Lawrence of Arabia influenced Dune

Villeneuve has named Lean's film as a reference for the look, and the photography shows it: figures reduced to specks against dunes, the horizon held for long enough to be uncomfortable, and heat treated as a visible substance. The thematic rhyme is closer still, since both films are about an outsider from an imperial power adopted as a desert people's prophet, and both are sceptical about what that does to him.