In the entertainment industry, just like in real life, when someone wants a toy, everyone wants to have the same one. It is a topic that has been talked about: the growth of transmissionin communion with the pandemic, it made acceptable a certain idea of continuous fluidity between film and television. You derivatives They are not a recent trend, they have existed for decades, many times they circulated within the same medium without becoming a phenomenon -using an expensive video game term-. cross platform. But before derivatives they were just derivativesoften only a parenthesis from which the possibility of constructing a complete sentence was studied. Few could. Now, a split It almost seems like a pejorative term, such is the desire to build a universe and not a parallel world.
Is it Marvel’s fault? Or Star Wars? Of Disney as an entertainment monster? No, in the end the fault lies with those who consume, because we are the ones who see, buy, accept and pay. Although Marvel (and later Disney as a whole) refined the formula in such a way that even franchises as fast and furious Now they are universes in which each new film is always presented as something more. It’s not “just” about marketing. In fact, films stopped growing forward (they even stopped, in some cases, taking risks) and began to grow only inward. This also explains the fatigue with Marvel movies: it’s not a problem with superheroes, it’s a problem with the replication of replication.
[o trailer de “Dune: Prophecy”:]
And so we come to Dune: Prophecy. As the penguin (also in Max), like all the series of the Marvel Cinematic Universe that emerged from 2021 (and, to a lesser extent, those that were produced before by Netflix), we are not really facing a split. We are facing further proof that it is an industry that often takes few risks and prefers to create around established brands instead of generating products that are the result of absolute creativity. Because the territory that automatically relates to the public is safer, more comfortable, more predictable. The disadvantage is that risk is an illusion, it steals time and energy for the rest… and the rest is a lot.
Dune: Prophecy He wants to try something similar with the rehabilitation of Frank Herbert’s imagination that Denis Villeneuve recently adapted to film, in a film divided into two chapters (and, of course, the director is already working on a third). The universe grows in cinema and expands on television and in transmissionto see how far it can grow, feeding on itself. Only Prophecy He is in a strange place and seems to recognize it. At this point it has become clear that it is impossible to find the next game of Thrones within the fantasy universe. What if she’s in science fiction? Because the way has been opened for this, with the successes of recent years of series such as Silo, 3 Body problem, radioactive dust or even gravity (the list is much longer). And yes, science fiction can be many things, but so can fantasy.
What leads us to think about this is the way in which the first episodes of Dune: Prophecy (it will be a short season, made up of only six parts) are similar to the first season of Game of Thrones, putting things in a very scary position (which seems strange, coming from where it comes from) and experimenting to see reactions. of spectators, among fans, curious people and accidental visitors. All of this has its problems, just like the first season of game of Thrones We had: it hits for the sake of hitting, it leaves us too adrift without knowing exactly what the objective is.
But there is some genesis, there is something here that tells us that something very good could happen. Partly, because we already know where we are going in this story. Prophecy takes place more than ten thousand years before the story that David Lynch and Villeneuve adapted to film and begins dealing with a very specific topic: the founding of the Bene Gesserit, the women who in Dune They control everything and are halfway between witches and puppeteers. What is happening here? Valya (Emily Watson) and Tula (Olivia Williams) Harkonnen are part of the Brotherhood that will give rise to the Bene Gesserit. When we meet them, they have not yet fully developed the techniques of manipulation through their voice and a series of gadgets at their disposal, but we know the genesis, especially the genesis of the search for the perfect leader, the Messiah, a theme that runs throughout Frank’s story. Herbert and film adaptations, from David Lynch.
Valya, more ambitious since she was a child, believes in the potential of the work already done by another member of the Brotherhood in the crossing of genetics between different families in the universe of Dune. This database you created is sort of a desire to create a system to control who is in power within that universe. The desire to take that control and the dynamics to achieve that desire are the basis of the first season and, as at the beginning of game of ThronesThere is a lot of sex, deaths, betrayals and a narrative thread that seems more interesting than what we are seeing. And that’s what gets us, that’s what encourages us to go back and think that there could be something more here than an origin story to capitalize on a brand; Assuming that only this last part, capitalization, can happen, is a risk we took when we decided to follow the series.
Unlike the penguin, Prophecy It’s not a story without its core (which in this case is Batman, who never appears in the series), but one that uses the origins of an idea (the creation of both the myth and the lineage of a Messiah) to solve the problem. power dynamics that exist in Dunebut which were only superficially addressed in Villeneuve’s films. Evaluations aside (let’s save it for the end of the season), we are increasingly confident that, most likely, science fiction will dominate these conversations for the next decade.
Source: Observadora
