From Fremen to spice: Everything you need to know before watching Dune: Part Two

Like the compass-baffling deserts of Arrakis, the Dune universe can be an inhospitable place. Simply picking up Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel requires readers to pause and swallow manfully before plunging ahead.

At a portly 500-plus pages, it’s a lavishly operatic sci-fi adventure set 20,000 years in the future which bulges with Machiavellian intrigue, dense metaphysics and arcane technologies. It tells the story of a space-faring noble dynasty, House Atreides, who are sent to the mysterious planet of Arrakis, where they’re caught up in a galactic conspiracy and an ancient prophecy about a saviour who will lead a rebellion against the malevolent Empire.

The second part of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation is now in cinemas. Like its 2021 predecessor it’s a visually-ravishing spectacle, allied to the returning Hans Zimmer’s immersive, chest-beating sound design. It’s also – again, like the first part – damn tricky to follow unless you’re up on Herbert’s rich and layered mythology. 

In fact, the latest film takes even fewer prisoners, plunging viewers right back into the story right where the first film left off. Of course, you could go back and rewatch the first part before tackling the second. But really who has the three hours for that? So saddle up your sandworm: this is your guide to Dune, parts one and two. But first, a speedy recap. 

What just happened? 

Part Two picks up exactly where Part One left off. This means it finds Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atreides and his mother, played by Rebecca Ferguson, up the creek and stranded in the deep deserts of Arrakis. They’ve just survived the surprise attack by the evil House Harkonnen which wiped out the rest of House Atreides (no fretting: we’ll recap the noble houses below) – and they’re presumed dead. That they’re not is largely down to the attentions of the Fremen, Arrakis’s indigenous tribes (again, ditto, don’t panic), who’ve lived for generations in the inhospitable wastes. 

The Fremen are conflicted about these interlopers. Paul has just killed one of their warriors in single combat, proving himself. And some believe he is their saviour, the “Kwisatz Haderach” – yes, I know, hold on a little longer. Others are convinced the duo are a liability and should be left to the attentions of the sandworms and the Harkonnen troopers scouring the desert for Atreidian survivors. 

And that’s about it… The plot clots, of course, with internal tensions among the Harkonnen and further scheming by the Emperor and other factions, but let’s not spoil everything. Ready for more? Let’s get into the nitty-gritty. 

The noble houses & the Imperium

In the universe of Dune, power teeters on a knife-edge. It’s split between the Landsraad, a loose alliance of noble houses, and the Padishah Emperors, otherwise known as the Imperium. 

As in Game of Thrones, the noble houses are sometimes allies, but more often are at each other’s throats – with the ruling emperor playing them off against each other to ensure one doesn’t get too powerful. The Padishah Emperors, aka House Corrino, have ruled for thousands of years; the current emperor, Shaddam IV, is the 81st of his line. 

While the emperor was only glimpsed in the first film, he plays a far more prominent role in Dune: Part Two. Played by Christopher Walken, whose strangulated diction makes every pronouncement seem aptly strange and spacey, he doesn’t have tons to do, but is excellent value nonetheless. Florence Pugh stars as his daughter, Princess Irulan. As the film progresses, she grows increasingly uncomfortable with the emperor’s realpolitik. 

Those machinations included, in the first film, cooking up a scheme to clip House Atreides’s wings with the help of House Harkonnen. The big baddie of Part One was Dave Bautista’s thuggish Glossu Rabban Harkonnen, the nephew of Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, the ruler of House Harkonnen. Part Two, though, sees the Baron increasingly miffed by Rabban’s inability to put down the Fremen, and drafts in his other, younger nephew, the psychopathic Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen. Austin Butler – minus his Elvis quiff, but without quite losing the growl – stars as Feyd-Rautha. 

At the beginning of Herbert’s novel, House Atreides were on the rise and the emperor feared they would come to challenge his rule. Hence the surprise attack on Arrakis. Hence Paul and his mother being cast out into the desert, rich in spice and mysteries.  

Spice and Arrakis

Spice Melange – known merely as “spice” – is the most valuable substance in the universe. It prolongs human life, grants prescience and, most significantly, is the essential component of interstellar travel. The Spacing Guild, a brotherhood that controls intergalactic movement, uses spice to safely guide ships through warp space; it gives them a limited ability to see the future and thus navigate the intricacies of faster-than-light travel.

Yet spice is found in only one place: the desert planet of Arrakis, right out in the universe’s unfashionable sticks, on the outer edge of imperial control. Also known as “Dune”, Arrakis has two moons, one which is marked by an asteroid crater like a claw scratch. The extreme scarcity of spice means that control of its meaning rights is fantastically lucrative.

Dune, therefore, is both “the wasteland of the Empire, and the most valuable planet in the universe,” Herbert writes. “Without [spice] there is no commerce in the Empire, there is no civilisation. And he who controls it, controls our destiny.”

Fremen

Arrakis is far from deserted. It is home to the Fremen, an indigenous people who, like the Bedouin on Earth, have evolved to cope with its crushing temperatures and lethal sand storms. They are the last remnants of the Zensunni Wanderers, a loose coalition of peoples who migrated between planets, fleeing persecution and enslavement by imperial raiders. They practise the Zensunni religion, a blending of Sunni Islam with Zen-Buddist influences. 

In Dune: Part Two, we spend a lot of time with the Fremen, following their war of resistance against the Harkonnen as well as Paul’s love affair with Zendaya’s Chani, a Fremen warrior. Over the course of the film, he comes to learn their ways – culminating in his first solo rodeo on a sandworm. 

We find out that the Fremen are not monolithic. Rather they are split into various tribes, whose beliefs differ. Paul and his mother are adopted by Javier Bardem’s Stilgar, a roustabouting chieftain from the more fanatical southern tribes. Stilgar and his followers are convinced Paul is the Mahdi, the saviour who will lead the Fremen to freedom in the stars. (This term is one of nearly 100 Herbert borrowed, somewhat controversially, from Arabic and Islamic belief.) 

The Fremen have no interest in spice, except as a hallucinogen in their religious rituals, and they were viciously persecuted by the Harkonnen during their fiefdom. These nomads live in underground redoubts, called sietch, which are built into rocky outcrops scattered across the surface of Arrakis. 

In Part: Two, we see more of their rituals too. These include a funeral in which the deceased’s body is drained of fluids, and added to a “lake of reflection”. We also witness one of their more disturbing practices whereby wannabe spiritual leaders are subjected to a draft of the “Water of Life”. This is actually a potent poison gathered from infant sandworms which is supposedly fatal to men. To those who survive, though, it grants the ability to see into the future and tremendous influence. 

Sandworms

If you’ve picked up a copy of Dune, you’ll likely have seen a sandworm on the front cover. Arrakis’s iconic megafauna, these vast invertebrates can grow up to 400 metres long. Their burrowing is responsible for Arrakis’s rolling dunes and, in their larval form, they excrete spice. Water is fatal to them.

Though not predatory, the worms are highly territorial. The noisy extraction of spice enrages them and they’re known to attack miners. Navigating by vibration, they are attracted to rhythmic noises. The Fremen exploit this by using an irregular walking pattern – like a bee-stung disco shuffle – to throw them off and employ distraction devices, called thumpers, to ensure safe passage and lead them to their enemies.

They’ve also been known to ride sandworms using grappling hooks; and even measure distances in terms of how long they can ride a sand worm before it is exhausted. The Fremen consider sandworms to be semi-divine, and worship a primordial sandworm deity, called “Shai-Hulud”, which lies at the heart of their Zensunni religion. This term also refers to the creatures in general. They also believe that one of the ways the Mahdi will be identified is through his taming of a vast “Grandfather worm”, a giant among giants. 

The religions of Dune

Herbert had a keen interest in the nature of belief, and Dune works as an intellectual laboratory as he bounces ideas of predestination, salvation and fanaticism off each other. He imagined that a frantic period of space exploration took place thousands of years before the action of Dune. This fit of discovery sparked a flourishing of hundreds of different religions and creeds as humankind confronted the fearful “outer dark”. The Book of Genesis was rewritten; its fundamental dictat became to “increase and multiply, and fill the universe, and subdue it”.

One of those religions was the Zensunni religion of the Fremen. Herbert drew on Islamic motifs in his depiction of the Fremen’s beliefs, a syncretism of superstition, messianic religion and animism. Like Sufi mysticism, it combined monotheism with ancient adherence to spirits and demons – known in Dune, and in the Islamic world, as “jiin”.

The Fremen believe that one day a saviour – “Muad’Dib” – will arise and lead a jihad to banish the outlanders exploiting their planet. This messiah will not be a Fremen, but a “voice from the outer world”. 

Without giving too much away, Dune: Part Two gears us up for the realisation of the Fremen’s hopes. A third film looks set to take us back out into space as the Fremen prosecute their holy war against the noble houses and the Imperium. (In Herbert’s book, this is referred to as their jihad – Villeneuve, unsurprisingly, drops their moniker, one of several instances of him planing down the novel’s spikier bits.) 

The Way and The Voice

Dune’s answer to the Jedi mind-control of Star Wars, The Way combines telekinetic powers with self-negation. Herbert was an enthusiast of Zen Buddhism and many of the sayings of The Way resemble paradoxical Buddhist teachings, or koans. A typical example runs: “Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife – chopping off what’s incomplete and saying: ‘Now, it’s complete because it’s ended here.’”

Adepts of The Way can endure great suffering, see into the future and manipulate others to do their will. This manipulation is achieved via a mesmeric technique called The Voice. Paul Atreides has these nascent powers, but when Dune begins, they aren’t yet fully developed. He has inherited them from his mother, Lady Jessica, who has some psychic abilities. 

As Part Two begins, she is pregnant with Paul’s sister, Alia – played in a brief flash-forward cameo by Anya Taylor-Joy – who has inherited Lady Jessica’s powers and can communicate with her from within the womb. To protect her son and unborn daughter, Lady Jessica manipulates the Fremen’s beliefs, manoeuvring her son to become their messiah, the “Lisan al Gaib”. Such conniving is typical of the Bene Gesserit, a shifty order of space nuns, to which Lady Jessica belongs. 

Bene Gesserit

Alongside the noble houses and the Imperium, the Bene Gesserit are the other great power in the universe. But unlike those forces, they prefer to use cunning, stealth and behind-the-throne tinkering to achieve their aims. A largely female religious school, their mental and physical conditioning gives them telepathic abilities. Like Star Wars’s Jedi Knights, the Bene Gesserit often play the role of counsellors to the noble houses and the Imperium.

But they have their own aims, too. Unbeknownst to most, they have been conducting a centuries-long breeding programme, mixing the blood of the noble houses, to produce the “Kwisatz Haderach”. This figure will be a person of enormous psychic powers capable of exploiting higher dimensions of consciousness. Alongside this intergalactic matchmaking, the Bene Gesserit also dabble in a spot of psychological warfare, using the order’s mystique to sow superstition and subdue indigenous populations like the Fremen. They are also not adverse to old honey trap: one of the subplots of Part Two sees Lea Seydoux’s acolyte seduce Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen and carry his child, ensuring they have all bases covered if everything goes to the wall. 

The Bene Gesserit grew out of the aftermath of the Great Revolt, or the Butlerian Jihad. This was a crusade against “thinking machines” promulgated centuries before Dune. It led to the abolition of all AI and computational machines. Hence why Dune takes place in a whizz-bang Middle Ages – battles are decided by poisoned darts and sword fights, and the galaxy is carved up between rival dynasties which jet around in massive interstellar cruisers. 

It also features ingenious technologies. Chief among these is the stillsuit: body-enclosing armour which cools its wearer and recycles their moisture; in this way, the user is sustained on desert crossings by their own sweat and urine (and, it transpires, the bodily fluids of dead enemy fighters). Delightful.

So what happens next? 

Parts one and two take us to the end of Herbert’s original novel. But as fans will know, Herbert followed this book with a further five titles. (His son was even busier, filling in the lore with a good dozen more books.) 

By the end of Dune: Part Two, it’s clear Villeneuve isn’t done with Herbert’s world. And provided the box office holds firm, we can expect an adaptation of Dune: Messiah, Herbert’s first direct sequel to Dune. There’s a lot of new mythology in Dune: Messiah and things get very odd indeed. Suffice to say: if you thought Dune was strange, tap out now. 

Dune: Part Two is in cinemas now