‘Dune: Part Two’ Made a Major Change to the Books Without Sacrificing Their Power

Thanks to its sweeping narrative, starry solid, and luxurious cinematography, Dune 2 is already attracting 2025 Oscars buzz. Every motion scene is nimbly choreographed and memorably cool. Every actor is at the highest of their game. Every sound serves a purpose, every line a theme. When critics say it’s a “defining” movie of the sci-fi genre, that’s not hyperbole.

That said, Dune 2 might credit a few of its success to its source material: the similarly-titled 1965 novel written by Frank Herbert. Dune 2 is essentially faithful to that seminal sci-fi tome and punctiliously preserves its essence. Still, Dune 2 did make some notable tweaks to the novel within the name of cinematic awesomeness. Some of those tweaks are small: Few Dune purists are offended that the movie invented a Southern fundamentalist sect of Fremen.

But a few of those tweaks are more noticeable. Zendaya’s character, Chani, is way more dynamic in the films than within the novel. Instead of standing idly by as Paul proposes to a princess he met ten minutes ago, she skulks off to the desert and angrily worm-rides her feelings out. 

Paul (Timothée Chalamet) is equally volatile – prickly and moody at first, then fully psychotic by the tip. The portrayal is kind of near Herbert’s vision for the character and (in some ways) a purer distillation of it. And if it is closer to Herbert’s vision, that’s resulting from one major change.

Fans of the Dune books were appropriately disconcerted when Paul, as a substitute of his sister Alia, killed Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård), the Big Baddie of the movie. In fact, Alia was nowhere to be found. Throughout the movie, she whispered to her mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) from the womb; but then she stayed there. She only appeared once, in the shape of Anya Taylor-Joy, in a dream that Paul had.

This was perhaps Dune 2’s largest departure from its parent text. Alia within the novels was an absolute freak – a superb, omniscient, ruthless toddler who code-switched between dribbling milk down her shirt and stabbing her grandfather to death. She could already walk and have interaction in diplomatic relations before she was one. And lest you judge, she inherited the ancestral memory of a complete murdered bloodline on the ripe age of zero years old, so give her a break. 

In any case, Alia was certainly one of Dune’s most indelible characters – a two-and-a-half-foot-tall proto-autocrat or an assassin in Huggies diapers (depending on the way you checked out it). And when she pricked her grandfather, the Baron Harkonnen, with a gom jabbar, or deadly poison needle, it was gaggy.

That doesn’t mean that it wasn’t gaggy to have Paul kill his grandfather as a substitute. In reality, it sped up his character development and set the tone for Dune 2’s inevitable sequel. As readers already know, Paul was at all times destined for anti-hero status; it was written within the cards the moment he recruited that Fremen army. But by having him stab Harkonnen and growl, “You die like an animal,” it turned him right into a vicious, power-hungry egomaniac ahead of Frank Herbert ever did. Well, technically, that transformation became complete when Paul ordered his Fremen army to guide his enemies to “paradise.” But the stabbing strengthened the concept that Paul was down a dark path, underscoring that final line. Further highlighting the importance of that line was the moment when the Emperor (Christopher Walken) told Paul that his dad was a failure because he’d practiced empathy. That’s not the life lesson you give to someone who’s going to prove OK. 

In other words, there was not any query as as to whether Paul was about to turn into a ruthless leader.

Though markedly different from the books, this Alia-less climax remains to be loyal to Frank Herbert’s overall goal. In 1985, the writer said in a speech at UCLA, “I wrote the Dune series because I had this concept.. that charismatic leaders ought to return with a warning label on the brow: ‘May be Dangerous to Your Health.’ Even director Dennis Villeneuve suggested in 2021 that Paul was an anti-hero, saying, “I feel Herbert wrote [Dune] as a warning, [against] leaders that faux to know what’s going to occur, who pretend to know the reality, who is likely to be lacking humility.”

Of course, anyone who has read beyond the primary Dune novel will know that Paul gets more power-hungry as time goes on, bringing his own worst nightmares to life. An ideal anti-hero, in the event you will. But not less than the films aren’t pretending otherwise anymore.