If you don't go to the Imperium, the Imperium will come to you. Indeed, the universe Dunefirst imagined in the books of Frank Herbert, comes back to life on television this Monday, November 18 through the series Dune : Prophecyon the Max streaming platform. And the stakes are necessarily high as this science fiction universe, created from the 1960s, is acclaimed throughout the world. So much so that it has already given rise to numerous adaptations, even if it sometimes means being mistreated. In 1984, David Lynch was already struggling with a catastrophic adaptation, despite the presence of Sting and Kyle MacLachlan in the cast. In 2000 and 2003, two mini-series were released with Alec Newman in the title role, without ever achieving the expected success. We had to wait until 2021 and director Denis Villeneuve to discover an adaptation that lived up to our expectations. But the series Dune : Prophecy did not wait for the success of Timothée Chalamet to take action, since the fiction was already in development even before the theatrical release of the first opus of Dune. But now that the bar has been set so high, is the series proving to be as compelling?
Dune Prophecy : the world of Frank Herbert as we have never seen it
To calmly approach this new adaptation, we must first of all ignore the films of Denis Villeneuve: due to a lack of financial resources as substantial as the films, the series cannot boast of the same visual ambition. Exit the impressive shots of dunes and sandworms on Arrakis, this is a series mainly filmed in interior settings. But from this constraint, Alison Schapker, the showrunner, was able to create an opportunity: while preserving true coherence on a photographic and visual level with Villeneuve's creation, the series does not attempt to reproduce but to enrich, through new settings and above all, an unpublished storynever brought to the screen. Here we break with a long tradition of adaptations centered on Paul Atreides and we travel more than 10,000 years before his birth to discover the beginnings of the Bene Gesserit order. We discover how these women, all dressed in black, developed their human skills beyond imaginable to become advisors and guides to the most powerful families in the Imperium.
Dune Prophecy : a political revisitation with the false air of Game of Thrones
This fiction in six episodes is actually adapted from the book Dune: The Sisterhoodpublished in 2012 and co-written by Brian Herbert, son of Frank Herbert. While the book covers the beginnings of the community well, it also recounts the political conspiracies that followed the War of the Machines and the banning of all intelligent technology. The storyline of the series does honorably. Starting from a crazy and clumsy novel, far from the quality of Father Herbert, the plot is purged of the superfluous and of most of the characters to keep only the substantive marrow: the characters of Sisters, and in particular of Valya Harkonnen, performed here with ferocity by Emily Watson and Jessica Barden (young version). While the Harkonnen family has been banished, Valya attempts to restore the family image by becoming the second woman to become Reverend Mother. She then makes it her mission to prevent at all costs the prophecy according to which the order will be destroyed by an as yet unidentified evil. Despite a particularly dense first episode, the series then develops into a political fiction, where palace intrigues and manipulation, including through sex, are commonplace. Enough to develop a dimension only glimpsed in the films and give this new creation a false air of Games of Thrones.
Dune Prophecy : a modern tale for a new type of science fiction
It's hard not to read this new production as a reinvention of the myth of the witch hunt. Valya must quickly face a formidable but difficult to read enemy: Desmond Hart. If Travis Fimmel, back after Vikingsdoes not particularly extend his range of play here, he still proves to be a worthy opponent, offering a very muscular confrontation to Emily Watson. While the latter reinvents herself as a prophet, threatening and captivating, she is the common thread of a modern and frightening tale mixing contemporary themes such as empowerment and obscurantism. The series, via its colorimetric palettes and its editing effects, also plays with the codes of horror, thus offering itself a real identity. If some green backgrounds leave something to be desired and some characters struggle to convince (the very good Mark Strong does not, for example, have much to play in the role of the easily manipulated Emperor), this prequel benefits from the charm of novelty and will capture its audience a little more with each new episode.
