Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two (the sequel to his 2021 Dune) is the big Hollywood blockbuster of the moment and perhaps the year. Although it’s a science fiction epic set 10,000 years in the future, it has many contemporary echoes that are all he more striking because it is based on Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel and was made before the outbreak of the current onslaught in Gaza. The film tells the story of a galactic empire that depends on resource extraction from a desert hinterland, the site of an uprising from the native population. This anti-colonial revolution is met with a ferocious counterinsurgency and hijacked by a religious fundamentalist crusade.

David Klion reviewed Dune: Part Two for The New Republic, where he took up the faithfulness of the two film adaptations to Herbert’s novel. David is someone I love talking to Dune about. We’ve taken up the movies in two earlier podcasts, available here and here.

In this latest iteration of our ongoing Dune conversations, we take up the Cold War origins of the novel, its remarkable prescience about global geopolitics and the Middle East, and the influence of French Canadian history on director Villeneuve, among many other matters.

We also take up the issue of the film’s alleged de-Arabization of the story, a matter raised by many critics, including Roxana Hadadi in Vulture (in what I think is one of the most insightful reviews of the movie).