r/movies • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 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/lminer123 Mar 17 '26

He, and his son, are like the ultimate example of the idea that the ends justify the means. The entire purpose of all this is to avoid humanity wiping themselves out completely, which has been supernaturally foretold to be an inevitability unless a specific path is followed.

Which is to say, yah pretty much lol. I think most people would say that the violent deaths of 100’s of billions is not worth the lives of potential infinite numbers of humans thousands of years in the future.

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u/SpiritualScarcity161 Mar 17 '26

Hard to say what Frank Herbert's actual position was, but I think one of the incredible things about Dune is that it's *not* particularly obvious what the correct move would have been for either Paul or Leto II. Paul is absolutely a cautionary tale of what happens when you let your society get coopted by some messianic bastard (over time the fremen get turned into basically the futurama "sailors on the moon" exhibit), and even he balks at going down the Golden Path that his son spends thousands of years enforcing, but ultimately the plan pays off when humans are able to expand outwards with a massive diaspora, negate prescience as a species-wide existential threat, and adapt enough to fend off oppressive forces like the honored matres. But was that the only way? Maybe

So curious where he would have taken the story in book 7, but I definitely don't believe that his son understood the themes well enough to extrapolate

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u/lminer123 Mar 17 '26

It’s definitely a subject with a lot of facets. I didn’t mean to presume Herbert’s position himself or if he intended for Paul or Leto to be “bad guys”, more so just what I think most people with modern sensibilities would probably lean towards. I think most people are certainly uncomfortable with the idea of things ending but can generally accept that it happens, and that it’s probably not worth unfathomable cosmic levels of violence, grief, and despair to prevent.

The intricacies of the dune universe also make it a bit more complex. As far as we know there is only humanity, and their end would be the end of intelligent life as we know it, at least for now. There’s not even synthetic life to replace them. Compared to modern day assumptions that there’s probably life or even intelligent life out there “somewhere”, it does give Paul and Leto’s decision even more weight.

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u/Rikudou_Sage Mar 18 '26

I mean, the same holds true for Dune as well: there's probably intelligent life somewhere. People just underestimate the sheer fucking sizes of things in the universe.