
Age: 58
male
Denis Villeneuve (born October 3, 1967) is a Canadian filmmaker. He has received seven Canadian Screen Awards as well as nominations for three Academy Awards, five BAFTA Awards, and two Golden Globe Awards. Villeneuve's films have grossed more than $1.8 billion worldwide. Villeneuve began his career in his home country, directing four French-language dramas: August 32nd on Earth (1998); Maelström (2000); Polytechnique (2009), a dramatisation of the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre; and Incendies (2010). The last of these gained him international prominence and earned a nomination for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. He expanded to English-language films by directing the thrillers Prisoners (2013), Enemy (2013), and Sicario (2015). Villeneuve gained wider recognition for directing science fiction films. His work on Arrival (2016) earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Director. This was followed by Blade Runner 2049 (2017), which was critically lauded but financially unsuccessful. His next projects were Dune (2021) and Dune: Part Two (2024), a two-part adaptation of Frank Herbert's novel of the same name. Both films were critically and commercially successful, with the former earning him Academy Award nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Picture.

Kevin Flynn is a leading software engineer formerly employed by the computer corporation ENCOM, who now runs a video arcade and attempts to hack into ENCOM's mainframe system. However, ENCOM's Master Control Program (MCP) halts his progress. Within ENCOM, programmer Alan Bradley and his girlfriend, engineer Lora Baines, discover that the MCP has closed off their access to projects. When Alan confronts the senior executive vice president, Ed Dillinger, Dillinger claims that the security measures are an effort to stop outside hacking attempts. However, when Dillinger privately questions the MCP, he discovers the MCP has expanded into a powerful virtual intelligence and has become power-hungry, illegally appropriating personal, business, and government programs to increase its own capabilities. The MCP blackmails Dillinger with information about his plagiarizing Flynn's games if he does not comply with its directives.

