Among many fans, the thought of a “Dune” movie was impossible, where many of book-to-movie adaptations had an exciting action-fantasy narrative—like the “Harry Potter” or “the Lord of the Rings” series—“Dune” had a political drama in the middle of pages upon pages of lore.

“Dune,” like any great fantasy book, had to have world-building. This worked perfectly as Herbert’s original novel had nearly 200,000 words to shape extraterrestrial planets like Arrakis, the setting in which Dune takes place, and Caladan, another central location of the novel and movie.

Fitting nearly 200,000 words into a two-to-three-hour film was a seemingly impossible task among fans of the novel—but Denis Villeneuve has done it beautifully.