Dune Part Three new trailer lands and the messiah business is going badly (trailer).
A new Dune Part Three trailer has landed, which means Warner Bros. is now rationing Arrakis footage with roughly the same generosity the Spacing Guild applies to spice: often enough to keep the addiction lively, never enough to actually satisfy anybody. December is close enough now that you can smell the cinnamon.
Denis Villeneuve’s concluding instalment opens on 18th December, in IMAX and on 70mm for those who prefer their sand delivered at industrial resolution. This is the film that adapts Dune Messiah, the book Frank Herbert wrote largely because a distressing number of readers had finished the first novel and come away thinking Paul Atreides was the hero. Herbert spent a whole sequel explaining, with some vigour, that this was not the intended takeaway. It remains one of literature’s great instances of an author writing an entire book in order to argue with his own fans.
Seventeen years have passed since the end of Part Two, and the holy war Paul set in motion has done what holy wars generally do, which is expand enthusiastically and leave a great many worlds in a condition best described as no longer there. Timothée Chalamet returns as the Emperor Muad’Dib, a man who now has absolute power, a personal religion, a war record measured in planets, and the pinched expression of somebody who has read the ending in advance and cannot get out of it. Absolute rule, the trailer suggests, is going about as well as everybody warned him it would.
Zendaya’s Chani supplies the emotional wreckage. The footage puts a quiet conversation about what to call a child alongside a woman walking away from an emperor, which is efficient storytelling by anyone’s standards. Book readers will note that Villeneuve appears once again to be departing from Herbert’s blueprint where Chani is concerned, positioning her less as a casualty of the plot and more as an active problem for the throne. Purists are already sharpening things. They will get over it, probably around the time the sandworms turn up.
Jason Momoa is back as Duncan Idaho, resurrected as a ghola and delivered to Paul as a present, which is a career development most actors can only dream of. Dying heroically in the first film and then returning as a laboratory-grown copy of yourself is the sort of contract clause that ought to be standard across the industry. The trailer gives him the sharpest exchange of the lot, in which the ghola informs his emperor that redemption is now well out of reach. Momoa says it with the cheerful bluntness of a man who has already died once and therefore has nothing much left to lose.
Around them, the conspiracy bench is deep. Robert Pattinson joins as Scytale, a Tleilaxu Face Dancer, and therefore a character whose entire function is to be someone else at inconvenient moments. Florence Pugh’s Princess Irulan is married to Paul and visibly regretting the arrangement, Anya Taylor-Joy steps properly into Alia Atreides after her brief appearance last time, and Rebecca Ferguson, Javier Bardem and Charlotte Rampling all return to loom meaningfully in expensive rooms. Isaach de Bankolé arrives as Farok. If you enjoy watching enormously talented people plot murder in whispers, this is very much your Christmas.
Villeneuve has been unusually candid about how the film came to exist at all. By his account he told his crew he was taking a break, went home, and then kept waking in the small hours with images he could not shift, which is either admirable artistic compulsion or a condition with a name. He has also called Messiah his most personal film, a statement that ought to give his family a moment’s pause given that the book concerns a man annihilated by the myth built around him. He writes with Brian K. Vaughan, and describes the tonal progression across the trilogy as contemplation, then war, then something tighter and nastier than either.
There is a pleasing perversity to all this. Studios do not usually spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a spectacular warning against charismatic leadership, complete with IMAX screenings and a merchandising programme. The Dune films have somehow become the most expensive cautionary tale in cinema, an epic that ends its own hero’s arc with an argument that heroes are the problem, and audiences have handed it more than a billion dollars for the privilege of being told off.
Here at SFcrowsnest we are entirely on board. Villeneuve reportedly moves on to James Bond after this, which means he departs one franchise about an unstoppable man who cannot be talked out of anything for another with broadly the same premise and better tailoring. Dune: Part Three arrives on 18th December. Bring water.
