"Dune: Part Three" Takes "Departures" From the Book, Its Stars Say — Six Weeks Before It Opens

The marketing for Dune: Part Three reached the delicate part this week: telling the book's readers, in advance, that the film won't simply be the book. In interviews published Thursday by Radio Times, reporting conversations from the New York Times, the cast of Denis Villeneuve's trilogy finale — in cinemas Friday, December 18, adapting Dune Messiah, Frank Herbert's second novel — chose their words the way people do when they know exactly which audience is listening hardest.

The quotes, in their own words

Zendaya, who plays Chani, carried both halves of the message in one answer: "there's a lot in this film that is very true to the source material" — and also "departures." Timothée Chalamet, returning as Paul Atreides, framed the standard the film set itself: "this movie is its own thing… It didn't feel like the bar dropped at all, Denis just changed the location of the bar." And Robert Pattinson, joining the trilogy as the shapeshifting antagonist Scytale, offered the blunter instrument: he said you would have to be "crazy" to find faults in the film, and described what it became in the making — "It reads as much more of a grand political, moral fable, and the movie is so much more emotional. A lot of it is about parenting."

That last word is doing quiet work. The final trailer, released the week before, gave audiences their first look at Paul and Chani's twin children — Leto II, played by Nakoa-Wolf Momoa, and Ghanima, played by Ida Brooke — which by itself announces how far into Messiah's material the film intends to go. The returning ensemble around them, per Radio Times' cast rundown: Anya Taylor-Joy as Alia Atreides, Florence Pugh as Princess Irulan, Charlotte Rampling as the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, and Jason Momoa as a reimagined Duncan Idaho.

Why "departures" is the right word to watch

Both of Villeneuve's previous Dune films were nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards — the trilogy arrives at its finale with its reputation made, and with the hardest adaptation problem of the three: Dune Messiah is a shorter, talkier, more political book than its predecessor, and its most devoted readers are also its most exacting. A production that intended to hide from that argument wouldn't put the word "departures" in its stars' mouths six weeks out. What the cast is doing instead is setting the terms early: faithful in substance, sovereign in structure. Whether audiences accept those terms is the December 18 question — the same day, as our earlier piece in this library set out, the film opens against Avengers: Doomsday in the year's most expensive calendar collision. The book-versus-film argument starts now, on purpose. The receipts arrive with the opening weekend.