Okay, so The Art and Soul of Dune is glossy marketing material for obsessive Dune fans, of which I am one. Concept art is interlaced with behind the scene pictures and stills from the movie, along with brief passages describing the production. In an age of access, Art and Soul conceals more than it reveals. But Dune doesn't need help, the movie stands on its own as a masterpiece.

One thing that comes through is Denis Villeneuve's uncompromising production design. Villeneuve loves Dune. He had "Muad'Dib" engraved on the inside of his high school graduation ring. The fact that he's a very talented filmmaker and also the only person on the planet who loves Dune more than me is at the heart of the movie's success. Villeneuve gets great people and brings out their best, from the gaffer's assistant up to the stars. That obsession, to get the big picture right and to get all the details right, is the soul of the movie.

So what did I learn? Well, the ornithopter was an actual physical prop so large it had to be shipped around the world by An-124, the world's second largest cargo plane. A 300 ton crane operated by a Jordanian man who didn't share a language with the production made it fly in the desert. A film studio in Budapest was taken over to create the massive brutalist sets that Villeneuve loves.

Some of the roads not taken are interesting. Apparently there's another few hours of footage floating around, including the Arrakeen dinner scene (and by the way, I would do a lot to see those deleted scenes), though a fair number are introductions not used. An early version of the Atreides castle on Caladan is almost like a cross between a D-Day bunker and Falling Water. Some preliminary sandworm designs look unfortunately like leeches or uncircumcised penises, so I'm glad we got the version we did.

It's interesting reading this book against Naha's The Making of Dune, about the 1984 Lynch film. We know the ending, but the sense that comes out of Naha's book is how amateurish Lynch's film was. Not that it didn't have talented people involved, but many of them had never made a scifi epic of this scale. And while Dune is bigger than Villeneuve's previous films, it's a step in a progress that includes Blade Runner 2049 and Arrival by someone who's been thinking about how to make this exact film since he was 12.