Looking forward to Dune: Part Two, but having trouble remembering some character names? Not sure what separates a Kwisatz Haderach from a gom jabbar? We know for a fact that Dune: Part Two is not going to help you out. But we can!
Read on for a succinct recap of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, and you’ll be all ready to go when you hit the theater.
Image: Warner Bros.
The single most important planet in Dune is Arrakis, ruled by the Harkonnen noble House in the empire of Emperor Shaddam Corrino IV (Christopher Walken). Arrakis is a phenomenally inhospitable desert world, whose natives actively resist imperial rule — but it’s also the only source of the spice melange, without which interstellar space travel is impossible.
While the spice flows, the Spacing Guild provides for travel and commerce, the noble houses manage their fiefdoms, the emperor keeps the peace with his fanatical army, and the mysterious yet ubiquitous Bene Gesserit order of mystic women facilitates political alliances and negotiations.
In Dune: Part One, we met Duke Leto of House Atreides (Oscar Isaac) and his concubine, the Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson). Jessica was supposed to use her Bene Gesserit powers to conceive a daughter with Leto, as part of the organization’s secret, 10,000-year plan to eugenically produce a puppet messiah, the Kwisatz Haderach, and seize control of the galaxy. Instead, she and Leto fell in love, and she chose to have a son, Paul (Timothée Chalamet).
The movie’s story begins when Emperor Corrino strips the notoriously difficult job of mining spice on Arrakis from House Harkonnen and gives it to their mortal enemies, House Atreides. This gesture is a cover for the emperor’s real plan, which is to secretly loan out his powerful Sardaukar army to House Harkonnen, so that they can assassinate the Duke and his family and crush House Atreides, taking back Arrakis. Duke Leto has grown so respected among his peers that his popularity has become a threat to the Emperor’s dynasty, but in this way, it will appear as though his line was ended by way of inter-house fighting, rather than by imperial order.
Most of Dune: Part One concerned the Atreides and their retainers, including swordsmen Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa) and Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin), packing up from their rainy, ocean-planet home and moving to Arrakis’ fortress capital, Arrakeen. Once there, they experience Arrakis’ unique environmental hazards (giant, mine machine-eating sandworms, sandstorms, and a general lack of water), and seek alliances with the Fremen natives, notably a tribe leader called Stilgar (Javier Bardem). Paul has always had psychic aptitude, but when he’s exposed to the ambient spice in Arrakis’ atmosphere, he begins having visions of a galactic holy war and a young Fremen woman.
Eventually House Harkonnen’s trap snaps shut and Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård) dispatches his brutish nephew Glossu Rabban (Dave Bautista) to Arrakis with an imperial Sardaukar army. The Atreides are unprepared and their forces are slaughtered. The only characters who appear to survive the massacre are Paul and Jessica, thanks to Duncan Idaho, who sacrifices his life for them.
They escape to the desert and make contact with Stilgar, who agrees to give them his protection after Paul defeats one of his warriors in ritual combat — and because he believes that Paul might be the Mahdi, the Fremen’s long-prophesied messiah (an idea that was planted in their culture centuries ago by the Bene Gesserit in support of their own aims). Stilgar’s niece, Chani (Zendaya), turns out to be the woman from Paul’s visions, and Jessica turns out to be pregnant with the late Leto’s second child.
That’s where 2021’s Dune abruptly ends. In the short term, Paul and Jessica must find their way among the Fremen. But if they can make contact with the wider galaxy, their story — of secret imperial collusion with one noble house to eradicate another — would shatter Corrino’s rule and throw the galaxy into civil war.
But thanks to Paul’s visions, he also knows they’re racing toward a turning point in galactic history. Can Paul forestall the war in his dreams? Is he the Mahdi? Is he the Kwisatz Haderach? Is he just a young man who is in a position to leverage both of those thousand-year legends?
Those are the questions that Dune: Part Two stands to answer.