Narrative Mirroring in Denis Villeneuve's Dune (2021) & Dune: Part Two (2024)

The final words spoken in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part One are Zendaya’s Chani telling Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atreides, “This is only the beginning.” It was a promise for what was to come: Chani is promising Paul that their fight will continue; the movie is promising the audience that there is more to this story, more action and spectacle. Remember, Part Two was not guaranteed when the original movie premiered in 2021. Thus, this final line of dialogue is as much an invocation of Paul and Chani’s larger story as it is a tease for the audience, attempting to manifest the sequel that Villeneuve so clearly wanted to make, and make on his own terms.

Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two satisfies this line’s promise, but it does not end the story that began in Part One. It is more a continuation than a climax, although it does culminate in the sort of spectacle and emotion that the first film (by virtue of being only half the story and heavy on introductions and exposition) lacked in its final moments. Part Two is a triumphant sequel, but more importantly, it’s a savvy adaptation of Frank Herbert’s book that fundamentally understands the complexities of its central character and the effects that his odyssey of revenge against the Harkonnens wreaks upon the galaxy and his own soul.

I’ve made it no secret that I adore Frank Herbert’s Dune and Villeneuve’s first film adaptation. Part One is my most watched movie of the past decade and about as good a film adaptation of the novel as I had hoped to get. If Herbert’s opus is science-fiction literature’s answer to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, then Villeneuve’s Dune movies are cinema’s answer to Peter Jackson’s trilogy from the early 2000s. They aren’t perfect because no cinematic adaptation of a novel can be perfect, but they get the spirit right and provide heights of cinematic spectacle and emotion in their own right. Like Jackson’s trilogy, but especially The Return of the King, Dune: Part Two pays off the promise of its predecessor and proves to be one of contemporary cinema’s most spectacular epics.

Core to the success of Dune: Part Two is how it pays off the threads of the first film with precision and scale, while also posing new questions to be answered in the inevitable sequel, Dune: Messiah. (Remember that Villeneueve split Herbert’s first Dune novel in two for his cinematic adaptations and that Herbert’s first sequel, Dune: Messiah, will likely be adapted into the third film in Villeneuve’s trilogy.) Part Two is a movie that is intimately in conversation with the first film, revisiting and reframing elements to deepen our understanding of the characters and the world.

Cousins: Paul Atreides and Feyd Rautha Harkonnen

In Dune: Part Two, Villeneuve’s entire handling of Austin Butler’s Feyd Rautha Harkonnen, the doppelganger to our hero, Paul, exemplifies the film’s reflexive approach to Part One. Feyd’s journey in Part Two is a deliberate mirror of Paul’s in the first film. Like Paul, he is first introduced on the precipice of major festivities. In Part One, we meet Paul on the morning of the day that his family is being given charge of Arrakis. At breakfast, he asks his mother, the Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), whether he has to don his ceremonial clothes and play the part of the young lord. Jessica reminds him that he must do his duty and live up to his promise. The implicit statement is that Paul must live up to the promise of not only being the son of a duke, but also up to his genetic planning, as he has been bred by the Bene Gesserit as a potential Kwisatz Haderach, the sought-after ultimate being capable of bending space and time and leading the Imperium to an era of permanent peace.

Feyd is another potential Kwisatz Haderach. In Dune: Part Two, we meet Feyd preparing for gladiatorial combat on his birthday, donning another kind of ceremonial garb to play into the pomp and circumstance of his household—albeit of a far more barbaric kind than that of House Atreides. Feyd fights three Atreides captives in a massive colosseum for the amusement of his subjects. It’s meant to be a secure spectacle, with the victims drugged in advance, but his monstrous uncle, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård), has other plans. The Baron refrains from drugging one of the captives so that he proves a real and deadly match to Feyd. Feyd realizes the challenge mid-combat and rises to it, even removing his protective energy shield to fight the captive to the death. After he wins, his uncle tells him why he sprung the trap on him in the first place: “This morning you were a playboy, but now you’re a hero. My gift to you.” Like Paul, Feyd is also being shaped and groomed for a particular fate.

Both Paul and Feyd are boys when we meet them and they grow to become men before our eyes, formed by combat and the machinations of their family members and the powers they represent. In the extended sequence on the Harkonnen homeworld of Giedi Prime that follows the colosseum combat, we see Feyd go through the tests that Paul did in the first film. We see him place his hand in the gom jabbar at the behest of a Bene Gesserit. We see him become a pawn in the plots of the Imperium and the Great Houses.

Feyd is a demonic doppelganger to Paul, physically and narratively. Like Paul, he’s something of a pretty boy (Austin Butler and Timothée Chalamet are two contemporary heartthrobs), but his pale skin, black teeth, and baldness make him seem a monstrous counter to Paul’s sun-kissed skin and thick locks of chestnut hair. The narrative paralleling between Feyd and Paul is also a means of demonstrating the larger plot of the great powers without resorting to exposition. It’s a savvy way to invest us in the main antagonist while teaching us about this world and all the backroom deals and generations-long plots that affect these people. Feyd, like Paul, is free only to a point. He is evil but he is also human, and he is as much a tool of others as an agent of his destiny.

Villeneuve’s investment in developing all these parallels between Feyd and Paul—parallels which go far beyond Herbert’s—also fuels the tension in their final fight. We understand that their confrontation is inevitable as they are binary characters fulfilling the same function within the universe. Only one may become the Kwisatz Haderach and the Emperor, so only one may survive the film. Thus, their duel becomes the film’s true climax, even if it follows the larger-scale spectacle of the Fremen assault on Arakeen and the destruction of the Emperor’s Sardaukar forces. For such a big film, the deliberate mirroring between Feyd and Paul imbues this intimate final fight with massive stakes, not only for the characters but for the universe.

Lovers: Leto and Jessica, Paul and Chani

The other key parallel between Dune: Part One and Dune: Part Two is the handling of each film’s primary romantic relationship. In Part One, Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac) and Lady Jessica share a deep love and affection, but even so they have a relationship that is constantly haunted by the things that separate them: that Jessica serves the interests of the Bene Gesserit above all else, while Leto is beholden to his ducal duty as head of House Atreides above all else. They give themselves to each other, but cannot give the entirety of themselves, which is exemplified by how they never marry. Jessica remains his concubine.

The fraught aspects of their relationship are best demonstrated in arguably the key moment between Leto and Jessica in the first film: a brief argument before Leto’s death. After Paul has a spice-fuelled episode on the desert sands of Arrakis, Leto confronts Jessica:

Leto: If anything happens, will you protect our son?

Jessica: With my life.

Leto: I'm not asking his mother. I'm asking the Bene Gesserit.

On the eve of his death, Leto understands that his wife is a part of a greater project than he is and beholden to more authority than even his own.

In Dune: Part Two, a similar dynamic exists between Paul and Chani, his Fremen lover. Even as they are drawn together, the weight of Paul’s destiny hangs between them, keeping them from fully giving themselves to each other. In the key scene between the two of them in Part Two, with Paul ready to go South and undergo the physical trial to become the Kwisatz Hadearch, he confesses to Chani: “If I go South, I might lose you.” She responds: “You will never lose me, Paul Atreides…. Not as long as you stay who you are.” It’s a comfort, but also a warning, and an acknowledgement that, like Leto before her, she will never possess the fullness of the one she loves and is constantly afraid of what he might become. One reason for this is that both Jessica and her son Paul are bound up in the thousand-year machinations of the Bene Gesserit.

The doomed romance parallel fuels our investment in Paul and Chani’s relationship and is a large part of the reason that the ending registers so strongly from an emotional point of view for many viewers. It’s no secret that Villeneuve’s handling of Chani differs from Herbert’s in the novel. In the novel, Chani is not passive, but she is far more pliant to Paul’s greater plans and she is much less skeptical of his messianic role.

In the second film, Villeneuve aligns Chani with the audience’s point of view, from which we observe Paul’s transformation from Paul Atreides to Muad’Dib, from boy to man, from hunted duke to triumphant emperor. We become invested in Chani through her romance with Paul, and it’s because of this romantic link between the characters that we are able to so clearly witness the tragedy of Paul’s victory. For to defeat the Harkonnens, he must become one, a creature fuelled by revenge and capable of unleashing genocide across the universe in order to fulfill his destiny. It is even revealed that Paul is in fact the grandson of the Baron Harkonnen, as Jessica was his secret child.

Chani knows the true Paul Atreides; we have seen her with him in his most vulnerable moments. And so in the final moments of the film, when Chani realizes that Paul intends to marry Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh) to secure the Imperial throne, the gasping look on Chani’s face is all we need to know that the old Paul Atreides is gone. The tragedy of Paul’s success is that it comes with so steep a moral cost. And this tragedy is amplified by mirroring the relationship between Leto and Jessica. Paul and Chani are repeating the patterns of their forebears, unable to break the cycle on the road to the Golden Path.

It is redundant to say that Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two succeeds by continuing the narrative throughlines of the first film: it is a direct sequel, after all, the Part Two to Part One. But Villeneuve not only continues the narrative in his sequel. He carefully mirrors and alters key dynamics of the first film to deepen the storyworld and help us intimately understand the emotional stakes of the larger narrative. It’s one key reason why Dune: Part Two registers so strongly and will continue to resonate for years to come. Villeneuve’s triumph is to understand that Part Two can only resonate so loudly because it is amplified by such a vibrant Part One.

Dune (2021, USA)

Directed by Denis Villeneuve; written by Jon Spaihts, Denis Villeneuve, and Eric Roth, based on the novel by Frank Herbert; starring Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Issac, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgård, Dave Bautista, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Zendaya, Chang Chen, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Charlotte Rampling, Jason Momoa, Javier Bardem.

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Dune: Part Two (2024)

Directed by Denis Villeneuve; written Denis Villeneuve and Jon Spaihts, based on the novel by Frank Herbert; starring Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Josh Brolin, Austin Butler, Florence Pugh, Dave Bautista, Christopher Walken, Léa Seydoux, Stellan Skarsgård, Charlotte Rampling, Javier Bardem.

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