Don’t Watch This New Sci-Fi Series, It’s Bridgerton In Space
It's Game of Thrones without the action scenes and all the players replaced by angry matrons in sensible black dresses.
If you enjoyed Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movies, but think they’d be improved with a script written by a women’s studies major, then Dune: Prophecy is the streaming show for you. The result of this approach is Game of Thrones without the action scenes and all the players replaced by angry matrons in sensible black dresses.
The first episode of Dune: Prophecy is available to stream now. I’ll be reviewing only that episode here because it’s the only one available, and the idea of suffering through another episode is intolerable.
Dune: Prophecy begins by dancing on the ashes of artificial intelligence. 10,000 years before Paul Atreides, the human race existed as slaves to AI machines. An Atreides ancestor defeated the machines and freed humanity, which made the Harkonnens very jealous.
That’s how the plot starts, building on the bones of petty Harkonnen jealousy. That jealousy is carried by the show’s main character Valya Harkonnen, Reverend Mother of the Bene Jesserit sisterhood. Making an entire series out of some lady being petty seems an odd decision, but here we are
Valya’s jealousy drives her to set in motion a series of events that will replace the current Emperor with an Empress she controls. To accomplish this, many women stand in rooms making stern, empty, and impassioned speeches.
And so Dune: Prophecy wanders from one speech scene to another, bouncing back and forth between women talking endlessly and saying nothing. It’s done in front of B- attempts at mimicking the set design of Villeneuve’s brilliant Dune movies, using digital backdrops and an occasional chair purchased from Pottery Barn.
Dune: Prophecy crescendos when its audience has reached the point where they’re ready to turn it off. It’s at this moment that actor Travis Fimmel shows up, dressed like he walked over to Dune from the set of a Dances With Wolves sequel. He’s a breath of fresh air, only because he’s slightly different in an ocean of blah and because he’s the only male character who doesn’t seem like a total idiot.
To be fair, there’s only one other male character of consequence. So it’s a 50/50 dumb to only sort of dumb ratio. That other male character is the emperor, played by Mark Strong. As a character actor, Strong has made a career out of playing smart and conniving bad guys. It is, therefore, strange that Dune: Prophecy has written him as an indecisive and impotent fool.
Fans of the Netflix series Bridgerton seem to be Dune: Prophecy’s intended target audience. That’s unfortunate since I don’t think the Bridgerton demographic is all that into spaceships, and I doubt if a few scenes with ladies wearing bodices will convince them to tune in.
I’m also not sure the corsets and fancy parties crowd will enjoy the slow, brutal, painful, and totally unnecessary screaming death of a cute little kid near the episode’s end. I’m not sure who would. Scratch that; I think Dune: Prophecy’s director, Anne Foerster, would. I’m not sure what else would drive someone to spend so much of their audience’s time watching that little fellow suffer.
Child murder-torture, speeches, weak digital backgrounds, and old ladies aren’t likely to draw an audience. This approach might have worked two years ago, during the days of peak, green-haired, ultra-feminism energy. Now it’s totally out of step with the world we live in, a leftover product from a time before the majority was caught up in the newly rising wave of humdrum commonsensism, for better or worse (whichever you think it is).
DUNE: PROPHECY REVIEW SCORE