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:
Central to the story concept is the idea of the Missionaria Protectiva, which is a millennia-long project by the shadowy Bene Gesserit sisterhood that has seeded cultures across the universe with religious iconography and prophecies that will allow them to pull the strings on these cultures when it suits them. Paul's mother is a member of this organization, and uses the long-embedded prophecies within the indigenous Fremen people's culture to position Paul as their long-awaited savior, the Lisan Al-Gaib.
Reluctantly, Paul does play into this role, granting him the power of fanaticism in an extraordinarily hearty people, whose harsh life on the desert world has bred them into the greatest fighters humanity has to offer (the movie admittedly downplays this idea - Herbert was convinced that the tougher someone's life was, the better fighter they'd be, which I'd suggest is probably more about correlation than causation.) But if this idea of a rich dude showing up and inserting himself into a culture that he then more or less takes over for himself makes you feel uncomfortable, that's basically the whole point of the story.
The thing about the prophecy stuff is that, while it is based in careful social engineering from people operating over ten thousand years ago, there's also some sci-fi weirdness that makes it not entirely bullshit.
Arrakis, the planet also known as the eponymous Dune, is the one source in the universe for Spice, which is a psychoactive drug that allows, among other things, a certain prescience that is used to plot travel between the stars, jumping across cosmic distances. But while the Spacing Guild navigators (whom we don't get to see in either of these movies - which honestly might have been the right call) are heavily mutated and engineered to make use of them in this way, Paul himself is the result of a millennia-long breeding program to produce someone who will be the Bene Gesserit's ultimate wise ruler to lead humanity into a new age (despite the fact that they spin the prophecies, the sisterhood seems to also get high on their own supply, so to speak).
And so, even if the story was written long ago as a kind of cynical contingency plan, Paul's adherence to the prophecies does raise the question of whether there's some truth to it.
On Arrakis, Paul meets a Fremen girl named Chani, with whom he falls in love and, in the later books, has children with (his son, Leto II, has an even more impactful destiny than he does). Chani's role in the books is significant but she's not the most fleshed out character. While she appeared mostly in Paul's dreams in the first movie (again, showing that that prescience was already lying dormant there before his arrival on Dune) and served as a kind of metaphorical avatar of Arrakis and the Fremen people, the real person Chani is given more of an arc herself in this movie. Chani is, in this film, one of the Fedaykin, the elite Fremen warriors waging a resistance war against the evil Harkonnens.
The expansion of her character was clearly one of the main goals of the movie, and it's through her perspective - seeing how the true believer Stilgar contorts himself in order to retain his faith that Paul is the promised savior, and raging against the way that her people are falling in line behind him, even as she is personally falling in love with Paul and trying to acquaint him with their ways - that we really see the darkness of Paul's story.
Essentially, Paul is a good kid who just wants to survive and do the right thing, but on the other hand, he's also a colonialist power-seeker whose "right thing" will mean the deaths of billions of people. And Chani is forced to grapple with this contradiction, watching Paul give in to the path that his mother has arranged for him.
And in fairness to Paul, there's a tragic sense of inevitability to this. His singular path - what in the books becomes known as The Golden Path - is filled with death and horror, but we're also given to understand that it's not as if the alternatives are great.
Speaking of alternatives:
This movie introduces us to Feyd Rautha Harkonnen. I feel like I need to re-read the book because I had this impression that Feyd was essentially the friendly face of the Harkonnen clan. Rabban is given control of Arrakis after massacring the Atreides, but his brutality in the books is set up, I think, to make Feyd's arrival of Arrakis as his replacement look like pure benevolence and kindness - kind of big PR move.
But I wonder if I'm misremembering that, because in this adaptation along with Lynch's in the 80s both have Feyd as a depraved monster. He's smarter and more in control of himself than Rabban, but he'll still casually murder servants and the like.
Ultimately, Feyd is set up as the person who will fill Paul's role if he does not - both as the Bene Gesserit's alternative option in their breeding program and a likely successor as emperor. (Given that Jessica was supposed to have had a girl, I've always wondered if the BG's plan was to have the female version of Paul marry Feyd Rautha and their child would be the actual Kwisatz Haderach. Ultimately it is Paul's son who becomes the God Emperor, so the timing still kind of works out).
I have to say that, while in the trailers I wasn't sold on Feyd's gladiatorial introduction being entirely in black and white, the effect of the sequence actually worked quite well on the big screen: kind of a depiction of the world as it would function controlled by the Harkonnens, with dread violence celebrated by the masses in a world robbed of all beauty.
Alia's role in the story is also changed somewhat. Jessica is pregnant when they flee into the desert. In order to fulfill the Fremen prophecies, she must become a Reverend Mother, which on Arrakis means drinking the poisonous "water of life" (which I think is some kind of lethally-concentrated spice straight from a Sand Worm's innards) and becoming connected to her entire ancestral memory. Within the womb, Alia is also subjected to this, and so is imbued with the intelligence of a full-grown woman with countless generations of ancestral memories in her despite still being a developing fetus.
In other words, Alia is a Reverend Mother before she's even born, and she and Jessica actually collaborate and consult with one another.
Unlike in the book, in which Alia is born and grows to be a child before the end of the story, the timeline here is accelerated. However, Alia does speak to Paul through their mother and sometimes in what seems to be a psychic connection facilitated by the Spice, and is actually played by Anya Taylor-Joy, appearing in person when Paul has a vision of an ocean restored to Arrakis.
I don't know why I've structure the post this way, but I guess given how foundational a science fiction text Dune is, it feels important to examine how this adaptation has altered things to make it work as a movie.
In terms of production design, I think this film makes bolder choices than part one did, which is very welcome. Likewise, there are editing and cinematographic choices that I applaud, such as the monochromatic gladiatorial fight.
Again, I'd be tempted to suggest the movie lacks subtlety in its portrayal of Paul's rise to power as a bad thing, but then again, Herbert complained that people didn't get that in his book, and Lynch's version of the story was pretty celebratory of him.
(I also think it's funny that after seeing Greta Gerwig's Little Women adaptation, I've now seen Timothee Chalamet and Florence Pugh get married in two movies and have very different feelings about that happening in each.)
Now, I know that Villeneuve is talking about making a third movie. This film does close out the plot of the original Dune novel, but I've read Dune Messiah and Children of Dune (and I started God Emperor of Dune, but boy is that a big departure from the first half of the hexalogy, and I didn't get hooked into it as well). I think this story does kind of work as an ending - Chani leaves the palace after Paul gets the Emperor to submit to him, suggesting that this is the end of their relationship, even though future stories would need her to stick around.
The previous movie ended somewhat abruptly (though not as abruptly as I feel some people thought) and I've seen some people feeling the same way about this one, but that big war across the stars that the movie portends is not one I expect to see. I wonder if they'll need to recast for an older Paul and Chani, or if they'll compress the story to allow the familiar stars to play their roles. I can't really see that working in the long term, but we'll see.
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