‘Dune Part Two’: What Zendaya’s Ending Tells Us About Denis Villeneuve’s Plans for ‘Dune: Messiah’

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

This story contains major spoilers for Dune: Part Two.

When Denis Villeneuve's Dune came out in 2021, there was an uproar about the lack of Zendaya. While the actress, who plays the Fremen warrior Chani, was a major part of the marketing campaign, she wasn't in much of the film, appearing to Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atreides only as a vision until he meets her in the last 10 minutes. She does, however, get the final word:

"This is only the beginning," she says.

In Dune: Part Two, Chani doesn't get the last line of dialogue, but the movie does end on an image of her face. It's a striking choice by Villeneuve that both enhances the power of his film and marks a divergence from Frank Herbert's novel. With Zendaya's emotionally bare performance, Chani becomes the moral anchor of this saga. It ends not on a moment of triumph for Paul—who has now assumed his role as the messianic Lisan al-Gaib—but on her heartbreak and furious anger.

As Chani calls a sandworm to ride, abandoning Paul's army as they gear up for holy war, Zendaya's chin quivers and her eyes burn. She's been betrayed not just romantically but on a deeper, more fundamental level. Villeneuve and Jon Spaihts' script establishes her as a non-believer who fears the Bene Gesserit prophecy of a Messiah because it's a way of controlling her people. She trusts Paul and falls in love with him because she finds him "sincere." On screen, when he drinks the "Water of Life" on his path to winning over the fundamentalist fighters, it's framed as a rejection of the ideals she thought they shared. He does actually crave power—not just their shared ideal of Fremen liberty from oppression.

By the time Paul announces that he intends to marry the emperor's daughter Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh), in a strategic match, Chani has already lost her personal faith in Paul's word. When he asks for Irulan's hand, you see Zendaya shudder, as if a knife has been further twisted in her back. In Herbert's novel, this is not how that interaction goes down. Instead, the Chani of the book simply accepts Paul's choice. Herbert writes: "'I know the reasons,' Chani whispered. 'If it must be…Usul.'" Chani, who at this point in the book has already had and lost Paul's child, refuses to take the title of "royal concubine," and Paul reassures her that his marriage to Irulan is just a "political thing."

The last lines of text belong to Paul's mother Lady Jessica, who tells Chani that Irulan “will have the name, yet she'll live less than a concubine—never to know a moment of tenderness from the man to whom she's bound. While we, Chani, we who carry the name of concubine—history will call us wives." (David Lynch shot a version with this dialogue for his 1984 film, but it was released with a more pat ending where it starts to rain on Arrakis, proving that Paul is indeed the Kwisatz Haderach, whose "mental powers would bridge space and time," per Herbert.)

You could read Villeneuve's desire to center Chani as a sort of feminist rewrite of the text, and Part Two certainly gives Chani more agency than she’s previously had. But by leaving the audience with Chani's fury, Villeneuve also signals explicitly what kind of story he's telling—and might tell in the future, if he follows through on his plan to adapt Herbert’s second Dune novel Dune Messiah.

Villeneuve uses Chani as an audience surrogate to emphasize the potential terror of Paul's reign and the danger of both religious manipulation and authoritarianism. Paul has broken all his promises to Chani and chosen a route he knows could lead to war, famine, and death. Of course these themes are baked into the material, but Villeneuve pointedly refuses to let Paul’s ending play like any sort of triumph. Yes, he kills Austin Butler's glowering Feyd-Rautha and forces Emperor Shaddam IV (Christopher Walken) to bow to him, but he is heading into a holy war, and the one person who loved him without hoping he was a savior is leaving him behind.

In an interview with the New York Times, Villenueve expressed his intent to stay true to Herbert's goals even while diverging from his narrative. "Frank Herbert wanted the book to be a cautionary tale, a warning against charismatic religious leaders," he said. "He felt that he failed because people misperceived his intentions. So he wrote Dune Messiah, an epilogue where he made sure his ideas would be seen. I think the movie’s more tragic and more dramatic than the book because it’s closer to Frank’s intentions."

Villeneuve clearly wants to make Messiah eventually. After all, you don't cast Anya Taylor-Joy for a brief hallucinogenic cameo as the grown-up version of Paul's sister Alia, a key figure in the second book, if you don't want to use her. But if or when Villeneuve does direct that film, he will start it after having established a very different dynamic between Paul and Chani than the one Herbert did.

And yet when it comes to Dune: Part Two that shift is for the best. Chalamet's Paul becomes someone to be feared, with the actor transforming himself in the third act into a figure utterly confident in his own ability to lead and manipulate to an unnerving degree. The audience's heart, however, rests with Chani and Zendaya. Zendaya infuses Chani and Paul's entire relationship with a skepticism that makes her heartbreak all the more difficult to bear. She let herself believe in Paul's goodness, knowing there is a danger in that, only to be let down.

And even though she couldn't predict that her lover would abandon her, she remains the one who is showing us the future. For all of Paul's power of foresight, we're left with the sense that it's Chani who knows the most about what is to come: In Zendaya's pained face we know that Paul's reign is not to be a glorious one, and that makes Dune: Part Two a brilliant punch in the gut.

Originally Appeared on GQ