However, of course, I plodded on and could feel the gap closing in with every page much to my joy and relief. I felt a yawning chasm between Herbert's vision and my limited understanding of it. I knew there were dialogues which meant much more than their superficial meaning and was unable to grasp at it. The challenge was the complexity and depth of the plot, which left me perplexed, in the beginning.

It was intriguing and challenging and heck, since I live for challenges I decided to take this one up too, gladly. The tone was umistakably sombre and I realized Herbert was not here to merely entertain me, he was here to make me part of the legend of Muad'Dib. The very first stirring I felt upon opening the yellowed pages of Dune was that of stumbling upon an English translation of an ancient Arabic manuscript of undeniable power and potence which had an epic story to narrate. All this set in a mind-boggling, frighteningly original world which Herbert ominously terms as an 'effort at prediction'.

Machiavellian intrigue, mythology, religion, politics, imperialism, environmentalism, the nature of power. Unaware of Herbert’s inspiration, he also claimed “there’s nothing of the Caucasus in Dune.” For some unexplained reason, the movie’s characters do speak modern English and Mandarin (a fact widely advertised).In my head, the purpose of this review is very clear. Maybe people pronounce words differently in the future - but why do the Fremen sound like a 21st-century, Americanized caricature of a generic foreign accent? The film’s conlanger, David Peterson, wrote that “Dune ” was set so far in the future that “it would be completely (and I mean COMPLETELY) impossible” for so much “recognizable Arabic” to survive. When the Fremen speak English, their accents are a hodgepodge. The Arabic and Persian that does appear is pronounced poorly. The film employs only the minimum Arabic necessary to tell the story, such as “Shai-Hulud” (the planet’s giant sandworms) and “Mahdi” (Paul’s messianic title, also a major figure in Islamic eschatology). Its Fremen language seems to be a futuristic take on Chakobsa, erasing Herbert’s elided Arabic. The film, however, dispenses with all that.

Dune the novel