Great science fiction doesn't just show you impossible things — it makes you believe them. And belief, more often than you'd think, comes down to sound.
Case in point: the ornithopters in Denis Villeneuve's Dune films. These insect-like aircraft with flapping wings are one of Frank Herbert's most distinctive inventions, and they've bedeviled every previous attempt to adapt the novel. How do you make a dragonfly helicopter feel real?
The answer, according to the sound design team, was obsession.
Supervising sound editor Mark Mangini and his team spent months building the ornithopter's sonic signature from scratch. They recorded everything from hummingbird wings (too fast) to canvas being whipped by wind (closer, but not mechanical enough) to industrial fans and helicopter blades run through spectral processors that altered the frequency without losing the texture.
The breakthrough came when they layered insect wing sounds with the creaking of old wooden ships. "Ornithopters are supposed to be ancient, elegant technology," Mangini explained in behind-the-scenes material. "They're not jet engines. They have to sound like they're working, like there's effort involved in keeping them aloft."
That attention to detail is what separates great sci-fi from merely competent sci-fi. Star Wars famously built its soundscape from WWII dogfight recordings and industrial noise. Blade Runner made Los Angeles 2019 feel real by giving every surface its own acoustic texture. Dune follows that tradition: every sound in Villeneuve's Arrakis is designed to make you forget you're watching actors on blue-screen sets.
The ornithopter is just one example. The sandworms required a separate team to develop subsonic rumbles that audiences would feel rather than consciously hear. The stillsuits have their own breathing rhythm that shifts based on exertion. Even the silence of space scenes was carefully crafted — sound doesn't travel in a vacuum, but the absence of sound has to be designed too, or it reads as dead air rather than the void.
