Filming Dune: Messiah? (A Note on the Potential Obstacles)

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

With the second half of Denis Villeneuve's Dune out the verdict is in on the project as a whole. At the moment the reception for that second half, and arguably for the whole, seems stronger than that to the first half back in 2021. (The Rotten Tomatoes critics' score for Part 2 is 93 percent, while the ticket sales have been treated as cause for tears of relief after the prior lousy half year.)

It thus became easy enough to imagine Villeneuve helming a sequel after the first weekend in play, and indeed the word we are hearing now is that a Dune: Messiah adaptation as officially happening.

Is such a movie a good idea, however?

First of all let us consider what Dune: Messiah was in the original Dune series--not just a follow-up to Dune, but a prelude to the third book, Children of Dune, which concluded the ultimately tragic story of Paul Atreides and clarified What it All Ultimately Meant for Humanity. Adapting just the second book without any expectation of adapting the third seems rather pointless to me--again, a matter of telling just part of the story. (Indeed it was a very sound decision on the part of the then-SciFi Channel when it filmed the second and third books together as a single six-hour miniseries back in 2003.) And as it happens, no one seems to be talking about that third book--partly, I suppose, because the commentariat DO NOT READ BOOKS, and therefore do not know how incomplete a Dune: Messiah would leave the saga.

One should also consider the source material for such a sequel, and its significant differences with the original Dune. As Josh Varlin made very clear, in adapting the first Dune novel Villeneuve's movie did a lot of violence to the background to the later books--enough so that it will have repercussions for any adaptations of the follow-up, like, to cite only the most obvious issue, the fact that at the end of the first film Chani left Paul. (After all, in the book the triangle between Paul, Irulan and Chani is indispensable to the intrigues directed against Paul--as is Chani's dying but leaving Paul newborn twins who are the protagonists of the third book.) The fact that Alia was unborn at that point in the narrative, and could not play her part in the events of the first novel, with all their resonance for the personality that emerges in her mind in the third; the downplaying of the complex power structure of the Empire that proves so important to the second book's plot--such things, too, work against any easy shift from the Dune movies we know to an adaptation of the second and third books of the series. (I will add that I have a hard time picturing Timothée Chalamet being up to the extraordinary dramatic demands that the radical shifts in Paul's fortunes impose on anyone essaying the part--and for that matter, seeing Jason Momoa keeping Duncan Idaho credible in the far more involved performances any faithful adaptation of the third book would require.)

Perhaps more fundamental, Villeneuve's movie hollowed out all the substance in the interest of giving us a big action movie (especially when handling Part Two). Problematic enough with the first book, the later books offer far less scope for that--all as the books get more philosophical. (As the writer for the Hollywood Reporter said, quoting a review on Amazon, Messiah "is 'a lot of sitting around and talking.'") They also get stranger. (Indeed, Varlin, an admirer of the original novel who in his review of the first part said that if the movie did no more than inspire "more people to read Herbert's Dune, it will have done a small service," characterized the later entries in the Dune series as "basically unreadable, except by the most devoted fans.") To satisfy the requirement of the studios for blockbuster-type material that will please fans of Part Two of Dune (expecting the same action-oriented filmmaking, at least as much as continuity with the established plot), we would probably get something nearly unrecognizable--and almost certainly even more dismaying to purists than what we have seen to date. Perhaps that unrecognizable product will sell tickets to the general audience--which is really all the Dauriats of Hollywood care about--but it is easy to picture the compromises in the end pleasing no one.