I’ve read Dune dozens of times. That context matters for this review because it means I’m not evaluating Villeneuve’s films as films alone. I’m evaluating them as interpretations of a text I know down to the level of structure. Some of what I’m going to say will sound harsh to viewers who haven’t read the book. From inside the book, these are the right criticisms.
The short version: Villeneuve made two visually extraordinary films that get many of the big things right and a handful of things badly wrong. The cinematography is in a category by itself. The casting is excellent across the board.
The world feels correct in ways that matter. But two specific creative decisions, what Villeneuve did to Chani and what he did to Alia, come close to undermining everything the films achieve. And the ending of Part 2 nearly finishes the job.
The ratings need two numbers each, because these films do something to me that almost nothing else does: they fall apart on the second viewing.
Part One is a 9.5 the first time. It’s setup, as the book is setup, and the half point comes off for Hans Zimmer’s score, which I can’t stand. Watch it again and it’s a 4. I can’t sit through it.
Part Two is the better film. It’s a 10 on first watch: more action, more payoff, more of what the story is about. On a second viewing it’s a 7. The score wears through, the film turns sing-songy and preachy, and the weight that felt deserved the first time starts feeling like it’s being pressed down on me.
What Villeneuve Got Right
The world of Arrakis looks exactly as it should. The scale is correct: the desert is vast, the sandworms are terrifying, the spice operations feel industrial instead of theatrical. Production designer Patrice Vermette and cinematographer Greig Fraser built a visual language for each faction, the brutal geometry of Harkonnen design, the sand-adapted pragmatism of Fremen culture, the bureaucratic weight of Imperial presence, that communicates character and politics without a word of dialogue. This is world building through camera and production design instead of exposition, and it’s done at the highest level.
The casting is uniformly strong. Timothée Chalamet handles Paul’s internal conflict without tipping into either heroism or self-pity. Oscar Isaac’s Leto is brief but completely convincing as a man who knows the trap he’s walking into and walks anyway. Josh Brolin’s Gurney Halleck is exactly right. Rebecca Ferguson’s Jessica is the most complex performance in the films, handling a character whose loyalty is always divided between her son, her Duke, and the Bene Gesserit sisterhood. Stellan Skarsgård as the Baron is one of the more convincing physical presences in recent genre cinema.
Villeneuve also made several changes from the book that improve the adaptation. Duke Leto’s death scene, giving him a small victory against the Baron before he dies, changes the emotional tone from futile tragedy to meaningful sacrifice. The book version, where the Baron escapes unharmed, is more honest about how power works but less satisfying dramatically, and Villeneuve made the right call for the screen. Liet-Kynes dying by summoning a sandworm instead of quietly expiring in the desert is a better death scene in every cinematic sense.
Leto’s last strike at the Baron is my favorite change in either film. The book’s version is truer to how power works, and I still wouldn’t trade Isaac’s final act of defiance for it. Kynes calling down the worm is the same kind of call, and those two scenes tell me Villeneuve read Herbert closely before he started changing him. These are the changes you make when you understand both the source material and the medium you’re translating it to.
Faithful adaptation doesn’t mean transcription. It means understanding what the source material is doing and finding the equivalent that works in the new medium.
The Soundtrack Problem
Hans Zimmer’s score is widely praised and I’m in the minority on this. I hated it.
Dune is a story about empire, prophecy, and civilizational stakes.
The soundtrack treats every scene as though it’s happening inside someone’s skull during a fever dream. The choral processing, the percussion that sounds like it’s being recorded in a cave, the deliberate rejection of anything resembling a melodic line: it creates atmosphere at the cost of clarity. There are moments where the score competes with the dialogue and wins, the wrong outcome.
This connects to the film’s broader whispering problem. Dune whispers. Lynch did it, the Syfy version did it, every adaptation has done it, but Villeneuve takes it furthest. There are scenes where I rewound to catch what a character said. Dramatic intensity and audible dialogue aren’t mutually exclusive. Characters can speak at normal volume while facing civilizational stakes. The whispering is an aesthetic choice being made at the expense of comprehension.
The Timeline Problem
The book’s two-year time jump is one of Herbert’s most important structural decisions.
Paul and Jessica don’t become Fremen in weeks. They spend years learning, fighting, training, and earning their place. By the time Paul rides his first sandworm, years of accumulated capability make the achievement believable. By the time he challenges for leadership, the Fremen accept him because he’s become one of them over time.
Villeneuve compresses this into what feels like weeks. Paul goes from outsider to sandworm rider to war leader in a continuous timeline with no significant gap. The film maintains momentum and avoids the narrative interruption a time jump creates, but it breaks the internal logic of the transformation it’s depicting. The audience is asked to believe that Paul’s development, physically, culturally, spiritually, happened at an impossible pace.
For a viewer who hasn’t read the book, it might pass. For anyone who knows the source material, it’s a recurring distraction.
The compression also eliminates Alia, and one bad decision cascades into another. Because there’s no time jump, Jessica can’t give birth, so Alia exists only as a fetus communicating through her mother’s womb.
What They Did to Chani
In Herbert’s novel, Chani is Paul’s equal and his partner. She supports his prophetic role not from blind faith but from her own assessment of who he is and what he’s capable of.
She’s fierce, capable, and fully embedded in Fremen culture. Her belief in Paul is active instead of passive, she chooses him because she understands what’s at stake, not because the Bene Gesserit conditioned her to.
Skepticism defines Villeneuve’s Chani. Zendaya’s version spends both films as the voice of doubt about Paul’s messianic role, pushing back against the prophecy, pulling away as Paul embraces his destiny. The intent is understandable: Villeneuve wants a character who represents the rational position in a story about manufactured religion and its dangers. Chani becomes the audience surrogate for skepticism.
The problem is execution. A character whose primary function is to resist the story’s momentum for two films becomes reactive instead of active.
Chani in the novel does things. Chani in the films mostly responds to what Paul does, and usually negatively. The result is a character who reads as petulant instead of principled, because her resistance is constant without evolving.
She ends Part 2 riding off into the desert alone, rejecting Paul’s choice, a dramatically clean ending that contradicts everything the character is in the source material and sets up a Part 3 that will have to rebuild a relationship the films just dismantled.
None of that is Zendaya’s fault. She plays what the script hands her, and she plays it well. My quarrel is with the writing, because by the time Chani objects to the prophecy yet again I’ve stopped listening to her, and Herbert’s Chani is someone I’d never tune out.
The Alia Problem, The Worst Change
Removing Alia from Part 2 is the most damaging single decision in either film.
In the novel, Alia is born during the time jump after Jessica ingests the Water of Life while pregnant. The result is a child born with the full consciousness of a Reverend Mother: an ancient mind in a toddler’s body, capable of manipulation, violence, and political calculation that terrify even the Bene Gesserit who created the conditions for her existence. She’s what the breeding program produces when it works, and she’s unsettling.
Her role in the climax is key. She kills the Baron Harkonnen. Not Paul. Not a warrior. A toddler who’s the Baron’s own granddaughter, product of the genetic manipulation he thought he was exploiting, destroying him with a gom jabbar. It’s the novel’s most concentrated moment of thematic payoff: the great houses played with forces they didn’t understand and those forces killed them from inside their own bloodlines.
The Alia problem is more damning than it first appears, because Alia doesn’t require a time jump to exist. She exists as a conscious being before birth. In Herbert’s novel, Jessica undergoes the spice agony while pregnant, and the experience gives Alia full Bene Gesserit awareness in the womb.
She’s already a Reverend Mother before she’s born. Villeneuve used this: fetal Alia communicates through Jessica in both films. The mechanism was there on screen, and he chose not to develop it into the character Herbert wrote.
That makes the omission a deliberate creative decision instead of a structural necessity. Villeneuve didn’t cut Alia because he couldn’t figure out how to include her.
He cut her because he chose to. Which means Paul killing the Baron instead of Alia is a choice to discard the novel’s most concentrated moment of thematic payoff in favor of a more conventional protagonist victory.
The challenge of portraying a hyper-intelligent toddler convincingly in live action is real. The Syfy version managed it. Villeneuve had the mechanism already in place and walked away from it anyway. The gap is self-inflicted.
This is the change that makes me angriest. A toddler killing the Baron with a gom jabbar is the scene I’d have built all of Part Two around, and Villeneuve had every piece he needed already on screen. Handing that kill to Paul turns the novel’s best payoff into the kind of hero’s victory I can get from any action film.
Alia killing the Baron isn’t just a plot point. It’s the thesis of the entire novel made physical. Remove it and the story loses its spine.
The Ending That Damaged Part 2
The final sequence of Part 2 has Fremen boarding spaceships to begin an immediate galactic conquest. This is wrong in multiple ways at once.
Desert people who have spent their lives fighting for water and survival don’t spontaneously acquire the ability to pilot and maintain spacecraft. The logistics of interstellar war, navigation, supply chains, communication across light-years, aren’t skills that transfer from sandworm riding. The Fremen in Herbert’s novel do eventually conquer the empire, but over years, with infrastructure built through the Spacing Guild. That controlled all interstellar travel and had to be negotiated with instead of simply bypassed.
The mechanism of how that conquest happens is the point of Dune Messiah and the books that follow.
Villeneuve’s ending skips the mechanism and shows the result, immediately, in the final minutes. It converts what Herbert wrote as a warning, the Jihad Paul unleashes is the horror, not the triumph, into something that looks like a victory montage. The Fremen sailing into the stars on spaceships they presumably found somewhere is a shortcut that misreads what the story is saying.
A viewer who hasn’t read the book might find it stirring. A viewer who has spent time with Herbert’s vision of what Paul’s victory costs knows they just watched the ending get away from the filmmaker entirely.
The Cinematography That Stands Apart
Greig Fraser’s work in both films deserves separate acknowledgment because it works at a level that transcends the craft failures elsewhere. The sandworm sequences are among the most visually convincing creature effects in the history of the genre. The Harkonnen sequences, shot in monochrome for Geidi Prime, all brutal angles and negative space, create an aesthetic for that culture that communicates everything about them before a single character opens their mouth. The desert photography gives Arrakis real scale, which almost no prior adaptation achieved.
Cinematography this good can save films that don’t fully deserve it.
Part of why the Chani and Alia problems don’t sink the movies entirely is that Villeneuve’s visual storytelling makes up for so much. A story choice can frustrate you and yet the image surrounding it can arrest you. The films justify the theatrical experience even when they don’t justify their narrative decisions.
Against the Lynch Version
David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation is the worst of the three major versions and it’s not close.
Lynch imposed his own visual and psychological obsessions on material that didn’t need them and couldn’t support them. The weirding modules replacing the Voice is the most famous error but not the only one. The internal monologue delivered as voiceover throughout communicates character psychology in the most on-the-nose way imaginable, and Lynch’s aesthetic sensibility, which serves him brilliantly in his original work, fights Herbert’s material instead of illuminating it.
The Syfy Channel’s three-part miniseries is slow and cheap but it’s the most faithful adaptation. It keeps the timeline, keeps Alia, keeps Thufir Hawat’s capture, keeps the political machinery that explains why everything is happening. The production values are what they are. The storytelling choices are almost uniformly correct. For anyone who wants to see the book on screen instead of a filmmaker’s interpretation of it, the Syfy version is the answer.
Villeneuve’s films sit between them. Better than Lynch on almost every dimension. Less faithful than Syfy. More visually impressive than both combined.
Is Dune Parts 1 & 2 worth watching?
Part One is a 9.5 the first time through and a 4 on any viewing after that.
Part Two is a 10 first and a 7 after. The cinematography is in a class by itself and would rate higher than anything else in either film. The casting is excellent. The world building is largely correct. Several specific changes from the book improve the adaptation.
But the Chani transformation reduces a strong character to a reactive one.
The Alia omission removes the thematic spine of the novel’s climax and forces a lesser substitution in its place. The timeline compression undermines the believability of Paul’s transformation. The ending of Part 2 mistakes image for mechanism and leaves the story in a place Herbert never intended it to reach this quickly.
These are structural decisions that change what the story means. A viewer who hasn’t read the book won’t feel all of them. A viewer who has will spend both films watching the films negotiate around the holes where the best parts of the novel used to be.
I’d still send anyone to see these films, and my numbers stand: a 9.5 and a 10 the first time through, a 4 and a 7 after. Fraser’s cinematography wins every point of those first scores.
The drop comes from Zimmer’s droning, from Chani and Alia, and from that spaceship ending, and each of them gets louder on a second viewing. See them once on the biggest screen you can find, then go read the book.
For a deeper breakdown of every significant change Villeneuve made from Herbert’s novel and whether each one works, see the full analysis at The Writing King.
