Dune: Prophecy trafficks in uninspired inevitability

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

It’s getting hard to justify the buzz around certain “prestige” series — in no small part because, somehow, despite having an endless supply of money and intellectual property, so many of these projects come off as basically boring.

Rings of Power on Amazon Prime; House of the Dragon on Max; and Star Wars spinoffs The Book of Boba Fett, Ahsoka and the unwatchable Skeleton Crew on Disney+ all had pedigrees in iconic pieces of pop culture, but still fell flat with stilted dialogue, bloated exposition, uneven pacing and unlikable characters. 

Unfortunately, we must now add Dune: Prophecy to the list of recent big-budget duds.

About eight months after Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Part 2 premiered to acclaim in theaters, Max unveiled Dune: Prophecy on Nov. 17, hoping to capitalize on the surge in excitement over the spice-infused religio-political sci-fi universe created by author Frank Herbert in his classic 1964 novel Dune. 

Still from Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Part 2. Courtesy image.

While Villeneuve’s two-part epics covered the events in Dune, Herbert wrote a further five books in the series that tell a story spanning thousands of years after the rise and fall of the anti-messiah Paul Atreides. The sixth book — Dune: Chapterhouse — ended on a cliffhanger, suggesting that Herbert intended to continue with a seventh installment, but he died in 1986, a year after its publication. 

More than a dozen years later, Herbert’s son Brian and sci-fi author Kevin J. Anderson teamed up to milk the franchise with three prequels between 1999 and 2001, and they’ve been churning out mediocre Dune-related spinoffs ever since. That includes Sisterhood of Dune in 2012, which tells the origin story of the Bene Gesserit — the all-female order of hyper-trained “reverend mothers” who quietly steer the events of the known universe from their positions as “truthsayers” installed in the courts of various noble houses that (ostensibly) rule humanity.

That’s where Dune: Prophecy comes in, as an adaptation of Sisterhood, both of which take place more than 10,000 years before the Atreides-Harkonnen standoff on the desert planet of Arrakis.

In Prophecy, the Bene Gesserit sisters are still a fledgling organization, established fewer than 100 years after the universe-spanning conflict against “thinking machines” that resulted in a religious backlash against artificial intelligence and in favor of expanding human potential (which would have made a better series, honestly). At this stage, precious few members of the order have survived the process of ingesting a special poison in order to access the matrilineal wisdom living ghost-like in their DNA, but that’s not stopping them from trying, uncovering the titular “prophecy” in the meantime.

At the head of the school is Valya Harkonnen (Emily Watson) and her sister Tula (Olivia Williams). Yes, those Harkonnens who, in this remote historical time period, are despised and relegated to second-tier status because of what one of their ancestors did (or didn’t do?) in the recent wars against the machines. Of course, anyone acquainted with Dune knows that the Harkonnens ultimately deserve their bad name, but Valya is hellbent on un-canceling them.

Meanwhile, in the royal court, we meet the embattled weakling Emperor Javicco Corrino (Mark Strong), his headstrong — and maybe traitorous? — daughter Princess Ynez (Sarah-Sofie Boussnina) and her forbidden but basic-hunk lover (and also traitor?) Kieran Atreides (Chris Mason). 

Oh, and there’s conniving Empress Natalya (Jodhi May) and Rasputin-like Desmond Hart (Travis Fimmel), who after an encounter with a sandworm on Arrakis is apparently able to burn people alive with his mind in the service of the emperor, to whom he is fanatically loyal (just so long as the bossman hates “thinking machines” as much as he does).

There are plots within plots, plans within plans and plenty of whispering in dark hallways.

However, even after four episodes of the six-episode arc and some things have happened, it’s still a show about people having low-toned, menacing conversations and almost none of them — barring Olivia Williams’ Tula — are remotely sympathetic. This is not a judgment against the performances, because I’ll never say a bad word about Williams or Watson, and I’m a big fan of Strong and Fimmel. The failings of Prophecy are common to many prequels but more pronounced in the Dune-iverse.

For one thing, it’s impossible to believe that the events of Prophecy are occurring 10,000 years before the storylines of the characters we all know from Dune. Apparently, nothing about the architectural, sartorial or artistic aesthetics; political plotting; technology, settings and place names; language or linguistic usage; religion; or even the surnames in this sprawling interstellar civilization (which we only see represented on, like, three planets) have changed in the slightest for 100 centuries. 

For comparison, 10,000 years ago on Earth, people hadn’t yet figured out the wheel or writing. 

I get it that “the sleeper must awaken,” and there is a throughline in the Dune story that humanity had stagnated at some point, but an awful lot can happen in 10,000 years. In this case it apparently won’t.

Beyond that, what a boring universe it must be if the same three or four families are in charge for 10 millennia, and all “prophecies” inevitably trend to one outcome involving those same families in the super-far future? Also, no one is going to get me to root for Harkonnens in any instance. 

We all know how this story ends, but Dune: Prophecy doesn’t really give us anything to distract us from its own culmination. Ultimately, it’s under-spiced.