The Dune: Part Two Ending Cements a Warped Take on ‘The One’

Spoilers ahead for Dune: Part Two.

It is telling—for reasons beyond the dangling-carrot thrill of a cliffhanger—that the final frame of Dune: Part Two is not of Timothée Chalamet’s ascendant spiritual leader Paul Atreides, but of his furious Fremen lover, Chani (Zendaya). The camera clings to Zendaya’s artfully furrowed brow as she stares down the horizon, electric-blue eyes narrowed with focus and dread. She clutches the hooks she’ll sink into the flesh of an approaching sandworm, one she’ll steer across the desert, though we can’t be sure where, exactly, she intends to go. By the end of Denis Villenueve’s monumental sci-fi sequel, Paul has abandoned Chani, no matter the promises of eternal love his actions already contradict. He has embarked on what his mother and sister—the latter still in the womb—proclaim his “holy war.” As she announces this prophetic fulfillment to the audience, the voice of Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) is weighed with terror and awe and the acrid-sweet smack of power. Jessica, her unborn daughter, Chani, and perhaps all the women in this film, recognize exactly what the boy they love has become.

The ending of Dune: Part Two, like Frank Herbert’s landmark 1965 novel, is both a foregone conclusion and a dramatic warping of the Chosen One’s journey. Paul Atreides of the stately House of Atreides has found a haven amongst the Indigenous population of the desert planet Arrakis, a.k.a. Dune, where a portion of the Fremen view him as their long-awaited messiah. Known by the monikers Muad’Dib, Lisan al-Gaib, Mahdi, and Kwisatz Haderach, this figure is forecasted to lead the Fremen and their parched world out of the galactic oppression that’s long ordered their lives, and that has demanded the harvesting of Arrakis’ precious resource, the spaceship fuel known as “spice.” These prophetic legends are borne on the backs of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, a secretive political and religious group whose members manipulate the galaxy’s power structures from the inside. Among them are Lady Jessica and Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh), the former of whom radicalizes the Fremen to believe in Paul’s divinity, while the latter frets over his threat to her father, the Emperor (Christopher Walken).

As Lady Jessica drinks the sandworm bile known as “the Water of Life” to become a Reverend Mother, further entrenching herself in Paul’s supposed mythos, Chani grows increasingly skeptical. She loves Paul, despite his outsider status, but she fears a legend that promises liberation through such an outsider. Paul, for his part, spends much of Villenueve’s film in agreement. He rejects the term “Muad’Dib” even as the Fremen relish it, especially as the spice on Arrakis deepens his prophetic visions, which convince him his ascent to power will ignite a “holy war” and eradicate billions of lives. This premonition fills him with terror. He has no desire to become a specter of death, but neither can he ignore the cruel House Harkonnen’s assault on the Fremen, on House Atreides, and on Arrakis itself.

Desperate for answers, ones that might reveal a path not soaked in blood, Paul seeks fruit from the same tree as his mother: Against Chani’s wishes, he sips the Water of Life, and falls into a coma. Chani’s tears—“desert spring tears,” as the Fremen call them, thanks to a translation of her name—return him to the land of the living, but at the cost of her trust. She had told Paul she’d love him, would stay with him, so long as he remained himself. But this blue-eyed man is no longer Paul. The Water of Life expands his visions to such a degree that he can see “everything,” and in all that everything, he locates only one story in which the Fremen survive. It is the story in which he is Muad’Dib, the Kwisatz Haderach. His rise is now his choice; he will bend to its will, as the Fremen bow to his.

The Fremen rejoice as Paul declares himself the Lisan al-Gaib, mounting an assault on House Harkonnen and the Emperor their colorless warriors protect. But Chani cannot view Paul with the same love as before, let alone with the zealous worship of her brethren. She insists the tale of the Kwisatz Haderach is built upon “lies” meant to “enslave” the Fremen, not liberate them, and she spits at Lady Jessica for gleefully tangling her fingers in the strings of power. Still, both Chani and Jessica understand each other in a way the other characters do not: They know, ultimately, it doesn’t matter if Paul’s legend is manufactured. It only matters if he embraces it himself.

And in the final beats of Dune: Part Two, Paul embraces his crown with none of the paralysis that haunted his earlier maneuvers. His Fremen soldiers attack the Harkonnens, overpowering them and eliminating Stellan Skarsgård’s ghastly Baron Vladimir Harkonnen in pursuit of the Emperor. Paul challenges the Emperor for the throne, announces his intent to wed Princess Irulan, and threatens to bomb Arrakis’ spice fields should the other galactic houses get in the way. The Baron’s nephew, Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler), spars with Paul as the Emperor’s champion, but even he falls to the Lisan al-Gaib’s blade.

Here again, the women process and plot and weave between the lines. Princess Irulan agrees to wed Paul, a strategic move given that it will a) save her father’s life and b) allow a Bene Gesserit the closest possible access to the Mahdi himself. Herself the prime Bene Gesserit, the Reverend Mother Gaius Mohiam (Charlotte Rampling) announces Paul an “abomination,” but has already secured Feyd-Rautha’s bloodline through another Bene Gesserit acolyte, Margot Fenring (Léa Seydoux), should Paul’s fail. Lady Jessica looks upon her son with pride, recognizing the new reality he presents: Beside him, she has secured the highest plane of power available to herself and her daughter. Finally, Chani flinches as Paul claims Irulan’s hand. She understands that his promise to love her alone might remain true, but he will never be hers alone. He is no longer Paul of House Atreides; now, he is Muad’Dib, and he belongs to the prophecy itself.

As the Lisan al-Gaib orders his Fremen warriors to strike the galactic houses orbiting Arrakis, launching the first battle of his holy war, Chani climbs the dunes of her beloved Dune. Only from that vantage point can she see a future, but it’s one Villeneuve doesn’t yet want us to know. (The director plans to adapt Herbert’s sequel, Dune: Messiah, as the third and final entry in his film franchise.) We can’t yet be sure if Chani plans to join Paul, to steer him or to intercept him or forget him entirely. Instead, the scene cuts to black, leaving the audience with the unsettling exhilaration of recognizing—as Chani does—a hero who’s betrayed his heroism, the One who has lost the Way. The question, as with all great Hero’s Journeys, is whether that path can be rediscovered. Or perhaps Chani, atop her sandworm, presents another option: a new path forward through the spice.