The trailer for Dune: Part Three, the conclusion to Denis Villeneuve’s Dune saga, is out, and I can already tell things are gonna veer wildly off the path Frank Herbert beat with his Dune book saga.
I appreciate that the trailer starts off strong, reminding us emphatically that Paul (Timothée Chalamet) is not a good guy by showing Chani (Zendaya) tear him a new one for his betrayal in Dune 2. At the end of that movie, Paul goes back on both his word not to rule the Fremen by ascending as the new Emperor, and his bond with Chani by agreeing to marry the princess Irulan. He also commands his new Fremen army to launch a holy war against the other noble houses of the Imperium.
The description for the trailer states that Dune 3 is set decades after Paul’s ascension, and we can see how much time has ravaged both him and the planet Arrakis. Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa) makes an appearance in the trailer, which should excite any book-understander because, if you’ll recall, Idaho met his end all the way back in the first movie. With Idaho’s return, I know that certain elements of Dune: Messiah (the second book in the series) are in play, but what about the rest? Paul’s sister Alia (Anya Taylor-Joy) shows up covered in blood, so I know her role will make for an entertaining and disturbing watch. Chani’s fate has already massively deviated from the books, and the trailer also makes it look like they’re setting her up to have a massive life-or-death showdown with Paul—an outcome I actually wouldn’t mind because her original storyline sucks worse than a hungry Shai-Hulud.
Speaking of sandworms, it doesn’t seem like we’re getting any of the wilder events of Dune: Messiah or Children of Dune — we already got gholas, which was as far as I thought Villenueve would go with some of the weirder elements of the source material. However, Paul does look a little…dry we’ll say, so who knows. Overall, Villenueve’s first two movies ably proved that the director was willing to take the elements of Dune that would make for a good, coherent movie that does justice to the talented actors playing these characters, and dispense with the rest. But now that we’ve moved beyond the events of the first book, there’s just so much less coherent stuff that was so integral Herbert’s story for Villenueve and his team to draw on that I’m curious to see how Dune 3 parks this big-ass sandworm without all that.