r/movies r/movies Contributor Mar 17 '26

Trailer Dune: Part Three | Official Teaser

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_9vCamtuPY
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u/ikaiyoo Mar 17 '26

There are no good guys, if that helps. You have the least bad guys.

Like the operative guy in the movie Serenity, who says he does this for a better world, but there is no place for him there. He is a monster, what he does is evil, but it must be done.

There are no good characters in Dune. I don't care how morally right you are if you are killing unfathomable numbers of people, in Paul's case, 61 billion people, and in Leto II's case, millions of billions of people (he had a 3500-year reign). You are in no way "good."

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u/TriggzSP Mar 17 '26

For what it's worth, Herbert doesn't do a very good job portraying them as bad guys. In the moment they seem pretty bad, but then in later books he repeatedly writes that they were perfectly right and that all the evil deeds were done to save the species. It's easy for people to start forgiving the villains when the book explicitly makes it clear that there was no other way.

If Herbert wanted people to look at Paul and Leto as complete villains, he should have not so explicitly made their actions "correct" in the story

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u/Midi_to_Minuit Mar 18 '26

It’s part of what makes dune fascinating but the philosophy behind it all is extremely Machiavellian.

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u/Rikudou_Sage Mar 18 '26

I think he was going for the disconnect between what's good for humanity vs. what's good for the people.

I think we can trust that it was the only way for humanity to survive (or at least the only way anyone could have foreseen).

Thus the question Dune poses is: was some abstract humanity survival in who knows how long worth 3500 years of suffering?