With Christopher Nolan‘s latest dominating the box office, cinema lovers aren’t just excited to learn what the director has planned next. They’re also excited about the second epic we have this year, another massive movie helmed by a filmmaker whose name evokes big ticket sales: Denis Villeneuve‘s Dune: Part Three. It’s not hard to see the similarities, as both films feature mythic heroes on strange adventures, and they even share cast members in Zendaya and Robert Pattinson.
However, fans of the books know that the connections between Dune and The Odyssey go deeper than one might expect. The secret is right there in the name of Frank Herbert‘s lead character, Paul Atreides. The surname “Atreides” means “Son of Atreus,” referring to the Greek hero Atreus, father of Agamemnon and Menelaus. However, nothing is quite as it seems in either Greek mythology or the world of Dune, meaning the connections are far more complicated than just lineage.
Fittingly enough for a story that leaves us longing for more, we have to begin with Tantalus, son of Zeus and Pluto. Tantalus established his family’s penchant for infanticide by killing his son Pelops, in order to test the gods. Most of the gods passed that test, except for the agricultural goddess Demeter, who actually ate some of the meal that Tantalus made out of Pelops. Infuriated, Demeter sentenced Tantalus to the underworld, where grapes and water remained forever out of reach, giving us the word “tantalizing.”
His father punished, the gods resurrected Pelops, who later married Hippodamia by sabotaging her father’s chariot race, a decision that results in his line being cursed… which might account for the family killing that happens in the next generation. Pelops and Hippodamia give birth to Atreus and Thyestes, who kill their half-brother Chrysippus, and then get banished. Later, Atreus learns that his wife is having an affair with Thyestes, and also they’re fighting for the throne. So he channels his granddad and kills Thyestes’ sons and cooks them in a meal he serves to his brother, and then also engaged in incest, which eventually gets him killed. But not before he gives birth to two sons, Agamemnon and Menelaus.
At this point, people who saw The Odyssey know about those guys, as Jon Bernthal stepped into the role of Menelaus, and Telemachus (Tom Holland) let Menelaus tell him something about Agamemnon (Benny Safdie), who sacrificed his daughter for good winds and got killed by his wife Clytemnestra (Lupita Nyong’o) because these Atreides boys never learn.