Chani and Dune Part Two (and Beyond)

 There are a number of adaptational changes that Denis Villeneuve's Dune movies make. I think the general consensus is that these changes are largely wise (I wish we'd gotten a bit more of the Spacing Guild, whose entire appearance in the two existing movies, as far as I can tell, are just some dudes in space suits in that early scene in the first movie when the Emperor's Herald shows up, but I also think explaining Guild Navigators as a thing is... well, it's a lot).

Probably the most welcome change is that of the character of Chani, played in these movies by Zendaya. In fact, really we're just talking about her role in the second movie, as she's something of a non-entity in the first one (which makes sense given that she's only literally in the story near the very end - most of her appearances are in Paul's prophetic visions in which she sort of represents Arrakis and the Fremen people, a bit like how Jamis, being the "friend" who teaches Paul the Fremen ways, does so by dueling him to the death).

Chani, in part two, is the voice of skepticism among the Fremen, and fleshes out this group of people as not being just a single hive mind. It's a difficult needle to thread - she's simultaneously the Fremen woman who falls in love with Paul while also the most vocal doubter of his divine nature.

It could be easy to see these two roles as being somewhat contradictory, and maybe better separated out into different characters. But I think that the film somehow makes this work, perhaps because her closeness with Paul allows her to see his humanity - both in an attractive, comforting way, and also in a manner that gives her too much specificity to his character and personality to let her believe he's this more abstract idea of a prophesied messiah.

The movie ends with Chani leaving the palace in Arrakeen on worm-back, leaving Paul after he has demanded Irulan's hand in marriage and sent the Fremen up to bring their jihad to the stars.

What's great is how this functions as a one-two punch to her faith in Paul. While the marriage is of course purely for political convenience - to legitimize Paul's seizure of the imperial throne by making himself a reasonable heir to Shaddam IV - it's nevertheless a reminder that Paul, despite learning the Fremen ways and living the Fremen life, is ultimately a creature of this imperial ruling class, where a bond that should represent a genuine emotional connection and life commitment is merely another maneuver in the grand political chess game.

And, on top of that, he's enabled the most destructive aspects of her culture, knowing full well the death and destruction that it will unleash. She has fought long and hard for her peoples' independence, but what they're going to get is not just freedom from tyrannical overlords, but to become the tyrannical overlords. Paul understands this entirely, but it doesn't stop him from letting it happen.

I know Frank Herbert considered Paul to be a villain, but as written he's more of an anti-hero - the text of the book makes it seem pretty clear that what he does is the lesser of evils, and ultimately all intended to save the human race from extinction. Granted, perhaps we're meant to wonder if Paul's prescience is really all that infallible, and if perhaps he's actually just seeing what he wants to see that will lead him to power. But at least in my single reading of the book, I didn't see a lot of evidence for that interpretation.

But regardless of whether Paul's good intentions outweigh the evils he unleashes, from Chani's perspective, it lays bare the lengths to which Paul will go.

The interesting question, then, is where we go from here.

In the books, Chani plays a similar role that Jessica did for Leto, in that she's Paul's wife in all but name. Paul never has a child with Irulan, and the empress-consort is left politically neutered and emotionally shunned, while Chani is the mother of Paul's children and given the reverence that her lover's position would typically be due.

In the movie, Paul claims that he's foreseen that Chani will have a change of heart, and return to him in time. I wonder, though: is that just a nod to the inevitability of their reunion given how things must go in the future stories?

Again, the book's version of Chani never abandons Paul, and is loyal to the end. But this one is horrified by the things that he winds up doing.

Now just think about what her son winds up doing.

While his rise to power comes with a jihad across the cosmos that kills billions, Paul is still looked upon as a benevolent, messianic figure. But it turns out that this is basically because, at least according to Leto II, his son, Paul isn't willing to go quite far enough.

Leto II is the God Emperor of Dune. At the end of Children of Dune, he allows the Sandtrout (a kind of early phase of the sandworm life cycle - one that I'm not sure totally makes sense as the species seems to subsist entirely on cannibalism, which is not thermodynamically sustainable) to form a kind of exoskeleton over his body, eventually transforming him into a human-sandworm hybrid that rules the Imperium for millennia.

Unlike Paul, Leto II becomes an utterly cruel despot - and he does so consciously and intentionally, with a sort of end goal of weaning humanity from the very idea of divine saviors. By the time he's done, the legacy of the Atreides is as being the worst villains known to humanity.

And yeah, that's Chani's son.

That being said, Villeneuve has said that his ambition is to adapt up through Dune Messiah, the second book in the series, considering it the end of Paul's arc. Paul's children are certainly part of that story, but they don't become central to them until Children of Dune.

So, I kind of wonder what will happen with Chani in the now fairly likely Dune Part Three, and if it will conform or diverge from the books.

How Dune Messiah Might Fit into Villeneuve's Adaptation Series

 With Dune part Two now out in theaters, the adaptation of Frank Herbert's original novel is complete. Whereas David Lynch's 1984 adaptation had to cram the entire novel into a single movie, to its detriment, the somewhat abrupt end to Villeneuve's first movie allows the second one to breathe and really dwell on Paul Atreides' struggles to survive in the desert, learn the ways of the Fremen people, and wrestle with the idea that, in order to achieve his heroic journey, he must co-opt an indigenous culture, breed fanaticism amongst them, and unleash a genocidal conquest across the stars.

Herbert supposedly wrote Dune Messiah in part to make sure his intent with the original story hit home - many read the first novel as a classic heroic journey and seemed not to understand the monstrousness of what Paul and his mother achieved in converting the Fremen to their cause.

Dune Messiah takes place decades after the original story. At this point, Paul is emperor and Arrakis and the Fremen people have become the center of power in the Imperium. The Harkonnens are no more - except, of course, for the fact that Paul and his mother and sister are, as revealed in the first book, are actually Harkonnens as well, given Jessica's parentage.

It's notable, I think, that there's a reasonable interpretation that Paul's father Leto was genuinely a good person through-and-through. Sure, there's also a way to look at him as being just really good at PR (I actually think there are parallels with the character of Miquella in the video game Elden Ring, where it's not clear if he's just a good guy or just really good at convincing people he is) but if we think of Leto as where Paul's goodness comes from, we must recognize that even though Jessica and Paul are both sympathetic characters in their own way, they have that killer instinct - that cruel Harkonnen instinct - within them.

Still, Paul is haunted by the horrors he has unleashed, even as he justifies them as the lesser of all the potential evils that might befall humanity. But it's clear that he wants nothing more than to leave that life.

Dune Part Two compresses time a bit - in the book, Alia is a toddler (though with her ancestral memories, she's far from your typical toddler, having the intellectual background of a wise elder) by the end of the story. Though clearly far younger than Paul, by the time of the second book, she's a full adult. Anya Taylor-Joy's casting in part two is interesting, then: while we see her in person only in a dream-like vision of an Arrakis that has returned to its watery, fertile climate, it's a minimal appearance that seems to portend future prominence in a part three.

Still, I wonder about the challenges of making such a distant sequel. Admittedly, in the Dune universe, the ruling class use Spice to prolong their lives (it's sometimes referred to as the "geriatric spice") and so they look far younger than they are (this is part of the reason I sort of forgive the fact that Rebecca Ferguson is only twelve years older than Timothee Chalamet, even if it's probably just classically Hollywood gender weirdness - they also both happen to be right for the roles individually). But we haven't really had that concept established in these movies - Emperor Shaddam is played by 80-year-old Christopher Walken, while the 72-year-old Emperor in the novel is described as looking like he's in his early 30s.

I can understand the choice to just cast older actors to play that older generation, but I also wonder if that means that they would need to re-cast Paul, Chani, and any other characters of their generation (other than Alia, for the aforementioned reasons).

I doubt they'd do that - Chalamet and Zendaya's performances, particularly the latter in the second film, are pretty central to the success of the series so far.

Still, I think both parts of the Villeneuve adaptation have benefitted from Chalamet's boyish appearance (the guy is in his late 20s now and might be in his 30s by the time they get the next movie filming) but I think Dune Messiah as a story really needs a weathered, weary Paul Atreides to work, dramatically. Messiah is all about how the potential horrors of being the figurehead of a genocidal theocracy have been made fully manifest, just as horrifically as he had feared. At one point (I think it's in this book,) Paul, accessing what is in his time profoundly ancient history through his ancestral recall, compares himself to Hitler, and finds himself to be responsible for orders of magnitude more suffering and death.

It's a bummer of a story, and arguably not as elegant of a plot as its predecessor or even the follow-up, Children of Dune. (I tried reading God Emperor of Dune, and while I find it conceptually interesting, I just could not get into it in the same way.) And honestly, I think Villeneuve's adaptational choices - making Chani the voice of skepticism, who recognizes the evil that is coming with Paul's rise (and the sense of dread you feel when Paul tells the Fremen to bring his enemies "to paradise,") - hit the thematic notes that Herbert felt weren't clear enough in his first novel. In other words, I think that these two parts make a pretty complete story.

But we'll see. I've been very impressed with Villeneuve's sci-fi movies - I have far less love for Blade Runner than a lot of (largely older, like elder Gen Xer) people do, but I thought his sequel told an interesting story well. And I thought Arrival was fantastic. And he's done a terrific job with Dune so far, so clearly he's the person to trust to do the next part.

In Dune Part Two, Heroic Destiny is the Villain

 It's funny that the aesthetics of the novel Dune were so inspirational to George Lucas in the creation of Star Wars when you consider the profound differences in their attitude toward heroism.

Both prominently feature a desert world (one that Star Wars admittedly has to keep coming up with excuses to return to given that it's theoretically meant to be a total backwater,) melee combat despite the futuristic setting, giant space-empires (Dune's is not technically a galactic empire, as it's theoretically a universal empire - it's the human empire but in a universe in which there are no aliens, depending on what the hell those sand worms are,) and a grand political struggle and war that the protagonist gets swept into.

But while George Lucas more or less set out to make in Luke Skywalker the prototypical hero to be admired and aspire to be like, Frank Herbert's Paul Atreides is more of a deeply conflicted anti-hero.

A simple reading of the first novel in the Dune series (known simply as Dune) might leave you with the impression that Paul is a rather classical hero, coming as he does from a noble family that actually seems to be noble in both senses of the word, coming to a new world in which his family is betrayed and he must learn the ways of this new world to both survive and get justice for his father's death.

Spoilers for Dune Part Two, parts of the rest of the Dune series, and, weirdly, Little Women, ahead: