New 'Dune 3' Trailer Teases The Showdown We’ve Been Waiting For — But Not The One We Expected
It’s all been leading to this. Two long years have passed since we watched Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) launch his holy crusade against his enemies in Dune: Part Two, orchestrating a marriage of convenience with the royal Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh) and breaking the heart of the Fremen Chani (Zendaya) in the process. Director Denis Villeneuve left us on an intense close-up of Chani storming into the deserts of Arrakis, calling a sandworm to ride home on, and stewing in silence.
Part Two was something of a departure from the books by Frank Herbert, which depicted Chani with far more docility and later wrote her off tragically — not unlike George Lucas’ Star Wars prequels, which (not that he’d ever admit it) took a major page from Dune for the doomed romance between Anakin Skywalker and Padmé Amidala. Villeneuve, thankfully, doesn’t seem interested in following that same path: his Chani was different from the start, and Dune: Part Three serves as the culmination of his bolder, more emotional vision.
After a few vibes-based teasers that kept most of the plot at bay, the latest trailer for Dune: Part Three finally gives us the crux of the conflict. A whopping 19 years have passed since we last saw Paul, Chani, and Irulan — and the Maud’Dib’s jihad has spread to conquer countless worlds. Rather than dying in childbirth (as she does in the books), Chani successfully delivered twins, a boy (Nakota-Wolf Momoa) and a girl (Ida Brooke), whom she shares with Paul. Paul’s mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), also gave birth to her daughter Alia (Anya Taylor-Joy), now old enough to serve as both a kind of religious figure and Paul’s fiercest protector.
He’ll need all the help he can get as Chani gets involved in a plot to assassinate him, alongside Irulan, a (kind of) resurrected Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa), and the shapeshifter Scytale (Robert Pattinson), Part Three’s secondary antagonist.
“Haunted by visions of Imperial collapse and the reappearance of his long-lost love, Paul is drawn into a sweeping conspiracy,” the official synopsis reads. His reunion with Chani gives Part Three a fresh kind of momentum: alongside its massive time jump, the film’s focus on Chani will make this conclusion utterly unpredictable for book fans. She may very well become the character we’re meant to root for as Paul spirals into madness. Will either survive what Villeneuve has planned? Just as Paul struggles to see the future, we’re totally in the dark, too — but that’s a beautiful place to be for a story that most think they already know.