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Is Dune unfilmable? Alejandro Jodorowsky’s abandoned fourteen-hour-long attempt and David Lynch’s inscrutable 1984 version would suggest: maybe. Wiser perhaps for the missteps of his predecessors, Denis Villeneuve seems, in a way, to agree. Acquiescing to the sheer scale of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel, the title card announces this Dune as only part one of a hoped-for two. ‘Hoped for’ because the go-ahead for part two depends on the fortunes of part one. No pressure, then.

Villeneuve has form when it comes to sci-fi. The excellent Arrival (2016) garnered critical and commercial success, and Blade Runner 2049 (2017) achieved critical approval, if disappointingly little attention from audiences. And there’s plenty to admire in his Dune. Its commitment to its own vein of dreamy, surreal beauty is admirable, especially in a piece of blockbuster entertainment. An attention to textures—the sandy glitter of ‘spice’, gloopy metallic liquids—grounds the film’s high-budget special effects satisfyingly. Vast cities and huge monolithic spaceships (the latter something of a Villeneuvian staple) impress upon you the scale of the drama.

The cast is ridiculously star-studded, with Zendaya, Javier Bardem, and Charlotte Rampling putting in appearances just for fun. Timothée Chalamet plays the lead role of reluctant chosen one Paul Atreides with the requisite angst. Paul’s father, Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac), has been granted stewardship of the desert planet Arrakis. Widely coveted for its reserves of a super-valuable and mind-expanding substance known as spice, and fiercely guarded by the native Fremen, Arrakis turns out to be less a gift than a burden. 

That’s not the end of Paul’s worries. Thanks to the machinations of his mother and the powerful sisterhood of psychically gifted warrior women to which she belongs, he just might be a superpowered space Messiah. If you doubt him, the prophetic dreams that sometimes irritatingly break in on the action should convince you. 

The foregrounding of Paul’s relationship with his mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), secures a core of knotty human drama for the film, and is a refreshing choice for a big sci-fi movie. Ferguson is great as a woman hesitating between her ambitions and her love for her son. Less refreshing are the often questionable colonial dynamics on which the narrative turns (the Atreides are the good guys because they’re the nice colonisers, Paul has a dubious ethnographic-slash-spiritual attraction to Fremen culture). A viewer unfamiliar with Herbert’s novel can only hope these nuances will be teased out in part two, should it indeed be made.

As a piece of entertainment, however, the fatal flaw of Villeneuve’s Dune turns out to be a familiar one: it’s just too long. The action unfolds with a slowness and attention to detail that brings art-house gravity to a story that could just as easily be played as goofy (one of its main characters is called Duncan Idaho (a game Jason Momoa)). The pieces slot gradually into place, the tension builds until it spills over in a dramatic interplanetary Night of the Long Knives. 

And then the film keeps going. With its climax receding in the rearview mirror, the narrative runs out of energy, and so do you. You wonder how long is left. You try to figure out where exactly the film’s writing trifecta of Villeneuve, Eric Roth, and Jon Spaihts is planning on dividing Herbert’s sprawling plot. You long for the return of intermissions. 

So, is Dune unfilmable? Villeneuve takes a fair stab at it. But when you emerge, blinking, from the cinema theatre, you might find yourself thinking what a great TV show it would have made instead.

Dune is out in Irish cinemas now.