PSA: The trailer for Dune: Part Two looks dope, whatever the rest of the PC Gamer team think
“Didn’t all the interesting characters die?” is one of several takes I am choosing to ignore while clambering aboard the hype worm.
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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 sheshaved her head, looking absolutely immaculate as Princess Irulan. There’s Austin ‘Elvis’ Butler whohasshaved 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 ofridiculous 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, theoriginal Dunehad barely spluttered to life before Westwood basically coined the RTS genre with Dune 2 in 1992. Back in the present day,Dune: Awakeningis a survival MMO from Funcom with no current release date, but that we can expect to hear more about this summer. taps nose
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With over two decades covering videogames, Tim has been there from the beginning. In his case, that meant playing Elite in ‘co-op’ on a BBC Micro (one player uses the movement keys, the other shoots) until his parents finally caved and bought an Amstrad CPC 6128. These days, when not steering the good ship PC Gamer, Tim spends his time complaining that all Priest mains in Hearthstone are degenerates and raiding in Destiny 2. He’s almost certainly doing one of these right now.
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