Josh Brolin, who plays the warrior-minstrel Gurney Halleck in the movie, took a lifelong “Dune”-fan friend to a screening in New York, and at the end of the movie the friend started screaming: “That was it! That was it! That’s what I saw! That’s what I saw when I was a kid!”įeaturing stars like Timothée Chalamet, Oscar Isaac, Rebecca Ferguson, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgard, Zendaya and Javier Bardem, “Dune” was three and a half years in production and cost approximately $165 million to make.

Afterward, I walked along empty streets with my head full of deserts and burning date palms, vast ships, monstrous sandworms and a sense of wonderment that the book’s visions had been so exquisitely realized. When the film began, I heard the thump of a heartbeat working in counterpoint to my own, bursts of percussive discordance as Hans Zimmer’s score cut in, and then harsh desert light was burning the backs of my eyes and I was somewhere else entirely, witnessing the brutal quelling of an insurgency on a distant planet - and after a while, I realized I was whispering, “Oh, my God” under my breath over and over again. Forgotten the particular smell of popcorn and carpet cleaner, how it evokes a childhood memory of brushing my fingers across the static on the glass of a just-switched-on TV set forgotten the vertiginous scale of the space and the screen. Forgotten how the light inside a big auditorium always feels dusty and late-night weary, no matter what time it is. I’d not been in a movie theater in almost two years, and I’d forgotten what it was like. Earlier this summer, sitting in a London cinema for a screening of Denis Villeneuve’s hugely anticipated, pandemic-delayed adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel “ Dune,” I found myself unexpectedly close to tears.

Helen macdonald