Watched it again with my daughter because she was brushing up before her second screening of “Part Two,” this time on 70mm IMAX at Lincoln Square. She’s also reading the original novel, and talking about “Dune” all the time and remarking how she’s realizing, correctly, that “Star Wars” is just a cut-rate version of Frank Herbert’s original vision, so it’s hard not to say that this whole Villeneuve thing hasn’t been a triumph, at least as far as she goes.

As for me, I’m still relishing every little quiet detail in this movie, like the little communication device that Stephen McKinley Henderson wears behind his ear that’s only seen one time and never gets explained but of course it’s so simple that we understand it completely, or Rebecca Ferguson’s many, highly nuanced facial expressions that now clearly foretell the gap that will grow between her Jessica character and Paul in the second film, or Jason Momoa’s escape from the battle of Arrakeen, when his stolen ornithopter suffers a blast and he’s fighting to keep it airborne. There’s so much spectacle in this movie that it’s easy to miss the meticulous intentionality that the cast and crew invested in every detail of this world. 

So the more I watch this movie, and its sequel, the more I feel like Villeneuve has pulled off this amazing feat of both revealing this story as the origin of so much of the sci-fi we’ve been consuming for the past four decades—the “Rififi” of space operas, where every detail and idea seems familiar from its many, many derivatives yet at the same time still new and surprising somehow—while also functioning as a kind of culmination of those decades, of sci-fi imaginings, a new summit for our collective imagination of what a technological future holds. Put another way, the landmarks of the genre now seem to be “2001,” “Star Wars” (just the first two), and this movie and its sequel.