Every adaptation puts a spin on the source material. Dune: Part One (2021) and Dune: Part Two (2024), by director Denis Villeneuve, are infused with a pro-secular viewpoint to the point that faith is denigrated as foolish, and skepticism is celebrated as heroic. These films could have aligned with Frank Herbert’s science fiction book Dune (1965) and allowed the audience to see the dangers of religion and religious manipulation through the perspective of lead characters Paul Atreides and Lady Jessica. Instead, at the risk of offending faith-based viewers, they push the simplified view that religion and faith are backward and unappealing, especially to enlightened young people. The bigger problem is that, because the key religion in Dune followed by the Fremen is coded as Islamic, the films reinforce an Orientalist perspective that believers are unthinking victims stuck in an irrational belief cycle and that freedom will only come when they embrace a secular outlook. The attempts by Villeneuve to appeal to twenty-first century Western sensibilities while avoiding controversy result in the story sidestepping richness and complexity in favor of a superficial and problematic indictment of religious belief.
The most obvious mechanism for this editorial choice is the significantly altered character of Chani. In the book she is niece to the Fremen sietch leader Stilgar, and she is a young warrior who both becomes a respected religious leader among the Fremen and supports the integration of her beloved Paul into their culture. In the film, she is cast as a kind of liberated girlboss, untethered from the looks and behaviors of the religiously devoted women of the Fremen, yet perpetually discontent with her situation. Her warrior garb contrasts with the sietch women’s flowing robes and long headscarves. Her scenes often show her out on the battlefield amid action and sunlight, while other women are domesticated and move in claustrophobic, dark spaces.
Everything about the sietch women seems constrained; everything about Chani appears liberated. Chani’s defiant attitude arises in nearly every scene. She grimaces against Harkonnen oppressors, glowers at Stilgar’s devotion, scoffs at religious women practitioners, frowns at Paul’s elevation to a messianic figure, and argues with Paul’s mother, Jessica. The main exception is when she appears as a soft dream girl in Paul’s visions, her robe flowing and eyes playful. She’s a GI Jane girlboss, fighting for justice and refusing to be held down by what she views as religious inanity.
Chani represents the rational Western perspective facing down the backward Other. Edward Said explains in Orientalism that this contrast continues to negatively stereotype peoples of the Middle East, particularly those of Islamic faith. As Chari is a lead character, Villeneuve invites the audience to share her view of religion, as illustrated in the Water of Life scene early in Dune: Part Two. In a clear deviation from the book—in which Chani is consecrated as Sayyadina and oversees the ritual that transforms Jessica into a Fremen Reverend Mother—the scene positions Chani and her friend, Shishakli, as secular onlookers who want nothing to do with what they see as a nonsensical ritual. When Paul asks them about their beliefs, Shishakli dismisses the southern tribes’s belief in a messiah to deliver them from evil. Chani emphasizes that she and Shishakli believe in Fremen, adding a mocking lilt to the word “believe,” and dismissing the concept of a messiah as merely a control mechanism.
On cue, Stilgar emerges from the cave where the ritual is occurring and says, “Now we must pray,” while someone lays out a cloth bundle for him to kneel on. His group’s prostrations on the desert dune are obviously coded as Islamic. Chani and Shishakli give them no respect, mocking the Water of Life ceremony while Stilgar hushes them so his group can pray undisturbed. The young women’s contemptuous attitude toward these true believers suggests that the audience, too, should see religion as laughable. Chani’s skeptical, secular viewpoint seems more logical in this framing. Stilgar represents the undeveloped and gullible part of Fremen culture while Chani represents the developed and forward-looking part, having dispensed with belief because she thinks it’s a ruse organized by the Bene Gesserit.
Paul supports this skeptical perspective as well. He is transformed from the book’s politically calculating, Machiavellian-in-disguise character to an enlightened noble who recognizes his privilege and eschews the beliefs of both the Bene Gesserit and the Fremen. Paul criticizes the Harkonnen family for mining spice and keeping the Fremen in their place as well as his father, Duke Leto, for supposedly suggesting the Atreides family do the same. His clear distaste for the obviously oppressive Harkonnen behavior positions him as a morally sound character. Speaking to his mother Jessica, Paul condemns both the Bene Gesserit’s efforts to steer the politics of the Imperium from the shadows and their belief in the One who will have special powers due to their breeding program, of which she is a part. Here, too, he expresses distaste at other people’s politicking and attempts at control.
Paul discourages the Fremen’s idea of a religious-based leadership role for himself as inappropriate and exploitative. For example, while Chani and Stilgar’s groups hotly debate the meaning of Jessica surviving the Water of Life ritual, Paul calmly provides a logical explanation, telling them that, due to her advanced Bene Gesserit training, it wasn’t a miracle. When viewed from an Orientalist perspective, Paul’s attempt to demystify the sacred ritual is an offer of rationality to believers, exposing them to the scientific reasoning behind what they believed was a spiritually significant event. As if to soften the impact of his delivery of this enhanced knowledge, Paul continues by saying that he’s not the Mahdi (the Fremen term for the messiah) nor is he there to lead them, but he is there to learn their ways and fight alongside them. Though he doesn’t mock Stilgar’s beliefs, he does disavow them, making him into a tragic figure who seems well-meaning yet is pulled into the Fremen prophecy through no fault of his own. As a lead character of a similar age to Chani, Paul reinforces the twenty-first century secular approach in the film, which has little interest in faith.
Even when Paul is about to finally embrace the prophecy among masses of kneeled Fremen, the film ensures that the audience can continue to support a secular perspective by having Chani stand up and call foul, highlighting a rational voice among a literal sea of believers.
By both attempting to show faith as unappealing and liberating Chani from the supposed tyranny of religious belief, the film removes the glue that binds the Fremen’s culture and philosophy. All Chani seems to share with Stilgar and other Fremen is an acceptance of violence in resisting the Harkonnen. She shows little indication of having a belief system other than being Fremen and wanting freedom for her people. There is no familial bond tying her to others, no passing down of rituals and memory from Fremen history. The audience doesn’t get to see any depth to what Chani believes in, only what she doesn’t.
These alterations from the book turn her into a mouthpiece for a rational viewpoint which seems out of place in her own culture. The films tell the audience that religion is unappealing, something the powerful use as a vehicle for control, and that certain factions of Fremen are being hoodwinked. But they neglect to show enough other aspects of the Fremen culture to give it an identity outside of its religiosity. Through Chani, the films strongly imply that because the religion was influenced or even possibly created by outsiders—the Bene Gesserit—it is therefore tainted and suspect. The Fremen lose agency and the opportunity to show that they are not backward because of their faith. Religion becomes a dividing force in this imagining of Dune, something that leads Chani to an angry separation from her people and their victory over their oppressors. These changes in the adaptation denigrate the value that religious practice and communities of belief have had for millennia, and they refuse to acknowledge the role of religion as an integral part of billions of people’s everyday lives. Religion is portrayed as backward, even laughable, best put aside as if it is not part and parcel of many cultures. The films put forth a clear critique of faith to cater to secular Western sensibilities, but in so doing, they risk reinforcing problematic Orientalist stereotypes and miss the opportunity to explore the nuances and complexities of religion.
Kara Kennedy
Kara Kennedy is an independent scholar and educator in the areas of science fiction, technology, and digital and AI literacy. She is the author of Adaptations of Dune: Frank Herbert’s Story on Screen, Frank Herbert’s Dune: A Critical Companion, Women’s Agency in the Dune Universe: Tracing Women’s Liberation through Science Fiction, and articles on the topics of science fiction and fantasy literature, Wikipedia and academia, and digital literacy in the arts and humanities.
