Opinion: What ‘Dune: Part Two’ fails to understand about colonialism

Editor’s note: Noah Berlatsky (@nberlat) is a freelance writer in Chicago. The opinions expressed here are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

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“Dune” by Frank Herbert The novels struggled with their debt to colonial adventure literature. The books delight in the splash and the buckle and Powerful little white heroes emerged from the environment of writers as diverse as Edgar Rice Burroughs, James Fenimore Cooper and H. Rider Haggard. But Herbert, writing in 1965, was also in tune with the criticisms of colonialism of his time. His hero, Paul Atreides, is filled with doubts about his role as messianic leader and director of colonial conquest.

The film adaptations of Denis Villeneuve, and especially the most recent ones “Dune: Part Two”, attempts to tap into Herbert’s anti-colonial leanings through subtle and not-so-subtle narration adjustments. Villeneuve goes further than Herbert in questioning the foundations of colonial narratives. Ultimately, however, he is hampered by the same problems that undermined Herbert’s more liberating impulses. It is difficult, and perhaps impossible, to tell an anti-colonial story by focusing on the perspective, heroism, and general genius of a colonial hero.

The first part of “Dune” (released in 2021) introduces us to Paul (Timothée Chalamet), the heir to House Atreides, in a feudal future of space travel and intricate plots. (The distributor of “Dune” and “Dune: Part Two” shares a parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, with CNN.) Paul’s father, Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac), has been granted rule of the desert planet of Arrakis. Arrakis is the only source of melange, a psychedelic spice that provides space pilots with the altered consciousness they need to travel between worlds. It’s as if LSD were oil, or vice versa.

However, Arrakis’s gift is a trap; The Emperor (Christopher Walken) is conspiring with the former ruler of Arrakis, Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård). They attack and destroy House Atreides on Arrakis, killing Leto. Paul and his mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) barely escape into the desert. There they encounter the proud desert-dwelling Fremen, and that’s where “Dune: Part Two” begins.

In the second (very long) film, Paul receives his destined and prophesied inheritance. Like many colonial heroes before him, from Tarzan to Natty Bumppo, Paul, as a colonizer, quickly proves to be better at being Fremen than the Fremen themselves. He is a superior fighter and He knows the paths of the desert through prophetic dreams. When he rides the gigantic (phallic) worms of the desert, he rides the largest of them all. The Fremen are presented as fierce, intelligent and amazing, but all His amazement is absorbed by Paul, who seizes his power and becomes even stronger. This is how colonialism (and colonial literature) works.

Herbert attempted to undermine or challenge these colonial tropes by making Paul himself feel very, very guilty. With his gift of prophecy, Paul was able to see that he was destined to lead the Fremen in a jihad of conquest (changed to “holy war” in the film to try to tone down the Islamophobic connotations). He doesn’t want to be a genocidal conqueror; he does not want to subvert Fremen culture for his own purposes.

That the colonial ruler is gloomy is not really much of an anti-colonial criticism. Villeneuve is smart enough to realize that. So, in the film, it’s not just Paul who sees problems with the colonial power of him. His Fremen lover, Chani (Zendaya), is also ambivalent.

In the book, Chani primarily supports Paul, with few reservations. In the film, by contrast, she resolutely refuses to believe in Paul’s prophetic destiny. She insists that the myth of the coming of the Messiah is a trick of the colonizers intended to make the colonized wait indefinitely for freedom. She wants Paul to join her as an equal, rather than rule the Fremen.

Giving one of the colonized the opportunity to express anti-colonial sentiments is an important change. But it doesn’t exactly result in an anti-colonial narrative. Paul’s destiny is more powerful than Chani’s, and that destiny is the film’s very narrative. Most viewers will want Paul to take revenge on the supervillain-like Harkonnens; You are rooting throughout the movie for Paul to win.

Chani is arguing, not with Paul or other Fremen, but with the plot itself and all its action-revenge movie narrative pleasures. The movie, the audience, and even the characters know that the story is Paul’s. Whether Chani is right or wrong matters less than whether Paul’s story fits into the inevitable rhythm of the genre.

The film’s failure to present an effective anti-colonial vision is especially frustrating because we are in a golden age of anti-colonial epics. “NK Jemisin”broken earth“, the trilogy “The Ambha Books“series, by Benjanun Sriduangkaew”His ruthless command“Trilogy, by Tade Thompson”Wormwood” trilogy and many other works of the last decade think about colonialism with much more depth and insight than Herbert ever imagined.

The key to Jemisin o Suri’s success is that they give narrative priority to the experiences of people attacked by colonialism, rather than celebrating the power, success and conflicting consciousness of kings, rulers and colonizers. If Villeneuve, or indeed Herbert, had really wanted to question the logic of colonial power and colonial privilege, the hero of the story would be a Fremen like Chani. And she would be fighting, not with Paul, but against him and his effort to drag her into her dreams and prophecies.

However, few blockbuster films give narrative primacy to colonized peoples. As writer and professor Viet Thanh Nguyen writes In Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, his study of Vietnam War films, “much American artistic and cultural work on the Vietnam War, even as it engages in anti-American critiques, locates Americans firmly and crudely at the center of the story.”

It’s not just about Vietnam movies. The supposedly anti-colonial “Avatar” sci-fi films center on a colonizer turned white savior. The “Star Wars” movies put you on the side of the colonial resistance, but they make sure that the leaders of that resistance are mostly white and, unlike the fremen (which evoke Images from the Middle East or North Africa and cultural elements and part of whose language is taken directly from Arabic), are not a simple analogy for real colonized peoples.

This is not an accident or a temporary problem. The refusal to see the colonized as central to their own stories is part of colonialism itself. Paul feels bad about being the destined one; Herbert and Villeneuve, to varying degrees, seem to regret making Paul the destined one. But ultimately, Paul doesn’t listen to Chani, and neither does Villeneuve. “Dune: Part Two” aims to show us a fight for freedom on an exotic and distant planet. But it tells the same old story of power as always.