Dune: Prophecy, the new HBO prequel series to the blockbuster film franchise, begins with one of the most hilariously hasty exposition-dump montages I’ve ever seen. Think of the great exemplars of this form: Cate Blanchett’s winding narration of Sauron’s rise and mankind’s near-fall at the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring; Ray Liotta’s chatty memoir of his childhood life of crime at the beginning of Goodfellas; Linda Hamilton’s ominous fugue at the beginning of T2: Judgment Day. These sequences are fast-paced out of necessity, but they quickly develop their own compelling rhythm. There’s an art to conveying a bunch of information—some of it worthy of its own entire feature film or series—in a tight space. These sequences have to function as aesthetically consistent prologues or overtures rather than a series of narrative shortcuts designed to solve a problem.
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