When it premieres on HBO Sunday, November 17 Dune: Prophecy will take its place The penguin on the schedule. It will also continue the premium cable giant’s recent string of strange corporate integrations, acquiring Warner Bros.’ blockbuster film franchises. into new television versions of popular HBO series.

Just like the creative team behind it The penguin looked at the possibility of creating a standalone show focused on Colin Farrell’s staggering crime lord, and delivered The sopranos with more latex, the developers of Dune: Prophecy apparently looked at the possibility of making a prequel related to Denis Villeneuve’s Dune and delivered House of the Dragon with (very few) sandworms instead of (very many) dragons.

I don’t say that if I have HBO Harry Potter series finally emerges from its endless gestation, it will be a stealth reboot Arli$$. But I’m not saying that.

Apart from the exaggerated fame, The penguin wasn’t bad, with Cristin Milioti’s performance the main draw. Nothing inside Dune: Prophecy rises to a Miliotian (trademark pending) level of greatness, and the show fails to live up to most of what’s technically amazing about the Villeneuve films. But as an overstuffed meditation on the struggles of female agency in a patriarchal society – one in which names like “Harkonnen” and “Atreides” are occasionally tossed around to pander to an imagined basis – it offers moments of beautifully produced , morally dark scheming and conniving.

Adapted by Diane Ademu-John and Alison Schapker, Dune: Prophecy is ostensibly an extended origin story for the Bene Gesserit, the franchise’s influential sisterhood, although it is only slightly based on the novel Sisterhood of Dune. The general basics are exhaustively laid out with about four minutes of voiceover from Valya Harkonnen (Emily Watson, plus Jessica Barden in frequent flashbacks), whose goal is to use the power of the Sisterhood – and the powers of the Sisterhood, since you you may remember, members of the Bene Gesserit can do many supernatural things: achieve a certain level of galactic control and help restore her family’s good name.

In those opening minutes, it was established that Valya has done something very bad and, as she admits, “I knew then that the name Valya Harkonnen would be forever damned on the wrong side of history.” But was the bad done for good reasons? Or is there no such thing as a good reason to do ambitious things in the name of power? And is it experienced differently when women do those things instead of men? Good questions!

Valya’s most trusted sidekick is her sister Tula (Olivia Williams, plus Emma Canning as a younger woman). They oversee an entire school of novices or acolytes or whatever, from whose ranks we meet a few, including the martyrdom-obsessed Sister Emeline (Aoife Hinds), the anti-authoritarian Sister Jen (Faoileann Cunningham), the secretly gifted Sister Theodosia (Jade Anouka) and the youthful Sister Lila (Chloe Lea), who is perhaps the most remarkable of them all.

The Sisterhood is about to add some status in the form of Emperor Javicco Corrino’s (Mark Strong) daughter, Princess Ynez (Sarah-Sofie Boussnina), who hopes to delve into speaking the Truth. human lie detectors – as she waited for her arranged husband to come of age. But things are about to turn upside down at the royal palace, with the arrival of soldier Desmond Hart (Travis Fimmel), the sole survivor of a spice harvest disaster on Arrakis.

What follows is a kind of Game of Thrones, so to speak, as the Emperor, the Sisterhood, several ancient families, and the enigmatic Desmond all begin making moves in the hopes of gaining control of the Imperium and the flow of spices. Because Posh, Ginger, Sporty, Baby and Scary – the Bene Gesserit of ’90s pop music – once sang: “People of the world, spice up your life!”

There is a very real feeling that someone has cut and pasted lines of dialogue from a Game of Thrones template script and simply added the word “spice” at random intervals, such as, “We are all just pieces on the board, to be played in the pursuit of power and spice” or “Ho-spice-dor.”

The story takes place some 10,148 years before the birth of Paul Atreides – a much wider gap than in comparable current prequel series like House of the Dragon or Amazon’s Lord of the rings thing – and it’s mostly set on planets that aren’t Arrakis, so don’t expect many direct connections to the Villeneuve films. Which factions will come to power many millennia later is not so relevant here, but the drama underlines the core characteristics of the famous families as they play games with each other, form weak alliances, commit heartbreaking betrayals and engage in scheming and counterattacks. plans, all imbued with a moral ambiguity that, quite frankly, leaves the entire series a thematic mess.

I understand that “ambition is dangerous” and “absolute power corrupts absolutely” and “religious fanaticism is scary.” But any conclusion that might make the story more topical, such as about the threat of powerful women in a post-Kamala universe or the encroaching dangers of artificial intelligence, is often contradictory.

Still, this is clearly an opportunity for some world-building that, despite a combined running time of over five and a half hours, couldn’t approach Villeneuve’s features. Dune: Prophecy is no slouch in the playing time department either. Each of the four episodes sent to critics is over an hour long, which is too much, but at least enough for a lot of context about the “thinking machine” war, the empire’s political structure, and the origins of elements from later years. in the plot, like the voice.

The very real question of whether viewers actually want all that context may be answered in the negative by those who enjoyed the films for Villeneuve and cinematographer Greig Fraser’s epic visuals. While the first film doesn’t lack for spectacle, the sequel in particular is as rich and expansive as any theatrical experience in decades.

Dune: Prophecy isn’t that. It is dark, gloomy and, despite the size of some palaces, citadels and the like, often claustrophobic. The endless horizons and rolling dunes of the films are replaced by winding corridors, baffling catacombs and smoky herbal hookah parlors. This is completely intentional and provides both aesthetic contrast within the stories and, presumably, a more manageable budget. But as by-design as it is, there’s a difference between ‘overwhelming’ and ‘generally well-produced’.

And this isn’t just a matter of movies versus TV. There is a gap between Pierre Gill’s photography and the company and the varied sets that production designer Tom Meyer turned in Dune: Prophecyand something like Foundation or Silo on Apple TV+, representing the current highlights of the medium’s current cinematography, effects and set design. On a practical level the Dune: Prophecy directors, starting with Anna Foerster, pay more attention to the contours of the actors’ faces than to anything set up on a sound stage in Budapest.

The dual casting of Watson/Barden and Williams/Canning is the centerpiece of the show, and all four actresses are excellent and impeccably on the same page in their characterizations. My favorite of the first episodes was the flashback-heavy, really twisty third, with Barden and Canning in the spotlight. That was the only episode that had something that genuinely surprised me.

Among well-known veteran actors, Strong is a smart choice to play an emperor who projects the appearance of dominant authority but is pushed around this chessboard by his wife Natalya (Jodhi May) and possibly by Desmond, a role in which Fimmel does his usual mix of movie star charisma and character actor weirdness.

As long as the chapters have existed, there hasn’t been enough time for the younger actors to really stand out as individuals until now. Despite some helpful exposition in which Valya and Tula look at photos of each acolyte and discuss their pros and cons, very few of their personalities are truly distinctive or consistent.

I spent most of my time scratching my head about what the show wants to tell us about Princess Ynez and whether Boussnina, who seems much older than the character should be, was simply a misconception. She’s stuck in the least interesting side of the story, with an extremely boring love interest, Keiran (Chris Mason), who would be completely forgettable if his last name weren’t “Atreides,” and a dreamy half-brother, Constantine (Josh Heuston), who contributes Game of Thrones-y discussion about legitimacy in royal bloodlines and is part of the extremely unnecessary and extreme Game of the thronesy sex scene so far.

Even if it is part of a brand, Dune: Prophecy has a lot of elements to introduce, and the series is already a slow, sometimes lurid build-up. But I noticed that I gradually started investing more and more. Maybe I’ll be hooked by the end of the first season. But from now on everything could use a little more spice.