Dune: Prophecy tries a different way of making its source material manageable. Rather than follow a familiar plot structure in order to smuggle in some of most bananas material you can find in the multiplex,

“We call ourselves 10,000 B.C. — before Chalamet,” jokes Emily Watson, who plays Mother Superior Valya Harkonnen. “As an actor, it’s a gift, this world…morally very, very complicated and everyone’s really messed up. But we’re playing with trying to control the universe.”

Ten thousand years before Paul Atreides, there was the Bene Gesserit, the fabled sisterhood that possessed superhuman powers after undergoing years of intense physical and mental conditioning and training.