[Editor’s Note: This article contains spoilers for Episode 3 of “Dune: Prophecy”]
Say no matter you’ll about Frank Herbert and Brian Herbert, however you can not accuse them of being slender in scope or not complete within the fictional worlds they’ve constructed. There’s a 10,000-year hole between the Denis Villeneuve “Dune” movies and the occasions of “Dune: Prophecy,” and sufficient lore for manufacturing designer Tom Meyer to imbue each piece of that historical past into the design of the HBO collection.
The project is a designer’s dream in some ways; Meyer wanted to create a wide range of extraordinarily totally different environments that may be instantly visually distinct, even when all of them share the identical large-scale, imposing geometric power established within the movies. However whether or not with the strict austerity of the Bene Gesserit base on Wallach IX or the cancerous grandeur that might probably swallow up the Corrino household on Salusa Secundus, Meyer thought by how effectively, or how harshly, historical past would have handled them.
“With the Corrinos, you should see the opulence. It’s good to see the wealth. So every thing — not simply the dimensions of the area, however the upkeep of that area — is effectively maintained. It is perhaps outdated and vintage and patinated, nevertheless it’s pristine,” Meyer informed IndieWire. “While you go to the Harkonnen homeworld, there’s this type of neo-gothic decay. They’re not the uber-scary villains that you just see within the movies. Their betrayal is simply 130 years outdated, so a part of the household remains to be combating for acceptance. They’re not resigned to their villainy but.”
In all these areas, Meyer leaves bodily traces of the legacy of the now-banned expertise behind the machine wars. The Corrino palace and the Bene Gesserit chapterhouse on Wallach IX are dominated by advanced parametric shapes. “We wished to have these shapes that had been intricate, not hard-carved. You knew they needed to be machined, and, visibly, the mathematics or the sort of design behind them is so advanced,” Meyer mentioned. “But it surely’s bought this archaic patina so hopefully provides it additional age, makes it really feel actual and grounded.”
A lot of the motion of the collection takes place on Wallach IX, a planet that, within the prolonged “Dune” lore, was devastated in a thermonuclear trade as a part of the machine wars which can be solely simply past residing reminiscence for the characters of “Dune: Prophecy.” It’s a chilly, lifeless, austere place, nevertheless it’s one which Meyer and his staff may layer in a way of that lore in addition to tease tensions that play out within the present itself.
An ideal instance is the reveal of simply the place the Bene Gesserit breeding program is on Wallach IX. Raquella Berto-Anirul (Cathy Tyson), one of many nice heroes of the machine wars, has saved a considering machine deep underground to spin the orders plots inside plots (wheels inside wheels) that can sooner or later result in Paul Atreides. The AI system, affectionately named Anirul, can be — as of the top of Episode 3 — holding Lila (Chloe Lea) alive.
Due to its forbidden nature, Anirul needs to be saved so deep underground that not even vibrations can attain the floor and probably trigger detection. However Meyer utilized that necessity to construct tunnels and warrens that solely a Bene Gesserit sister may handle. There’s a way of paranoia, scheming, and contingency-planning within the dimly lit surroundings that matches the expression on Tula’s (Olivia Williams) face as she strides by the ultimate hologram hiding Anirul.
The immersion into Anirul’s area was far more vital to Meyer, and likewise extra cinematic, than depicting a large server bay. “Proper now with AI, everyone has a digital actuality or altered actuality glasses, and I went with the concept in some unspecified time in the future the artifice of utilizing these instruments isn’t going to be wanted anymore. The pc can be round you,” Meyer mentioned. “Expertise involves the place we’re at, the place our creativeness is. So [we liked] the concept the cave turns into the pc.”
That fusion of surroundings and pc allowed Meyer to make the design of Anirul itself intriguingly natural and visually not like the rest within the collection. “It lets the viewers challenge what they need it to be as a result of the vital half is the knowledge, this tree of data and this type of never-ending, unspooling household DNA construction of the universe that [Anirul] has,” Meyer mentioned.
Meyer wished to construct that sense of the buildup of data into each Bene Gesserit surroundings. When you take a look at the library of the Bene Gesserit within the flashback sequences of Episode 3 and examine it to the library that Valya (Emily Watson) and Tula lord over 30 years later, there’s a visible imprint of the ability they’ve expanded.
“[The library] has been stuffed with information. The bookshelves go up 4 tales to the ceiling — all constructed for actual — and I put these museum vitrines at eye degree all the best way across the library and inside Valya’s public and her non-public workplace,” Meyer mentioned. “You get the sense that they’re accumulating data as a result of it’s the sisterhood’s information that controls the universe. So that you need to really feel that that is the repository of every thing that’s identified of their universe.”
That accumulation of data melds with the historical past that Meyer sculpted into the repeated machined patterns of its surroundings. How a lot of the Bene Gesserit’s plans and hopes are all the way down to human company, and the way a lot of them are as a result of forces and buildings that spin out far past our management? That’s the query that each chapter of “Dune” reckons with — and “Dune: Prophecy” units it into the very stones of Wallach IX.
New episodes of “Dune: Prophecy” premiere Sundays on HBO and stream on Max.