Worms don’t move like that!
, the fact that the so-called Shai-Hulud look so much like oversize iterations of squirmy creatures that crawl our own earth makes them feel, if still extraordinary, more plausible., I was shocked to see the creature barreling through the desert sand like a high-speed train. Zero wiggling. Zero swerving. It somehow feels like therealistic part of the scene .movies routinely establish that biology doesn’t play by Earth rules, even for humans, on the sand planet Arrakis.
Their movement through the sand appears closer to the fluidity of a snake than to the stepwise undulations of an earthworm. Collectively, snakes have nearly half a dozen modes of propulsion that they use; the way any one species moves depends on the construction of their bodies and how they interact with their typical habitats.
Like I said before, most worms on planet Earth—well, those visible to the naked eye— have a lot of chambers and undulate, which isn’t very sandworm-ish. But Goldman points to the teeny-tiny nematode, or roundworm, as a possible sandworm cousin. These little guys live in basically every natural setting in the world, including deserts, soils, and, in particularly unlucky cases, the sludges of the human body.
So, do the universe’s largest fictional creatures share qualities with some of the tiniest we’ve observed? Are they more like amphisbaenians? The answer, for now, can be whatever you want it to be. What I want is for director Denis Villeneuve to quit being a coward and show me how the worms move in the next
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