So, with the third Dune film, Dune Messiah, still very much in development limbo, what can we expect from Villeneuve’s other big science fiction project, the much-discussed adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama? The short answer is: don’t expect it to be anything like Dune. And, if Villeneuve is very smart, he and his collaborators will make Rama very different from its source material. At the risk of sounding reductive, Rendezvous with Rama is a bit easier to define: It’s an epic work of speculative science fiction that firmly favors its concepts over its characters. Anecdotally, even huge...