Warner Bros. has released the official logo for Denis Villeneuve‘s Dune movie. The logo, seen below, is very stylized. It uses the same shape for all four different letters in the title. It’s the kind of design that fans have come to expect from the director of such distinct films as The Arrival and Blade Runner 2049. The logo comes on the same day that Warner Bros. revealed the first photo of Timothee Chalamet as Paul Atreides in the film. The son of Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac), Paul is destined to become the reluctant messiah Muad’Dib. “The immediately appealing thing about Paul was the fact that in a story of such detail and scale and world-building, the protagonist is on an anti-hero’s-journey of sorts,” Chalamet says. “He thinks he’s going to be sort of a young general studying his father and his leadership of a fighting force before he comes of age, hopefully a decade later, or something like that.”
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In an interview in December, Oscar Isaac said the film will not be for the faint of heart. He noted that Villeneuve isn’t shying away from the uglier elements of the story. “I couldn’t imagine anyone more suited for the tone of the original Frank Herbert novels than Denis,” he said. “There are some things that are โ for lack of a better word โ nightmarish about what you seeโฆ There’s just this kind of brutalist element to it. It’s shocking. It’s scary. It’s very visceral.”
The film’s synopsis, which appeared in a recent issue of Production Weekly, reads: “The trouble begins when stewardship of Arrakis is transferred by the Emperor from the Harkonnen Noble House to House Atreides. The Harkonnens don’t want to give up their privilege, though, and through sabotage and treachery they cast young Duke Paul Atreides out into the planet’s harsh environment to die. There he falls in with the Fremen, a tribe of desert dwellers who become the basis of the army with which he will reclaim what’s rightfully his. Paul Atreides, though, is far more than just a usurped duke. He might be the end product of a very long-term genetic experiment designed to breed a super human; he might be a messiah. His struggle is at the center of a nexus of powerful people and events, and the repercussions will be felt throughout the Imperium.”
Dune‘s cast includes Timothรฉe Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgรฅrd, Dave Bautista, Zendaya, David Dastmalchian, Stephen Henderson, Charlotte Rampling, Jason Momoa, and Javier Bardem. Dune opens in theaters on December 18, 2020.