Ten thousand years before Paul Atreides, there was the Bene Gesserit, the fabled sisterhood that possessed superhuman powers after undergoing years of intense physical and mental conditioning and training.

Dune: Prophecy tries a different way of making its source material manageable. Rather than follow a familiar plot structure in order to smuggle in some of most bananas material you can find in the multiplex,

“We call ourselves 10,000 B.C. — before Chalamet,” jokes Emily Watson, who plays Mother Superior Valya Harkonnen. “As an actor, it’s a gift, this world…morally very, very complicated and everyone’s really messed up. But we’re playing with trying to control the universe.”