Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: How Subtle Cli-Fi Works

When Denis Villeneuve released each of Dune and Dune: Part Two (2024), his first two of three adaptations of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel, the films became instant global sensations. Dominating the box office in their separate releases, the two movies grossed a combined 1.1 billion dollars. Critics and moviegoers alike raved about the movies, praising their sensational performances, epic cinematography, and groundbreaking visual effects. Climate scholars also shared their sentiments on the films, though their praise was rooted in their agreement with the climate messaging within the films (Lange). Less mainstream attention has been paid, however, to the films’ messaging on environmental destruction and climate change. In Dune and Dune: Part Two, Denis Villeneuve conveys climate change not through overt messaging, but through immersive world-building and subtle visual storytelling, adapting Frank Herbert’s ecological warnings into a cinematic format that feels both immediate and impactful.

Dune’s setting, the planet Arrakis, is portrayed as a planet in ecological collapse; the sweeping cinematography of scorching heat, violent sandstorms, and extreme water scarcity offers a visceral depiction of environmental degradation, all without ever explicitly invoking the term “climate change.” Instead, Villeneuve invites audiences to make subliminal connections to real-world ecological crises through visual parallels rather than direct exposition. As Professor Oli Mould of the University of London observes, the films mirror global struggles over extractivism, particularly the colonial exploitation of Africa - an analogy Villeneuve builds deliberately. For instance, he alters the story to include numerous scenes of the villainous Harkonnen extracting spice under military guard, whereas in the novel these sequences are only referenced retrospectively. These scenes often culminate in resistance from the Fremen, the indigenous Arrakeen population, visually reinforcing for audiences how imperial resource extraction damages both the land and its people.

To that end, the suffering of the Fremen is rendered with emotional, intimate scenes that display numerous battle sequences and mournful burial rituals - moments that once again are not present in Herbert’s original text but instead serve as intentional directorial additions. These scenes enrich the viewer’s emotional and political understanding of the link between indigenous struggle and climate injustice, all without stating it outright. Ultimately, by relying on symbolism rather than didacticism to draw parallels from both spice extraction and Fremen indigeneity, Villeneuve allows viewers to engage with climate themes in a more reflective, immersive way. By choosing not to lecture the audience on the consequences of climate catastrophe, but instead to immerse them in it, Villeneuve makes the two new Dune films some of the most subtly resonant climate fictions in modern cinema.

However, certain voices in the climate-film sphere believe that simply holding a mirror to our world isn’t enough to actually impact climate movements or perspectives on them. One person who has effectively communicated this perspective is the freelance journalist Rebecca Long. In her 2024 article, “Climate Fiction and Dune: Lost in Adaptation,” Long argues that the first installment of Villeneuve’s two-part series didn’t sufficiently lean into the ecological aspect of the novel, bringing audiences away from the environmental considerations of climate change. Long states that, “Villeneuve clearly considers Herbert's novel an ecological story, but his adaptation prioritizes visual aesthetics and world-building at the cost of some of the book's core ideas. The environmental subtleties are so subtle that they get lost.” Throughout her piece, she argues that Villeneuve prioritizes other themes at the expense of environmental ones, portraying him as a director unable to balance complex artistic, socio-political, and socio-environmental narratives, ultimately causing the film’s climate messaging to fall flat with audiences.

In analyzing the historical emergence of climate fiction as well as its deeply explicit nature in the visual medium, Rebecca Long’s argument makes complete sense–Cli-Fi has always been a deeply informative genre which has impacted climate perspectives for generations. As Sherryl Vint notes in her article “A Century of Science Fiction That Changed How We Think About the Environment,” even before “Climate Change” became a known issue, environmental fiction platformed numerous stories to deliver intentionally informative narratives that conveyed a sense of agency for viewers. Specifically, many early pieces, such as Edgar Rice Burroughs’s “A Princess of Mars” (1912), conveyed a sense of consumer dread through environmental destruction as a result of “total human control over the environment and planetary weather.” After shifting to the age of post-climate change recognition, Vint then references Werner Herzog’s 2006 The Wild Blue Yonder, an experimental sci-fi film which tells the story of the failed attempts by humans to colonize another planet after destroying Earth’s environment.

Despite the near-century difference, Herzog’s movie illustrates the same sort of informative climate warnings as its predecessors, though more explicitly. It does this by having an alien narrator quite literally explain every element of the story, detailing how Earth became uninhabitable, why humans were forced to leave, and how their efforts to colonize a new planet failed. Heavily relying on an exorbitant amount of exposition, The Wild Blue Yonder displays the common tendency of visual works of Climate Fiction, especially more recently, to rely on explicit or didactic language in order to impact audiences and their perspectives of the climate movement–a tendency which is non-existent in the two Dune films.

Anthony Dudo, Jacob Copple, and Lucy Atkinson’s academic article “Entertainment Film and TV Portrayals of Climate Change and Their Societal Impacts” analyzes portrayals of climate change in entertainment media, overviews the sources of these portrayals, and displays the individual-level effects of these portrayals in audiences through past studies. One specific study that they reference, which is relevant to cli-fi’s explicit nature, is Thomas Lowe, Katrina Brown, and Katharine Vincent’s 2006 study of UK-based viewers after watching Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow, a 2004 explicit sci-fi disaster film centered on a global ice age caused by a sudden climate shift. In the study, the investigators found that seeing the film, one which has much more climactic exposition than Dune or Dune: Part Two, influenced attitudes in the short term, with viewers becoming significantly more concerned about climate change and environmental risks. Additionally, they found that the film increased viewers’ anxiety about environmental risks, which in turn heightened their motivation to act on climate change.

However, although The Day After Tomorrow is packed with climate warnings, moral messaging, and even a climate-denier-turned-advocate, the scholars in this study still argued it failed to provide audiences with actionable climate knowledge. So this introduces a couple of essential questions which have been sparked from scholarly arguments, such as these: How “explicit” does cli-fi have to be to have an effect, and how can films like Dune and Dune 2 have a climactic effect if, according to people like Rebecca Long, they don’t share this same form of messaging?

The answer to these questions is that explicitly climate-messaged films are, in fact, not necessary, and are not the only type of climate films that can make audiences realize the severity of climate change. After all, if an overtly explicit film such as The Day After Tomorrow cannot fully generate shifts in attitudes towards climate, then why should filmmakers be compelled to model their works the same way? This highlights a realization that filmmakers and reviewers of modern cinematic climate fiction must make: Subtle, metaphorical, aesthetic, and culturally accessible films deserve a place in conversations around contemporary Cli-Fi.

In the past four years, since the two Dune films have been out, they have spawned countless conversations across social media about the methods of filmmaking, more specifically, their bold, ambitious, and epic visuals and special effects, which, according to Long, got in the way of climate messaging. However, audiences noticeably tended to completely resonate with the messaging, showing their impact through the specific visual, rather than the explicit approaches the film used. In one Reddit thread which argues that Dune: Part Two didn’t do enough in its ecological messaging, a user named Shirebourn actually came to the defense of the film, stating that, “This movie is dense with ecological ideas, especially if we read its images as text. So, so much is conveyed visually, and this might be one of the more genuinely environmentally centered films I've seen in a while.” Indeed, we can look at several general audience reviews that cite the Dune films as works with “resonant messages on climate change” (Naylor), describing them as experiences that “feel like watching a world collapse in upon itself” (Weidemoyer). In looking at these clearly climate-receptive audiences, it begs the question as to what those with Rebecca Long’s perspective fail to see about climate reception in subtle cli-fi amongst viewers.

Perhaps we can receive Long as critiquing the film's inaccessibility to general audiences, but even this perspective would be inaccurate. The visual parallels and symbolic imagery that make Villeneuve’s Dune so resonant already speak powerfully to climate-aware audiences, offering a nuanced portrayal of ecological collapse and resource exploitation. But to ensure these themes could also reach a broader, less climate-conscious audience, Villeneuve adopted a different strategy, which was one that complemented the film’s environmental subtext rather than diluting it. He framed Dune through a commercial lens, enlisting not only high-profile actors but also renowned creatives—like composer Hans Zimmer—whose work contributes to the film’s immersive spectacle.

This hyped-up spectacle that Villeneuve surrounded the projects with generated widespread interest and cultural traction, which would increase the likelihood that its environmental themes would reach the broadest audience. In evaluating the impact of this “spectacle,” one should turn to Bloomberg Opinion editor Mike Gongloff, who commented, “If you write a news article or column about climate, the odds are strong it will be too depressing, too repetitive or too wonky to attract eyeballs. But if you make Dune 2 starring Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Austin Butler, Florence Pugh and several other beautiful people riding cool spaceships and giant worms, people will line up to see it.” It’s a sharp observation, and one that underscores how the most effective climate messaging today may not come from explicit or didactic works of cli-fi, but from visually spectacular, star-powered blockbusters. Simply getting audiences into theaters, drawn by the cast and spectacle, allows them to engage - however subconsciously - with themes of environmental collapse.

Whereas more explicit or niche climate films often struggle to connect beyond already-aware viewers, Dune succeeds by embedding its message within a widely appealing cinematic experience. In that way, Villeneuve’s subtle, commercially accessible approach arguably does more to promote climate awareness than most entries in the cli-fi genre.

In examining the cinematic techniques Villeneuve uses to draw subtle yet powerful parallels to real-world climate issues—alongside the commercial accessibility and spectacle of the Dune films—it becomes clear that Dune succeeds as a subtly resonant work of climate fiction. Its ability to embed environmental themes within a widely appealing cinematic experience shows that subtlety can be just as impactful as overtly explicit or didactic messaging. The positive audience climate reception from Dune’s climate impact further reinforces this point, mirroring the reception of earlier cli-fi films like Interstellar, which partially set the standard for subtle cli-fi blockbusters altogether. Ultimately, the reaction to the two Dune films demonstrates that audiences are capable of recognizing and responding to climate messaging even when it's delivered indirectly. Those who, like Rebecca Long, argue that the Dune films don’t do enough for climate discourse have a clear misunderstanding of how the Dune films benefit from their level of exposition; they argue that subtlety is the films’ weakness, when it is actually their strength. In examining this fact, both the film and climate communities should understand that subtle cli-films deserve a place within the genre, as they truly do have an impact.

Works Cited:

1. Liu, Michael. “How “Dune” Became a Beacon for the Fledgling Environmental Movement − and a Rallying Cry for the New Science of Ecology.” News and Events, 15 Mar. 2024, dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories/how-dune-became-beacon-for-environmental-movement/?.

2. Romeo, Jess. “The Ecological Prescience of Dune.” JSTOR Daily, 15 Nov. 2021, daily.jstor.org/the-ecological-prescience-of-dune/.

3. Lange, Jeva. “How Environmentalists Saved “Dune.”” Heatmap News, 2 Oct. 2023, heatmap.news/culture/dune-spice-must-flow-ryan-britt. 

4. Martens, Pim. ““Dune” as a Mirror for Our Climate Crisis.” PIM MARTENS, 14 Mar. 2024, pimmartens.com/2024/03/14/dune-as-a-mirror-for-our-climate-crisis/. 

5. Author, This. “Climate Fiction and Dune: Lost in Adaptation | Sierra Club.” Www.sierraclub.org, www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2024-1-spring/books/climate-fiction-and-dune-lost-adaptation.

6. Vint, Sherryl. “A Century of Science Fiction That Changed How We Think about the Environment.” The MIT Press Reader, 20 July 2021, thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/century-of-science-fiction-environment-anthropocene/.

7. Dudo, Anthony, Jacob Copple, and Lucy Atkinson. "Entertainment Film and TV Portrayals of Climate Change and Their Societal Impacts." Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science.  September 26, 2017. Oxford University Press. https://oxfordre.com/climatescience/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228620.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228620-e-374>

8. Matthew Schneider-Mayerson; The Influence of Climate Fiction: An Empirical Survey of Readers. Environmental Humanities 1 November 2018; 10 (2): 473–500. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-7156848

9. Gittell, Noah. “Why “Interstellar” Ignores Climate Change.” The Atlantic, 15 Nov. 2014, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/11/why-interstellar-ignores-climate-change/382788/.

10. Etienne, Nya [@nya.etienne]. "Just saw interstellar in Imax and will need several days to recover" TikTok, 18 Dec. 2024, https://www.tiktok.com/@nya.etienne/video/7449869027695922478.​

11. Matthews, Josh. Review of Interstellar, directed by Christopher Nolan. Letterboxd, 20 Feb. 2024, https://letterboxd.com/joshmatthews/film/interstellar/.

12. LetoSecondOfHisName. "Loss of the Ecological Themes from the book in Dune Pt2.?" Reddit, 10 Mar. 2024, www.reddit.com/r/dune/comments/1b6kmr6/loss_of_the_ecological_themes_from_the_book_in/.​

13. Naylor, Tom “Is Dune Worth Watching? (Dune Movie Review) | Denis Villeneuve.” Student Pocket Guide | UK Student Magazine, 10 Nov. 2021, www.thestudentpocketguide.com/2021/11/entertainment/film/dune-movie-review-denis-villeneuve/? 

14. Dune: “Penn Moviegoer.” Penn Moviegoer, Apr. 2024, www.thepennmoviegoer.com/movie-review/dune-part-two? 

15. Mould, Oli. “Dune – a Prophetic Tale about the Environmental Destruction Wrought by the Colonisation of Africa.” The Conversation, theconversation.com/dune-a-prophetic-tale-about-the-environmental-destruction-wrought-by-the-colonisation-of-africa-170583.

16. Gongloff, Mike. ““Dune” Is a Climate Story We Can Actually Root For.” Bloomberg.com, 6 Mar. 2024, www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-03-06/-dune-part-two-is-a-climate-story-we-can-actually-root-for.

Kallen is a Sophomore at Columbia College studying History and Film. He loves cinema, collecting books, and playing pickup basketball.

@kallen.zbf