Zendaya Narrates the Trailer For What Might Be the Best Dune Yet

How do you compress a book that spans (depending on the edition) nearly 1,000 pages and took Frank Herbert six years to write into coherent cinema? Badly! That’s at least the way it’s gone so far for Dune, Herbert’s trippy 1965 sci-fi classic about intergalactic politics, the evolution of religion, and powerful worm excrement. Adapting the story is such a task that an entire documentary was made about a failed attempt—2013’s Jodorowsky’s Dune offered a peek inside a late ’70s version by cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky that would have featured Salvador Dalí, Amanda Lear, and the designs of H. R. Giger (perhaps best known as the creator of the monster in Ridley Scott’s Alien). David Lynch’s 1984 crack at Dune is not without its charms (a young, badly dubbed Alicia Witt proclaiming, “For he is the Kwisatz Haderach!,” for one), but it was a famously convoluted telling of an intricate story that prompted the studio to prepare handouts to theater patrons explaining the vocabulary and concepts of Herbert’s universe. At any rate, it flopped. In 2000, the Sci Fi Channel ran the miniseries Frank Herbert’s Dune, which also has its fans but… was a miniseries on the Sci Fi Channel.