oft-quoted line from the novel. The quote, a kind of mantra meant to alleviate fear, comes from the Bene Gesserit, a religious sisterhood.

Any red flags?

One concern might be the film's combat. We see shield battles in the trailer, which combine visual effects with choreographed fighting. They look okay. Hand-to-hand combat is a primary feature of the novel and provides the frame for the work's most important scenes. In other words, the novel's violence isn't simply a literary gimmick; it's an essential element of the characterization and narrative. The movie will have a PG-13 rating, however, and you can see some of the blood substitutes in Duncan Idaho's (Jason Momoa) fight where his impacts turn the shields red. (Violence as described in the novel is definitely not PG-13.)

The trailer also opens with Paul's vision of Chani and continues to put both characters on screen throughout, suggesting that this romantic union will be one of the central storylines of the film. This decision would not be in keeping with the novel, wherein most of Paul's visions, motivations, and destiny involve his leading the Fremen. (The book is many things, but a traditional romantic story it is not.)

That said, actor Zendaya, who plays Chani, noted that (at least for the first film) she doesn't have a lot of screentime. (Which makes sense, as Paul doesn't meet her character until well into the first novel.)

We're guessing the romantic tease is more for marketing purposes than an actual summation of the film's plot.

Who is in the cast?

Everyone. Everyone who's hot in Hollywood. That includes Timothée Chalamet, Jason Momoa (whose Khal Drogo and Game of Thrones' Essos feel like Dune decedents), Oscar Isaac, Zendaya, Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem, Dave Bautista, Stellan Skarsgård, and like a billion other people.

All these hot people filmed Dune in the very hot canyons of southern Jordan. Chalamet told Vanity Fair the temperature on set was 120 degrees. And that's on top of the rubber armor they wore.

Who's directing Dune this time around?

Denis Villeneuve. And he may actually be the perfect man for this job. The filmmaker has done ambitious sci-fi before, most notably Blade Runner 2049 (Blade Runner and source material author Philip K. Dick owes a literary debt to Herbert.) He's also pulled off some very difficult literary adaptations (including Enemy, based on José Saramago's Kafkaesque novel, The Double). If there's a filmmaker working today who can do Dune, it is most certainly Villeneuve.

And no one is more excited about the project than the French-Canadian filmmaker. In a recent interview with Empire, Villeneuve spoke about a new image from the film.

The image shows Chalamet as Paul Atreides being aided by Josh Brolin’s Gurney Halleck. “It’s Paul’s first contact with the deep desert, where he’s mesmerized by it,” Villeneuve told Empire. “He has a strange feeling of being home. There’s a lot of action at this specific moment, and [it’s] one of the scenes in the movie that I’m starting to get pretty proud of.”

It’s one of Villenueve’s trademark moments: the crossing of the threshold, the moment the hero leaves behind the known world for the unknown. Think Amy Adams’ Louise Banks entering the alien vessel in Arrival. Or Emily Blunt’s Kate Macey riding across the border into Juarez, Mexico, in Sicario. These have been some of Villenueve’s most intense scenes. He’s an expert at hurling viewers into a new world. And in Dune, he’ll have many new world’s to introduce.

What will the Dune movie be about?

Villeneuve's Dune movie will play fairly close to the first 1965 novel.

Paul Atreides (Chalamet), the heir of an aristocratic family, leaves his home planet of Caladan for the mining planet Arrakis, site of the coveted spice "melange" or an elixir-like drug that gives a user a longer life span and is also essential for space navigation. Arrakis, therefore, is of the utmost geopolitical (or would it be galactic-political?) importance, and so the convergence location of the galaxy's competing forces. Paul soon finds himself amidst an intergalactic family-feuding, power scramble for control of the planet.

Villeneuve is also likely to play up the work's historically prophetic themes, telling Vanity Fair that the novel was "a distant portrait of the reality of the oil and the capitalism and the exploitation" of Earth. So Dune will be Herbert meets Miyazaki? Hell yeah.

Wait, how many Dune adaptations are there?

Depends if you include the myriad of failed movies and half-baked TV series left stuffed in drawers as Hollywood writers pull out their greying hair.

Alejandro Jodorowsky attempted it back in the '70s. (There's an amazing documentary about how Jodorowsky's attempt failed.) David Lynch tried it in 1984, but met rare critical scorn. And the SyFy channel gave it a shot in 2000. But, like, who the heck remembers that?

Villeneuve will thus be the fourth person to attempt the project. His advantage: a lot more money and a lot more special effects tech advancements.

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