On first viewing of the new Dune trailer I was absolutely blown away by the visuals. If I knew nothing else about this IP, director, or cast, the visuals in this trailer alone would have gotten me excited for what this movie could be. Greig Fraser is the director of photography, and he comes with award winning credits including 3 episodes of the Mandalorian, Rogue One and Zero Dark Thirty. The set pieces and the costumes are absolutely amazing, but I think none of it matters if you can’t use the light to bring a movie to life, and judging by this trailer, Fraser knows his shit.

After I watched the trailer David and I talked about it a lot. As David is the mega Dune fan of the Geekhouse, he had watched it a number of times before I did. At first he was not thrilled with the choice of music. He even found a version of the trailer without the music. And although it didn’t have as much of an impact as the official trailer, it just heightened my love for the visuals.

But after re-watching the official trailer, we started to really dig into the music. So, as a lot of people already know, it is a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Eclipse” from the 1973 album Dark Side of the Moon. The cover was conceived and supervised by the movie’s composer, Hans Zimmer, performed by a 32-voice Los Angeles ensembled directed by Edie Lehmann Boddicker who has a million vocal related credits, most notably with her work on The Lion King which you can really feel in the second half of the trailer.

In an interview talking about the song and Zimmer’s work on it, Boddicker said, “He wanted to pay homage to the original, very back-phrased sound, a little spaced-out, so the vocals would not sound urgent. There’s a kind of joy happening in the track, a lot of hopefulness. It’s not despondent, just very peaceful and sounding not of this planet.”

And I have to agree with her 100%.

The choir performed the entire song, which is amazing, you should check it out.

The only 13 lines actually used in the trailer are:

All that you touch
And all that you see
All that you taste
All you feel
And all you create
And all you destroy
And all that you do
And all that you say
And all that is now
And all that is gone
And all that’s to come
And everything under the sun is in tune
But the sun is eclipsed by the moon

The words of the song fit so perfectly with the concepts in Dune you might forget that it was written almost 50 years ago instead of specifically for this trailer. We will just straight ignore the fact that Dune was published in 1969 and Dark Side of the Moon came out in 1973. But I digress, the choice for the music in the trailer is also a nod to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s plans to have Pink Floyd score his version of Dune in the mid 70s that never got off the ground.

Ok, so aside form the visuals and the music choice, watching the trailer was the first time I understood the casting choices. I’ll be honest, when they first announced this cast I was not hopeful. But seeing the actors in full costume and makeup … I’m a believer. Everyone looked amazing, but the most surprising actor was Oscar Isaac as Duke Leto. He was the actor I was most skeptical about and the actor I was most suprised by how amazing he looked in the trailer.

All in all, I give this trailer an A+ and I am so excited for this movie.