Christopher Rhoten
It’s been a rough week for Timothée Chalamet. After a bizarre “controversy” involving alleged disparaging remarks about opera and ballet, the actor not only lost a second straight Best Actor nomination at the 98th Oscars, but his film Marty Supreme also went 0-for-9. The whole thing prompted Jon Stewart to humorously declare on The Daily Show that the terrible war raging for two weeks is now over—“opera and ballet have defeated Timothée Chalamet.”
But it’s all relative. Even if Chalamet is going through a rough patch, it’s been a rough decade for Paul Atreides. The first teaser for the third and seemingly final Dune film is here, and it promises a truly epic conclusion to Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi saga. Chalamet remains one of the biggest stars on the planet thanks to his role in the franchise, and even if “Academy Award winner” had to be scrubbed from the trailer at the last minute, that kind of thing will almost certainly be long forgotten come December.
It’s a fantastic trailer. The dark, foreboding, nearly two-and-a-half teaser is filled with images of war and devastation as Paul’s reign, established at the end of the second film, spreads across the universe. “War feeds on itself,” Paul says. “The more I fight, the more our enemies fight back.” The brutal imagery plays against what sounds like Paul himself chanting passionately, culminating in a wide shot of his massive empire. Alongside returning cast members Chalamet, Zendaya, and Rebecca Ferguson, Dune: Part Three will also bring back Jason Momoa’s Duncan Idaho (who “died” in the first film) and introduce Robert Pattinson as the shape-shifting antagonist Scytale, who visually recalls Sting’s Feyd-Rautha from David Lynch’s Dune.
While the first two films split the original novel, Part Three will primarily draw from Dune: Messiah, Herbert’s first of five sequels. Yes, you read that right—Herbert wrote five sequels to Dune, but the novels are increasingly esoteric and gradually skip forward thousands of years after the story of Paul Atreides. And those are just Herbert’s: his son, Brian, has written more than a dozen additional novels. While that material could always be mined down the line, Villeneuve seems wisely content to close out his take on the story as a trilogy.
I’m a huge fan of these films—I gave Part Two a perfect score—and if you’re even remotely familiar with the books, an adaptation of Messiah won’t pull any punches when it comes to Paul’s descent into something far darker than a traditional hero, and the subsequent efforts to remove him from power. It’ll be especially interesting to see how Zendaya’s Chani is handled, given how significantly her role is reduced in the novels.
There was plenty of skepticism before the first film about whether Villeneuve could condense the dense, famously convoluted lore of Dune into something both accessible and stylish. He did. Then came the question of whether Part Two could deliver on action and spectacle while preserving the story’s political complexity. It did that, too. Now, his trilogy capper looks poised to wrap up one of the strongest sci-fi franchises in recent memory. I say he’s earned more than enough trust to stick the landing, and I couldn’t be more excited.
Dune: Part Three hits theaters December 18.
