Dune’s Messiahs

Three weeks into its release, people are still talking about Dune: Part Two. The second half of director Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi epic has generally impressed critics and audiences alike (myself included, for the most part). But one of the most notable changes from the book — the character of Chani — has divided audiences. Two critics embody this divide: one guilty of excess charity and the other guilty of excess antipathy.

Enjoying the movie has become a rare point of agreement between me and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, whose history of wrongness National Review has long chronicled. Yet Krugman does get part of Dune: Part Two’s appeal right. “Between ‘Dune’ and ‘Oppenheimer,’ we’ve learned that you can, in fact, make three-hour epics that don’t feel overlong and that don’t have you saying to yourself, ‘Oh no, not more bombastic C.G.I,’” he writes in the New York Times.

But his praise of Chani’s change from the book is off-base. Krugman claims that “Villeneuve embraces the underlying darkness” of Herbert’s vision — in which the novel’s protagonist, Paul Atreides, accepts a role as the religious leader of the titular desert planet’s natives, the Fremen, and leads them in a devastating intergalactic conquest — more than Herbert himself did. “The novel acknowledges that Paul Atreides starts a terrible war but more or less absolves him from responsibility — and ends with Lady Jessica reassuring Chani that she will remain Paul’s true wife, despite his imperial marriage of convenience,” Krugman writes, whereas “the movie ends with Chani leaving in disgust.”

Chani, Paul’s love interest, does indeed change dramatically between the book and the film. As I wrote in my review of Dune: Part Two, she becomes “the primary skeptic of Paul’s transformation into the Fremen’s messiah, meaning that “what Herbert shows largely through Paul’s inner thoughts, Villeneuve externalizes in Chani, undercutting their union for the apparent sake of increasing the agency of her character.” For Krugman, this makes the movie even more subversive than the book.

It seems rather to be one of the movie’s few concessions to modern cinematic norms to have transformed Chani in this fashion. As a result, the idea — so important to Herbert’s vision — that false messiahs are dangerous is undercut. Chani, by becoming so literal and direct a representation of messianic skepticism despite being of the Fremen, suggests that the cult that forms around Paul is not, in fact, all-consuming, thus undermining Herbert’s thematic intent. And Paul’s own resignation at his fate is transferred to Chani, becoming a less interesting kind of bitterness.

Krugman is the sort of person for whom Liel Leibovitz believes Dune: Part Two was made. In Tablet, Leibovitz laments its appeal to another high-brow publication, the New Yorker, “the world’s once-greatest magazine” run by “much smarter and more soulful men and women” but “now the upscale prose equivalent of Kamala Harris.”

Leibovitz correctly criticizes the very thing that so excites Krugman: the transformation of Chani’s character. In the book, “she’s fiercely loyal, not so much to her man as to the spiritual promise he represents.” But in 2024, “no vision of female agency is permitted unless it goes full Beyonce and asserts its independence, repeatedly and in the most obvious, performative ways.” He continues that she “may as well be wearing a ‘smash the patriarchy’ T-shirt: She quarrels with Paul endlessly, doubts his religious revelations, and is generally a downer.” This may be a tad strong, but it’s essentially correct.

Leibovitz, however, goes too far in letting this defect ruin the movie for him. Admitting that it has many admirable elements, he nonetheless argues:

Without instilling in his characters the realness of belief—that is to say, without allowing his Fremen to be Fremen, not modern, solipsistic creatures that yowl about the future being female—what the director of our latest Dune has given us is the digital equivalent of a sandstorm: awesome while it lasts, then wiped away without a trace.

This both mischaracterizes the Fremen (all of whom aside from Chani eventually accept Paul as their messiah) and shortchanges what Villeneuve has accomplished. So much so that Leibovitz elides a key element of the story. He describes the treatment of the Bene Gesserit, the powerful, all-female religious sect directing the course of the universe behind the scenes, as proof that the movie despises faith. They are imperfect, perhaps, but “deeply faithful, true believers whose pursuit is of prophecy; power is merely a means to an end.” But Villeneuve portrays them as merely “monomaniacal witches interested solely in peddling political influence.”

Yet one of the most consequential actions the Bene Gesserit take in Dune is rooted in their willingness to use religion for political manipulation. Paul’s transformation into the Fremen’s messiah would not have been possible had the Bene Gesserit not seeded prophecies on Dune of which they could later take advantage. These “Missionaria Protectiva” are deeply cynical. Even if justified in pursuit of some greater end, their very existence, and the Bene Gesserit’s willingness to employ them, suggest a decidedly more ambiguous character for the order than Leibovitz asserts. It is consistent with Herbert’s warning of the dangers of misguided religious belief, which the movie conveys. The film ends “triumphant” for Paul, as Leibovitz puts it, only for those who have not paid attention at all to Part One and the rest of Part Two, which make clear the carnage he is about to unleash.

So Krugman ought to temper his enthusiasm for Dune: Part Two’s deviations; Leibovitz ought to be more forgiving of its faults. And anyone who has not yet seen the movie should stop woolgathering and take a ’thopter (or a sandworm) to the nearest theater.