I love the Dune ass worms

Dune is not a perfect movie. Half the dialogue is unintelligible, you need a really long attention span, and you’re gonna have to wait another few years for more than seven minutes of Zendaya. I loved it, but your mileage may vary.

That said, there’s one part of Dune that is perfect and that everyone should appreciate: the Shai-Hulud, or the sandworms:

It feels disrespectful to even try to explain the sandworms, but I’ll try anyway. These worms are native to the desert planet of Arrakis, the site of most of Dune’s action. They can get up to 400 meters long and they’re attracted to rhythmic noises that they can somehow detect through all the sand, fucking up any industrial activity and forcing anyone traversing the desert to move in a very fun to watch “sand walk” that mimics the sounds of the sand moving. Also, apparently, their poop is the “spice” substance that the whole film revolves around (it’s a hallucinogen that gives life and also makes space travel possible.) So yeah, they’re pretty important.

And have I mentioned how much I love these worms? I love how otherwordly they are, I love how you have no fucking clue if you’re staring at its front or back end (it could be either—you don’t know sandworm biology any more than I do!) and yes, they look like a rectum. That’s a feature, not a bug.

Actually, I’ll take it one step farther: I love these worms because they look like an ass. Do you really think visionary director Denis Villeneuve genuinely looked at these things and thought “great, send it off, nothing to see here”? This man deals in images; of course he knows what they look like. What this tells me is that Sir Villeneuve had a vision for a completely alien dune worm, recognized that it looked a bit like a human asshole, and went ahead anyway. That’s gutsy as fuck and I respect it.

I’m not alone in my admiration; there’s a whole society in the film, the Fremens, who saw the light of the worms way before I did. I wasn’t clear on if their veneration was a religious thing (Dune is a very dense film), but no matter the nature of their reverence, they’re simply correct. When that Doctor Liet-Kynes lady said “I only serve one master. His name is Shai-Hulud,” reader, I felt that. No gods, no kings, only worms.

Dune spends a lot of its incredibly long runtime teasing us by showing us the plumes created by the worm’s undulations or a sand-filtered peek into its rectal maw, and the whole time I wanted to see that worm way more than I wanted to see if Paul Atreides would be the chosen one or whatever. And when we finally got to see the whole thing, I made a face that can only be described as pure ecstasy. It was the best part of my week and maybe my entire life.

A few hours later, I now realize I wasn’t feeling simple bliss. With the beatific light of the screen washing over my face, what I felt was an almost religious awe. One of the emotional climaxes of the film comes when Paul, tripping balls on psychoactive worm poop, freaks out when he sees premonitions of a holy war in his name. If Villeneuve or this universe has any sense, he needn’t worry. The real messiahs are the ass worms beneath his feet, and I for one welcome my new masters.