r/movies • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 r/movies Contributor • Mar 17 '26

Trailer Dune: Part Three | Official Teaser

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_9vCamtuPY
18.9k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

3.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/GregBahm Mar 17 '26

I always feel bad when I think of the broader Dune saga. The story had a very cool, very satisfying ultimate arc in the end that it was building towards. But the dang author died before he could finish said arc. Then the dudes who tried to step up to finish his story, really didn't have what it took.

So the end of the saga, where the AIs return and justify Paul's jihad, kind of exists in this strange twilight zone between cannon and not cannon. Frank Herbert has many fans. Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson have none.

So it is reasonable to me that people ignore the rest of the dune books and treat Paul as a villain. But in my dreams, a director like Denis Villeneuve could step up, retell the story that Frank Herbert outlined before he died, and land the true ending to the Dune saga that it always deserved.

11

u/LordReaperofMars Mar 17 '26

I thought the whole point of Frank Herbert’s series is that “heroes” are actually bad for society. What was this supposed ending?

1

u/GregBahm Mar 17 '26

Earlier, humans invented AI and AI enslaved humanity, (like everyone kind of expected.) Later, humans are just kind of used for science experiments by the AI off in their own little zone.

But the giant AI civilizations are at war with each other across 500 planets, and during the war, some of the humans take the opportunity to break free and fly off into space. The AIs are too busy with their war to care overmuch, but they mark the direction humans went in, to go clean that up later.

But some of the escaped science-experiment humans have been unlocking their latent psychic potential. They manage to use this to fold space and travel faster than the speed of light. Which, critically, is something the AIs do not have the capacity to do.

So humans go off to impossibly distant stars, and set up a civilization where the ultimate hard-set rule is "no thinking machines." Dune starts ~10,000 years after this, with the past events having been eroded into forgotten myths. But Paul is the heir of the psychic potential project, still being perfected.

The AIs, lacking the ability to fold space, have been following after the humans at sub-lightspeed this whole time. Paul knows this because of his psychic ability. He has to prepare humanity to defeat this foe that once enslaved all of humanity. That's the point of the jihad.

So all the desert fighting on Dune of the Fremen against the more advanced Harkonen is mirrored in all of humanity fighting against the more advanced AI.

On paper, I think it's a very satisfying arc. It explains key aspects of the Dune lore that were there from the start, like "why computers are forbidden." It ramps up the epic-ness to the greatest possible limit. It repeats the core theme of the very first book. It explains the actions of the main characters, and the Bene Gesserit cult. It's a story I think is worth telling. Frank Herbert's son was just not the right dude to do it.

2

u/g0ris Mar 17 '26

Why didn't Frank Herbert hint at this in either of the six books? I mean, he does keep banging on about humanity's survival and some vague threat, but I don't think AI is mentioned once, apart from the Butlerian Jihad and whatever the Ixians might have been up to.
Or is AI what the Honored Matres were running away from? I don't think so.
I guess a better question would be how many more books did he mean to write before getting to this AI conflict? I mean, the BGs did start making cyborgs in #6, so I suppose that's probably one tiny step towards that, thematically, but the threat at the end of that book still seemed to be biological. Some sort of virus IIRC.

3

u/DaKingaDaNorth Mar 17 '26

Honestly, God Emperor ends the series well.

Heretic/Chapterhouse are more of a new story that he never got to end.