Dune is one of those books that is notoriously hard to adapt to screen, especially if you want to be faithful to the extensive and confusing source material. French director Denis Villeneuve will try his hand at adapting the epic sci-fi series. And today, even in the midst of this pandemic, we’ve gotten to see our first look at the film.
We see Timothee Chalamet as Paul Atreides, the main character of Dune, looking forlorn on a beach with spaceships in the background. Is it just me or does he look like Kylo Ren? Not judging or anything, it’s just that moody sci-fi man in black is a look now. Still, we don’t get very much from the photo itself, other than it has Villeneuve bleak, expansive style. At least Chalamet looks appropriately dour for the part of a young man whose whole life is turned upside down.
“The immediately appealing thing about Paul was the fact that in a story of such detail and scale and world-building, the protagonist is on an anti-hero’s-journey of sorts,” Chalamet said to Vanity Fair about signing on to Dune. “He thinks he’s going to be sort of a young general studying his father and his leadership of a fighting force before he comes of age, hopefully a decade later, or something like that.”
Chalamet is in good company on this shoot. Rebecca Ferguson and Oscar Isaac play Chalamet’s parents Lady Jessica and Leto, Josh Brolin plays weapons master Gurney Halleck, Stellan Skarsgard plays Baron Harkonnen, and Zendaya plays love interest Chani. In smaller roles, we have Dave Bautista, Javier Bardem, Jason Momoa, Charlotte Rampling, David Dastmalchian, and Stephen McKinley Henderson. We even get to see some of them in additional shots posted by Vanity Fair:
So far, Warner Bros has not delayed the film due to the great coronavirus reshuffling.
Dune is scheduled to premiere in theaters on December 18, 2020.
