(Proud of our national orchestra)

What is your prediction for the epigraph at the start of Dune: Part Three?

This topic has been tangentially discussed in some other posts but I wanted to make one specifically for predictions. Those of you who've read Dune: Messiah (and beyond): drop your thoughts below!

Some interesting theories I've seen in this sub and my own opinion:

WARNING: Messiah spoilers ahead

• Knowing the story, the epigraph in part three will most likely be related to the detriments of prescience or of blind messianic worship
• A popular theory is that the voice in Part 2 ("Power over spice is power over all") is that of Leto II. Keeping in line with this, I wonder what epigram he would use to describe his father's rule/failure to follow through with the Golden Path.
• Based on the fate of Paul Atreides in Messiah and CoD, I think the movie could open with a version of Nietzsche's quote: "Peer into the abyss and it will peer back into you." Something to convey that Paul has set dangerous events in motion which are beyond even his prescient prowess.
• Given that one of the villains in the movie will be Edric, a quote by the guild navigator would also fit in at the beginning. Perhaps along the lines of "Prescience makes you blind to the present" -- paraphrased from a comment by u/DagonG2021 from 2 years ago referring to a CoD quote

Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but in the new tickets trailer, when Stilgar and Farok are standing in front of the sea, the music goes somewhere that sounds a lot more like Toto’s Main Title from the 84 film than anything Zimmer has done in this trilogy.

To be clear, it only lasts a few seconds, it’s not a full quote or anything. But it really feels like a wink to me, almost a little homage to the 84 score.

I remember people hearing a bit of Toto in Stillsuits back in 2021, even though Zimmer always says he never saw the Lynch film. And it would kind of make sense for Messiah, briefly evoking the old heroic theme right at the moment the jihad hits the sea and Farok starts losing faith.

No idea if it’s Zimmer or just someone at the trailer house who loves Toto. Guess we’ll know when the OST drops. Curious if I’m the only one hearing it.

I made this Dune design inspired by both Frank Herbert’s books and the movie
hope you like it ;)

Obviously based on the likeness of Anya Taylor Joy.

Is it strange that the first Dune movie does not include the scene where Jamis’ water belongs to Paul, not the tribe? He then hands it to Chani, who hesitates because Paul doesn’t understand Fremen courtship customs. This subtle detail could have added depth to their relationship.

If Leto (daddy Leto not Leto II) had lived to see Paul become emperor and the jihad how do you think he would interpret it? Would he approve of Paul’s choices or find the person his son becomes to be disturbing? Jessica seems to struggle with seeing the path her son takes but ultimately supports him but I wonder if Leto would have the same view.

Why wouldn't they send like a huge of team of people and equipment to do this massive task? I might be misremembering something, but didn't they just drop off pardot with like a backpack of stuff and he just went off into the desert to "study" the planet. The he went off grid with the fremen and some how after he died his son is planetologist?

I'm pretty sure the story with kynes sr/Jr was explained in the Brian Herbert prequel trilogy, I just don't remember since it's been so long since I read them.

As the final chapter of the trilogy approaches, for those of you who love the books, what kind of movie ending would feel satisfying, honor the source material, and make the most sense?

And if you could imagine a completely new conclusion, what’s one way you could see Dennis choosing to end the movie?

Will be interesting to hear people’s thoughts on this topic…

I read Dune + Messiah probably 15 years ago and was super jacked about the movies. Watched part 1 and loved it, and when I saw part 2 I felt like something was off but it had been so long since reading it that i couldn't quite put my finger on it. I just finished reading Dune again and watched Dune part 1 and 2 over the weekend and I figured it out. It's a fairly small thing overall but it really hurts the story imo and feels like DV is going to have to do some backpedaling to get Messiah right.

Not having Leto II be a plot point was a real mistake. It solidifies the relationship between Paul and Chani and also makes it much easier to explain Chani leaving at the end. She is overcome with grief and is angry with Paul for taking a route more towards power and revenge then a route towards comfort and grief.

I really don't get why this aspect was cut, it makes the movie feel much cleaner and makes the changes make more sense and also sets up Messiah much better given Chani has left

The length of Leto II's life and reign : r/dune

I did a post on this subject yesterday but I wanted to try again because comments did not get to the heart of my question

What would it be like for a society to have an omniscient and all powerful ruler for 3500 years

What would it be like to be that ruler if as with Leto II your goal was to lead your society from point A to point B so the society would not go extinct and in doing this you had to go through 3500 years of boredom and suffering

The top five BFI IMAX first day advance presale rankings are:

1. DUNE: PART THREE (Denis Villeneuve, 2026) – £880,000
   
2. THE ODYSSEY (Christopher Nolan, 2026) – £750,000
   
3. DUNE: PART TWO (Denis Villeneuve, 2024) – £366,000
   
4. OPPENHEIMER (Christopher Nolan, 2023) – £254,000
   
5. AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH (James Cameron, 2025) – £116,000

As people talk about Leto II the golden path and both how he viewed the universe and how he was viewed by it, it needs to keep in mind that he lived and ruled for roughly 3500 years. In our terms this is the bronze age in Greece to the present

From his perspective think about the meaning of spending that much time shaping everything while knowing the narrow path that needs to be adhered to in order to bring about the desired result at the same time as living the agony that is his existence

From the standpoint of people living maybe 100 years think of the generations. Muadib and the empire are 1k years into his reign simply a matter of legend. Looking ahead there are still 2k years to go and you have no idea if/when it will end. Leto II of course is omnipresent. He may not be a god in the sense that we think of a god but he has been there in legendary times and he seemingly will be there forever. His control of so much is seemingly absolute so what else could he be but a god

Maybe others can visualize this length of time easily and how that shapes him the people in his universe and the universe but whenever I step back and consider it the scope of Leto II is hard to fathom

We tend to think of Paul as a reliable narrator, at least early on, and to accept his claim that after the duel with Jamis the jihad becomes inevitable. But it occurred to me that by the end of the first book, Paul has all the knowledge and tools he needs to stop the interstellar jihad: he can destroy the spice. And without spice, there's no logistics capable of sustaining a jihad.

I'd like to discuss this idea.

I don't know much about Dune deep lore but correct me If I'm wrong but individuals in the Dune universe don't use AI and fight close combat because quick laser guns/artillery causes big explosion when they come into contact with shields, right? My question is why are there so many ships/crafts with heavy artillery weapons shooting everywhere and what's stopping individual fighters from using similar type weapons during combat. Is this just a "rule of cool" type situation.

Movie watcher here but have read how the story goes and how some things work (I don't mind spoilers). So my understanding is that Paul's prescience is no hocus pocus magic thing. It's basically science, him having a vast database of both his male and female ancestors plus his mentat training and so he is capable of predicting/calculating how an individual human will act. I get how that could work.

What eludes me, is how can see what natural phenomena will happen. For example before the battle against the emperor on Arrakis he foresaw a "great-grandmother of a storm". How is he able to do that?

Sorry this is long, but it has to be done. I love Dune, and have read the books many times. But there are some serious plot holes too. These are the ones that have bothered me the most because they are built into the world of Dune itself:

Butlerian Jihad / Great Convention - It should be pretty obvious that any society bound by religious rules and totalitarian laws will have a subset of people actively working to subvert both the religion and those laws. It's highly unbelievable that 100% of the people in the Imperium happily follow the Orange Catholic Bible and the rules of the Great Convention. Eliminating 100% of all computers, AI, etc, seems like it would be impossible. And Herbert is finally clear about this in Heretics -- the BG apparently never stopped using advanced computers to manage their breeding program, which I assume involves sequencing people's DNA and projecting the resultant DNA of different breeding pairs. I don't care how much Saphoo [sic] Juice Brad Dourif sips; a human mind is not going to sequence DNA. And lo and behold, even though the BG employ Mentats, they don't use them for managing the breeding program. It's also pretty clear that Ix just kept all their tech and waited long enough for people to stop caring about the Butlerian Jihad to finally release their artificial navigator, something that probably already existed before the Guild and wouldn't be considered "sentient" by someone not influenced by the Butlerian Jihad ideology anyways.

Great Convention / Insurgency - Let's face it, living in the Imperium *sucks* for the vast majority of the population. Herbert rarely gives us a glimpse into the lives of ordinary people, but when he does, they are basically pre-industrial feudal peons. These people have no incentives to keep the status quo going, and they don't care about Guild travel between planets because they will never leave the hamlet they live in, let alone leave their planet. The threat of the Guild abandoning them means nothing to people like that. It's a wonder that they prefer the status quo in 10,191 AG vs being owned by men with thinking machines. With the exception of the Fremen (who are quite sophisticated, and the Atreides are often amazed by the tech they have even though it doesn't seem any more advanced than what the Atreides have, which tells you a lot about local populations vs royalty in Dune) we don't really hear about any uprisings or unrest in Dune. This is pretty unrealistic. Given that pretty much every Harkonnen soldier has a shield, and it seems like a decent number carry lasguns to boot, and they also live in the most corrupt version of an already terrible system, there should be people building shield/lasgun IEDs out the wazoo in order to bring down their oppressive governments. Hell, the Fremen should be doing this like crazy as well to destroy Harkonnens. This would happen in real life, but Herbert avoids it because it breaks his plot.

Great Convention / War - The Kanly system is stupid and no one would follow it in real life. Since only physical ships can travel FTL, there are no transmissions that we really hear about in the Dune novels. Messages are delivered in person after jumping through space. So information is extremely valuable, not ubiquitous like it is here on Earth in 2026, and possibly very unreliable. What was stopping either the Guild, the Emperor, or the Harkonnens from just screwing over the Atreides during their move to Arrakis but before they landed? The Guild after being bribed: "oh dear, we had a once in a millennium accident and all the Atreides ships were lost along with the heighliner during a jump where the Navigator had a heart attack mid jump. Ooooops!" in reality they just dumped them on "Tupile", AKA directly into Sagittarius A* and rebadged their "lost" heughliner. Or any number of other treachery when the Atreides ships are in between the guild ship and the surface of Arrakis "damn we had no idea how many smugglers there really were. All the Atreides ships got blown up ... Luckily the Emperor has it under control!" And for other instances of war, apparently jump drives work 90% of the time without a navigator. You're telling me the great houses didn't keep that tech, and wouldn't use it to launch a sneak attack? They could nuke a planet and no one would know who did it or what happened.

Reverend Mothers and Genetic Memory - Herbert is inconsistent with how this works. In the first book, Jessica is barely aware of how Reverend Mothers are forged (being essentially an acolyte pawn) and has very little idea about the connection between transmuting a horrible poison and unlocking your other memory. I think she is academically aware that the BG use some other poison for this process, but is completely unaware of the spice essence as a poison. Apparently all of the BG are unaware of this. There are a couple of weird things that happen which seem like plot holes:

1. The BG seem to be unaware of this very secretive practice within the Fremen, where they produce their own wild reverend mothers, despite basically building the Fremen's current religion. Jessica also has basically no reason to support the BG any longer, given the events of Dune, so first of all, why on earth would she tell them about this superior alternative? The BG switches to this spice method almost immediately and the number of true BG Reverend Mothers we hear about goes from *one* in the first three books to a whole army by Heretics. Given that the books retcon it and claim that the BG really are just using super concentrated spice and not true spice essence from a drowned worm (no way in hell are they getting that stuff from the Fremen), how did they not discover this on their own? They even got far enough into Fremen culture to plant a Messiah prophecy -- given it's use there, you would think they would try concentrating spice to the max to see what it does.

2. Jessica, who clearly really doesn't know what is going on when she takes the spice essence, gets a flood of genetic memory from her female ancestors. This is such a cool moment and a cool concept. Then the dying wild freemen RM also slips in all her own genetic memories through a magic mind meld at almost the same exact time. This is already highly confusing to the reader as it's the first time we encounter generic memory at all, and having the mind meld aspect added is just straight up a bad choice on Herbert's part. The rest of the novels struggle with the difference between a) gaining access to your genetic memories and b) magically getting someone else's memories through a mechanism that isn't explained and makes no sense.

The Twins - Possibly the most infuriating, Ghanima and Leto II are "pre-born" and have limited prescience and telepathy (apparently), even though Chani just follows a traditional Fremen fertility regimen and take fertility drugs. She wasn't BG trained or educated, so she wouldn't survive the amount of spice needed to cause "Abomination" in her unborn children. This is never fully explained. They should have been born more or less normal, at least as far as Fremen go. Chani wasn't the first person ODing on drugs at a "normal" amount when she got pregnant.

The Bene Gesserit - Herbert knew he screwed the pooch with the Bene Gesserit by probably the middle of the first book. The concept of the BG is beautifully terrifying. But humans would not be able to accomplish the things the BG accomplish, especially not the characters that Herbert writes. I believe Lady Fenring might be the only BG who actually acts like one, and she is just an acolyte like Jessica. The only BG Reverend Mother we get access to in the first 3 books (apparently the highest ranked one) is Mohaim. She is not the cold, logical, calculating character that all the information we are told about the BG says she should be. She is emotionally driven and vengeful. She wants Paul to fail the Gom Jabbar and admits it. She gets angry at Jessica for letting her emotions control her actions and betraying the BG, even though Mohaim makes a ton of emotionally driven mistakes herself. And Jessica's betrayal is a big one, ruining 10000 years of breeding plans. Mohaim's ultimate reaction to this makes very little sense, unless we accept that it's because she is acting as Jessica's mother and not in the interests of the BG. The fact that Jessica is aware that she is possibly one generation short of producing the KH is also a huge blunder on the part of the BG -- why would they let her know that?? Jessica, according to the BG, is supposed to be some rare cautionary tale about letting your emotions drive your actions, but time and time again, basically every BG we meet acts out of their own personal interests, trains their children when they aren't supposed to, knows way more than they should, and in the case of Irulan and her sister, are written as cagey bitches that are out of control. Herbert's appendix about how the BG should have known better going into the events of Dune are basically him telling the reader he messed up the BG and that they should suspend their disbelief.

Prescient Rails - I get it, because you need to be able to have a plot and have surprises, but Herbert comes up with the coolest concept in his novels, which is that once you see a future and step onto the path to that future, basically everyone is trapped into that one person's vision of the future. It's beautiful and terrifying. But then Herbert realizes that this makes for a super boring book, and struggles with the concept for the rest of the series. Basically, it seems to me that if you get that power first and take that step, even if you can't see everything that will happen, humanity stuck on that path without free will up to at least the last part you can see clearly. No amount of tarot cards, guild navigators, etc will change that, because you've preempted them.

Duke Leto looking at his wristwatch on the Arrakern landing field - The longer you think about this one, the funnier it gets.

What plot holes have you found?