Dune 3 In Trouble It Can’t Avoid

The first book is filled from cover to cover with compelling characters, plenty of action, a great storyline, and enthralling character arcs to keep readers engaged page by page.

The basic elements you need to make a great movie have always been present in the 1965 novel, but you can’t say the same for the rest of Frank Herbert’s Dune installations. 

Though the rest of the books aren’t terrible, they don’t have the same energy and momentum present in the first book, making it more and more challenging to create a film adaptation of the story the further you move down the line of novels. Dune 3 is set to explore the third Herbert novel Dune Messiah. 

The director of the most recent Dune movies, Denis Villeneuve himself has publicly commented on the decline of action as the novels progress.

Villeneuve said that each book becomes more and more “esoteric” as they go, making it more and more difficult to adapt to the big screen. 

Villeneuve has said that he is almost finished writing the script for Dune 3 but the third installation in the series undoubtedly has presented him with challenges along the way. Dune Messiah is by no means a bad book, but it’s rather philosophical and political and filled with discussion. It’s not a dramatic or action-packed story, and it doesn’t make the kind of connection with the first two books that you might expect. 

Dune 3 or Messiah begins with a 12-year leap into the future. It focuses on the life of Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) during his rule as Emperor.

It goes into the ins and outs of his relationship with his wife, Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh), and his side girl, Chani (Zendaya). 

Enough time has passed that Paul’s vision of a violent jihad has already come and gone and now he is faced with a possible coup looking to overthrow him while also working to create an heir. Paul’s mom isn’t even in the book for Dune 3, and the story is void of any noteworthy villains. 

It’s hard to imagine that Villeneuve could adapt Messiah into a screenplay for Dune 3 without changing something, and changing stuff hasn’t been Villeneuve’s motif thus far. Changing aspects of the story to make for a better movie presentation is also a move that will likely alienate some die-hard Dune fans. 

Villeneuve will have to work magic to craft a final cut that will keep viewers from snoozing in the theaters.

He and his co-writers will need a new level of adaptive flexibility and creativity to create a movie that feels more like Return of the King than Godfather Part III. 

Alas, the end of the second Dune movie does drop a subtle hint that there may be a fairly significant deviation from the novels in store for Dune 3.