The Empty Impact of Dune: Part Two’s Villain Turn

The sequel’s condemnation of colonialism rings false when it won’t acknowledge its own Middle Eastern and Muslim influences. Photo: Warner Bros.

This article was originally published on March 6, 2024. On May 21, Dune: Part Two became available to stream on Max. Spoilers follow for the novel Dune, by Frank Herbert, and the film adaptation.

In the opening lines of Dune, Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of the 1965 Frank Herbert novel, Zendaya’s Fremen warrior Chani tells us her home planet, Arrakis, “is so beautiful when the sun is low.” The desert world has been ravaged by outsiders who arrived long before she was born, she says in voiceover. Its last colonizers, the sadistic Harkonnens, became “obscenely rich” from harvesting Arrakis’s spice, a natural resource that facilitates space travel, among other benefits. Her people, the Fremen, have been killed and exploited for outsiders’ gain for generations. She wonders out loud, “Who will our next oppressors be?”

In the sequel, Dune: Part Two, Chani echoes those lines in a scene where she and the outsider Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) sit together on a sand dune and share a kiss for the first time. He promises he wants to be “equal” to her — not a duke or a member of a Great House, as was his birthright on his home planet, Caladan, and not Lisan al Gaib, the messianic figure whom prophecies state will bring the Fremen to “paradise,” a role many on Arrakis believe is his destiny. (That prophecy was planted years ago by the Bene Gesserit, a secretive order of space-witches whose political plans involve finding a way to subdue the Fremen through faith.) Chani repeats the first line of her old monologue, but not the last one. There’s no need to wonder anymore who the Fremen’s “next oppressors” will be. Her answer is sitting right next to her.

At the end of Part Two, after months of living with the Fremen, battling alongside their Fedaykin guerrilla fighters, and growing closer to Chani, Paul accepts his role as Lisan al Gaib — but uses the power he holds over the Fremen for his own vengeful quest against the Harkonnens, not for the betterment of Arrakis. He usurps power from the Padishah Emperor (Christopher Walken), strong-arms the emperor’s daughter Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh) into a political marriage to secure legitimacy, and declares a “holy war” in his own name — pushing Chani to abandon Paul. All of it makes for a starkly different ending from Herbert’s original work.

Most of Villeneuve and his co-writer Jon Spaihts’s changes help shift and deepen the story’s central tension. In the novel, Paul fears the jihad he sees in his visions, but he’s accepted the prophecy that he is Arrakis’s rescuer and redeemer. (Herbert used the term “jihad” often; the films replace it with the less specific “holy war.”) He holds onto his Atreides identity as he does so: “It’s not right that I give up entirely the name my father gave me. Could I be known among you as Paul-Muad’Dib?” he asks Fremen tribal leader Stilgar. And he has no qualms using the Bene Gesserit power of Voice on the Fremen to convince them to his side. To a certain degree, Paul always holds himself apart from the Fremen, even as he becomes a respected warrior and starts a family with Chani. When Paul accepts that he should harness the power of jihad, he diverges somewhat from his Bene Gesserit–trained mother, Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), who says to him, “I suddenly see how I’ve used you and twisted you and manipulated you to set you on a course of my choosing … I want you to do something for me: Choose the course of happiness.” But the fated path forward feels too concrete for him to diverge from it. His duel with his cousin Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen (Austin Butler), his toppling the Padishah Emperor, and his engagement to Irulan take up all of 12 pages at the end of the novel. Paul’s victory, thanks to the certainty of prophecy, seems predetermined.

Photo: Warner Bros.

In the novel, Paul and Chani are fully devoted to each other (he sings her a love song on the baliset; she kills a challenger to his leadership) and to their son Leto II until the boy dies in a Harkonnen attack. Villeneuve and Spaihts, however, significantly alter the couple — injecting them with far more doubt, putting them on oppositional sides of the prophecy and the debate on who should lead the Fremen, and ending Part Two with a breakup that undermines our assumption of the hero Paul is supposed to be. In choosing personal retribution for the fall of House Atreides, he curdles into a villain with a speech to the Fremen that Chalamet delivers like a manic dictator. When he orders the Fremen to “lead” the Great Houses who refuse to honor him as Emperor “to paradise,” he is instigating a holy war not to free the people he spent months hiding and fighting among, but to elevate himself. The anger and betrayal on Chani’s face all but tell us how to feel in the moment. But this condemnation of Paul’s colonialist turn can only go so far when the film is also reluctant to acknowledge the Middle Eastern and Muslim influences in Herbert’s novel, and its direct allusions to real-world forever wars driven by imperialist forces. Without that urgency, Part Two’s insistence that we turn on Paul as Chani did feels hollow.

The ideological and romantic rupture between Paul and Chani positions Paul not only as a superspecial boy who deserves to lead but as a self-aware colonizer following literally and figuratively in the footsteps of his Harkonnen relatives to take advantage of the Fremen. In Herbert’s book, Paul learned about his Harkonnen blood much earlier; he’s the one who breaks the news to his mother, Jessica, immediately after they’ve escaped into the desert wilderness of Arrakis. But onscreen, Paul’s realization comes after he drinks from the Water of Life ceremony in the last act of Part Two. The knowledge seems to change him, and explicitly sets up his turn into exploitation and bloodthirstiness. Suddenly, the visions he’s been seeing in both films get recontextualized. He’s not seeing himself following Jessica through images of violence, war, and death because she is a Bene Gesserit. He’s seeing all this because of who Jessica’s father is — the vicious Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård) — and what he’s passed down to them both. “We’re Harkonnens. So this is how we’ll survive, by being Harkonnens,” Paul later vows to Jessica.

Part Two reworks Chani, meanwhile, from a firm believer in Paul and his prophecy to an Arrakis-for-Fremen-only loyalist. Chani’s faith helps define her in the book. She willingly gives Jessica the spice-poison in the reverend mother ceremony, identifies as both a warrior and a sayyadina (an acolyte priestess), and respects and helps revive Paul after he imbibes the Water of Life. In the Dune films, by contrast, Chani unapologetically sneers at the “stupid prophecy” of who Paul could be, and dismisses Lisan al Gaib as backward folklore. She’s drawn to who he is, and teaches him how to sand-walk, collect the desert air’s moisture, and use a rocket launcher. She primarily calls him “Usul,” the name Stilgar gives him that is derived from the Arabic word for “roots” (and is connected to the concepts of Islamic law), indicating that the duke he was is of no importance to her. Book Chani is Paul’s lover, protector, and one more part of his destiny; the film’s Chani is committed to the idea of independence for Arrakis. When Paul announces his intention to marry Irulan and legitimize his claim on the Imperium, Zendaya’s Chani leaves the room, broken-hearted — but more important is what she doesn’t do before abandoning Paul’s holy war: bow to him.

Still, even as Part Two can imagine more for Chani, it can’t imagine more for her outside of her relationship with Paul. We know nothing about her life before she meets him. (In Herbert’s Dune, she’s ecologist Liet-Kynes’s daughter and dreams of transforming Arrakis into a green oasis “rich with good things.”) Shishakli (Souheila Yacoub), the one friend Chani has in Part Two, seemingly dies after being tortured by Feyd-Rautha, but we never see how Chani would either grieve her loss or celebrate her sacrifice.

Part Two ends with an attempt to validate Chani’s insistence on Fremen self-determination, in part by emphasizing that Paul is now one of Arrakis’s oppressors. But that indictment is little more than posturing, given how disinterested Part One and Two otherwise are in the distinctly Middle Eastern, North African, Arabic, and Muslim textures of Fremen culture. Although Part Two invents regional and generational differences among the Fremen when it comes to the Lisan al Gaib prophecy, the details in Herbert’s book that help us understand who the Fremen are outside of that divination are again absent here. No mention of the “mish-mish” (Arabic for apricot) or “baklawa” on which the Fremen feast after “Ramadan” fasting; the importance of “Hajj,” or religious pilgrimage; the Reverend Mother’s memories of her “Sunni ancestors” and what they endured. No interest in how Fremen declare their romantic love for each other, or how they share the Water of Life in communal celebration after victories, or the years they worked with Liet-Kynes to plan the agricultural transformation of Arrakis’s surface. The societal and lifestyle particularities that define the Fremen outside of single-minded struggle are of no use to Dune: Part Two. When the film does bring in authentic elements of MENA and Muslim culture — like Stilgar’s warning Paul to avoid djinns in the desert — it’s played for laughs.

Aesthetic mimicry is the prevailing mode of world-building here. Arrakis is a planet full of wailing women hidden behind niqabs and chadors, leaned over in dua-like worship; of foreboding, robed men described as “fundamentalists”; of inhabitants who speak a vaguely Arabic-sounding language — all while the filmmakers demur from giving these motifs the distinct context Herbert’s novel did to make them more than simple stereotypes. But it’s impossible to watch a scene in which the Harkonnens destroy one of the Fremen’s hidden sietch communities and the holy place of worship hidden inside of it, leaving a child covered in blood wandering around rubble, a mother sobbing about five of her relatives dying, and countless refugees fleeing to the south, and not think of the current real-world parallels, whether or not Villeneuve and his collaborators acknowledge it. Even as the film reaches for radicalism in clarifying Paul as a villain, its weakest point is that it still can’t fully conceive of the Fremen as people.