One of the benefits of being (at least nominally) in charge of the good ship PC Gamer—there are still a few—is that I get to write about whatever I want. Mostly that means Destiny 2 and Hearthstone, but today it also means the Dune 2 movie, which has released its first trailer. Frankly, I was surprised no other members of the team beat me to it, but judging by the "sorry I just can't take Timothee Chalamet seriously" and "didn't all the interesting characters die" messages in Slack, it appears I've surrounded myself with heathens who don't care about the second part of Denis Villeneuve's icy rendition of one of the all-time pillars of the sci-fi canon.
Anyway: The trailer. There's sand. There's Zendaya and my semi-namesake Timmy Chalamet gazing at each other mournfully with eyes blue like justice. There's more sand. There's Flo Pugh, shot before she shaved her head, looking absolutely immaculate as Princess Irulan. There's Austin 'Elvis' Butler who has shaved his head (and eyebrows) looking vampiric as Harkonnen asshole Feyd-Rautha (previously played by Sting in David Lynch's flawed but bonkers version). There is, finally, more sand.
The key scene in the new trailer shows glimpses of Paul Atreides sand-surfing atop the back of one of the planet's iconic giant worms, without entirely giving the money shot away. In Lynch's 1984 movie, the kindest thing I can say about the worm riding was that it was done with a kind of ridiculous gusto. Visual effects have obviously leapt on an incredible amount in the intervening almost three decades, so I'm hopeful the worm ride is less likely to be met by giggles when Dune hits cinemas on November 23.
Finally, lest you, like the rest of my team, are still wondering why I'm giving precious page space to a movie, aside from the fact its influence can be felt throughout the entire history of space games on PC, allow me to remind you that there have also been a number of licensed Dune games down the years. As Richard Cobbet wrote, the original Dune had barely spluttered to life before Westwood basically coined the RTS genre with Dune 2 in 1992. Back in the present day, Dune: Awakening is a survival MMO from Funcom with no current release date, but that we can expect to hear more about this summer. *taps nose*
