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This article was originally published on March 6, 2024.
On January 23, 2025,Dune: Part Twowas nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture.
Spoilers follow for the novelDune,by Frank Herbert, and the film adaptation.
Her people, the Fremen, have been killed and exploited for outsiders gain for generations.
She wonders out loud, Who will our next oppressors be?
Chani repeats the first line of her old monologue, but not the last one.
Theres no need to wonder anymore who the Fremens next oppressors will be.
Her answer is sitting right next to her.
All of it makes for a starkly different ending from Herberts original work.
Most of Villeneuve and his co-writer Jon Spaihtss changes help shift and deepen the storys central tension.
(Herbert used the term jihad often; the films replace it with the less specific holy war.)
Could I be known among you as Paul-MuadDib?
he asks Fremen tribal leader Stilgar.
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.
Pauls victory, thanks to the certainty of prophecy, seems predetermined.
The anger and betrayal on Chanis face all but tell us how to feel in the moment.
Without that urgency,Part Twos insistence that we turn on Paul as Chani did feels hollow.
The knowledge seems to change him, and explicitly sets up his turn into exploitation and bloodthirstiness.
Suddenly, the visions hes been seeing in both films get recontextualized.
So this is how well survive, by being Harkonnens, Paul later vows to Jessica.
Part Tworeworks Chani, meanwhile, from a firm believer in Paul and his prophecy to an Arrakis-for-Fremen-only loyalist.
Chanis faith helps define her in the book.
We know nothing about her life before she meets him.
Aesthetic mimicry is the prevailing mode of world-building here.
