Hollywood has a long history of making great first sci-fi instalments that slowly turn into pompous, inconsequential, and increasingly mind-numbing dross as the sequels keep rolling. The Matrix went from a revolutionary cyberpunk masterpiece to an interminable slog of a philosophy dissertation in which both humans and machines alike seemed to be forever fighting a losing battle with a CGI hurricane. The Terminator franchise started out as a brutally sleek and sinuous time-travel thriller that plucked at the very heartstrings of the eternal fear of the unknown at the heart of the human condition – yet ended up as the living embodiment of what happens when Hollywood repeatedly tears the living skin off its own dead-eyed robo-franchise, as if stuck in some kind of endless corporate judgment day doom-loop. Let’s not even mention Jurassic Park, which began life as an awe-inspiring blockbuster about the dangers of unchecked scientific hubris and ended up as the prosaic tale of dinosaurs just sort-of existing in the background while we all focused heavily on a dull corporate espionage subplot about genetically modified locusts.

All of which is why Denis Villeneuve’s current efforts to bring Dune back to life on the big screen (more than four decades after the late, lamented David Lynch’s version poured psychedelic spice-soaked fever dreams into our quivering mid-80s retinas) are the subject of so much breathless anticipation and existential dread among fans. Because, damn it, Villeneuve has (as anyone who watched any of his previous films expected) done a simply incredible job of adapting Frank Herbert’s sprawling, monolithic space fantasy into not one but two synapse-crushingly epic movies of almost impossible power and majesty – operatic, awe-inspiring spectacles that somehow make interstellar feudalism, giant sandworms, and psychic drug trips feel utterly essential to the very fabric of existence, as though humanity’s ultimate destiny was always to brood majestically in the dunes while contemplating the crushing weight of prophecy.

There are immersive, prescient-vision-fracturing moments in these films where it is possible to feel, for a moment, that we, the audience, are actually riding an enormous alien creature through the wind and sand, while tripping the blue fantastic and imagining the horrors of future jihad 100,000 generations into the future. So intense is Villeneuve’s world-building that they really ought to serve spice-laced hallucinogenic tea instead of popcorn and issue each viewer with a moisture-recycling stillsuit, just to enhance the screening experience and increase the sense that we have all just blipped out into the great cosmic unknowable, where time is a flat sandworm and destiny is an inescapable, beautifully written corporate franchise roadmap stretching endlessly into the desert void.

Thank goodness, then, that the Canadian auteur is finally coming round to the idea that he really ought to get this thing done, now that quite a large number of people have decided Dune: Parts One and Two are the best thing since the Bene Gesserit started gaslighting entire bloodlines for fun and prophecy. Speaking at the Saturn awards recently, the film-maker said he had been “really moved by the way Part Two was received by cinephiles around the world” and had “felt an appetite and a desire to see more and a responsibility to finish that story”.

This comes as something of a surprise, as the Hollywood trades have been convinced for some time that Villeneuve would take a break after the filming of Part Two to focus on other ventures. There’s also the small matter of Herbert’s next novel, Dune: Messiah, being a bleak, introspective deconstruction of heroism compared with the first book’s sweeping, mythic rise-to-power arc. Later novels get even weirder, and frankly much worse, but Villeneuve would still be pulling off an incredible achievement if he somehow managed to turn Paul Atreides’ slow, agonising descent into regret and religious tyranny into the must-see sci-fi event of the decade.

Frankly, we’ve never seen a Hollywood science fiction film-maker find themselves in such a precarious yet irresistible position. Villeneuve may have somehow navigated the first Dune novel, a freaky, 600-page thought experiment disguised as an adventure novel where the main character wins by overdosing on space drugs. But he now faces the prospect of trying to build a massive, studio-funded cinematic event from a deeply weird book about a space Messiah having a prolonged existential crisis over whether orchestrating his own downfall (when he’s always known this is going to happen at some point) truly counts as free will.

This maelstrom of juicy, cosmic nonsense is exactly the reason why even the great Lynch, hampered by the technological mediocrity and artistic inertia of 1980s Hollywood, was simply unable to make head or tail of this stuff. If Villeneuve can buck that trend not once but twice, in the face of studio risk-aversion, blockbuster homogeneity, and an industry that treats intellectual depth like a lethal contagion, he will truly be the Kwisatz Haderach of modern sci-fi cinema, bending the Hollywood machine to his will like a tamed-but-still-monstrously-terrifying sandworm beneath his feet.