By: Alex Tilton

Way back in 2010 a studio called Visceral Games released a video game called “Dante’s Inferno”. It was a shameless rip-off of God of War. I recall watching a demo of ‘Inferno’ at this time and talking to a friend of mine about what a blatant GoW clone this was. He shrugged and said, “At least they ripped off a good game.” ‘Inferno’ got decent reviews (a lot of 7/10), but sold poorly and consequently there was no sequel. Dune: Prophecy is the same situation. Every review I’ve seen calls it “Game of Thrones in space”, and it has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 70%. 

I think 70% is a little generous. Some spoilers ahead.

This show was always going to suffer by comparison to the recent films, but it didn’t need to also suffer from imposter syndrome. Dune: Prophecy tries so hard to be Game of Thrones that it’s hard to notice anything else. Four episodes in this show have no trace of its own identity. This is compounded by the fact that the acting is only ‘good but not great’, and at least half of any given episode is expository dialogue. A good alternative title for the show could be “People standing around explaining things”. This breaks the most basic rule of good TV, ‘show, don’t tell’. I realize you’ve got a complex plot and you don’t want the audience to get lost but if the only way you can manage this is by including 25 to 30 minutes of info-dumps in every episode then you need a better director. There’s also a lot of worldbuilding going on in flashbacks. This would be fine, except that the flashbacks are also infodumps. 

And an unfortunate side effect of all this info-dumping is that nothing is surprising. There’s a scene where an assassin uses psychic powers to burn a child to death from the inside. Sounds horrifying, right? Well, it should be. But by the time it happened the show had already established that 1) life is incredibly cheap, and 2) there’s nothing they won’t do to be like GoT. Consequently, a scene that should be shocking just feels predictable and awkward.

If you want to use foreshadowing to build suspense you need an emotional connection between the audience and characters, and that takes time. You also need to leave some genuine doubt about their fate. But this all happens in the first episode and there’s zero doubt how it’s going to play out. Also, it’s hard to feel horrified when the characters clearly don’t. I get it that this is ‘space feudalism’ and murder is commonplace but even the people who are upset about this killing mostly feel that way because it disrupted their political plans. This is crappy storytelling. If the horrible things that happen on screen aren’t considered horrible by the standards of the world they’re happening in then how is the audience supposed to sympathize?

So, what’s good in this show? Some of the cast are fun to watch, the music is pretty good, the visuals are (mostly) impressive and they do a ‘good but not great’ job of building the atmosphere. But in the end there just isn’t enough here to get me to watch the rest of it. The pacing is too slow, the dialogue is on the nose, and the action feels like something from a YA novel. Every character has exactly one mood that they use all the time, and even the people who supposedly want to make things better are prepared to use extreme violence. So, what we’re left with is a bunch of unlikable people doing unlikable things, constantly talking in a low, melodramatic monotone with every aspect of the aesthetic stolen from another (better) show. I can’t make up my mind if they’ll greenlight a second season of this thing. On the one hand, it isn’t very good. On the other hand it’s called DUNE, which means it might be able to coast on the goodwill of the books and the movies. It’s also vaguely possible that the show will course correct and get better. But I’m not holding my breath.

Image Source: TVInsider.com