'Dune' is a climate story we can actually root for

Here's how to make it make sense: If you write a news article or column about climate, the odds are strong it will be too depressing, too repetitive or too wonky to attract eyeballs. But if you make 2 Dune 2 Sandy starring Timothee Chalamet, Zendaya, Austin Butler, Florence Pugh and several other beautiful people riding cool spaceships and giant worms, people will line up to see it. It turns out the best route for delivering climate messages is often an indirect one.    

To be sure, Dennis Villeneuve's Dune: Part Two — which vacuumed up $82.5 million in the US and $182.5 million globally in its opening weekend — is not immediately recognisable as a climate story. If anything, it's arguably more of an allegory about crude oil, with massive powers warring over a commodity (spice) that enables long-distance travel. (Except this commodity also makes you live longer and gets you really, really high.)     

But the entire Dune saga is rooted in the climate of the fictional planet Arrakis. Please allow my mentat eyeballs to roll up into my head while I retrieve the lore: This is a desert planet populated with native creatures (sandworms) that live in harmony with their environment, a simple existence of eating sand, making spice and being large. 

The humans on the planet have also adapted to the harsh climate, wearing suits that collect and recycle every drop of their bodily drippings so they don't die of thirst. Their spartan lifestyle also makes them leathery enough to take on the colonial-capitalist powers exploiting the planet's resources.

The novel on which the movies are based is also rooted in ecology. Author Frank Herbert's study of efforts to control Oregon sand dunes led him down a wormhole of dunes and deserts that inspired him to write a doorstopper of a novel about a sandy planet (followed by five more). 

Herbert dedicated the book "to the dry-land ecologists" and claimed he meant it to be "an environmental awareness handbook." He also embraced environmentalism, spoke on the first Earth Day in 1970, put solar panels on his house and never bought a new car.  

But the key to the commercial success of Dune — one of the best-selling science-fiction novels of all time and a movie franchise threatening to make $1 billion at the box office — might be that it keeps the whole climate thing subliminal. You can enjoy it for its cool spaceships, giant worms, desert battles, freaky metaphysics and much more without having to think too hard about the environment. 

This fits a recurring pattern of juicy pieces of fictional meat helping people swallow a bitter climate pill hidden inside. In the smash-hit video game and HBO series The Last of Us, for example, global warming makes the Cordyceps fungus mutate until it can thrive in hot human bodies. Cannibal zombies ensue. The cool part is the zombies and Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal of it all. But while you're enjoying that you're also ingesting a dose of climate awareness.

Compare and contrast this with fare such as Don't Look Up, where the climate pill is barely hidden, or Extrapolations, the Apple TV series where the pill is the only thing on the menu. Far fewer people watched or enjoyed those. I can relate! 

Then again, skillful creators can produce climate content that is closer to the nose but also enjoyable. Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, Nnedimma Okorafor, J.G. Ballard, Kim Stanley Robinson, Richard Powers, Paolo Bacigalupi, Barbara Kingsolver and many more have managed it, to name a few.

It's tempting to feel as if everything that needs to be said about climate change has already been said and that it's depressing and pointless to keep saying it. "It's 109 degrees in Portland right now. It's been over 130 degrees in Baghdad several times," former climate journalist Sarah Miller wrote in 2021. "What kind of awareness quotient are we looking for? What more about climate change does anyone need to know? What else is there to say?" And she wrote this long before a year in which the climate broke dreary new records month after month after month.

But maybe those of us still slogging through the climate-awareness fight just aren't trying hard enough to tell a better story. Dune is one of the best. Let's never stop trying to top it. 

Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and writer of the Opinion Today newsletter. A former managing editor of Fortune.com, he ran the HuffPost's business and technology coverage and was a reporter and editor for the Wall Street Journal. @markgongloff

Disclaimer: This article first appeared on Bloomberg, and is published by special syndication arrangement