Warning: the following contains SPOILERS for Dune.
Dune 2021 ended in a scene that highlights a major flaw in Paul’s powers of prescience. As Dune’s main character, Paul Atreides’ powers and abilities are central to the plot of the reboot. These powers manifest as visions and dreams that Paul has about events in the future.
This includes visions about members of House Atreides, the Fremen, and even the distant future of Arrakis. Paul’s visions are first revealed to be predictions of the future when his dream about Duncan Idaho dying on Arrakis comes true. Also, Paul’s dreams about burning trees and corpses foreshadowed the Harkonnen attack. However, most of Paul’s other dreams aren’t confirmed to be real, and some are even contradictory to future events in the film.
Dune’s ending, for instance, shows Paul killing the Fremen Jamis in a duel. However, in an earlier vision, when Paul is piloting the ornithopter across a sandstorm, Jamis appears to Paul to teach him the ways of the desert, and even shows him the maker hooks that Fremen use to ride sandworms. Moreover, the ending of Dune also reveals the Fremen Chani as a potentially strong ally for both Paul and Jessica. This is also contrary to one of Paul’s earlier visions, in which Chani kisses him and then stabs him with a crysknife, which even prompts Paul to wonder whether or not he saw his own death. All of this is because Paul’s prescience doesn’t show definite events in the future. The visions are not certainties. Instead, they are different possibilities, revealing the various paths that Paul can take.
In fact, while Paul’s visions aren’t set in stone, there’s always something to be gained from what they reveal. Even though Jamis dies before he can teach Paul anything about riding sandworms, the way he forces Paul to kill him in their duel certainly taught the young Arrakis newcomer a thing or two about the ebb and flow of the deep desert. The way that Paul’s dreams and visions work in Dune 2021 is actually consistent with how they work in Frank Herbert’s books. As Paul’s vision about Jamis foreshadowed the true lesson of their duel, Paul’s other dreams about Chani, Jessica’s pregnancy, and the coming of the galactic religious genocide could also end up revealing much more than what Paul initially expects.
Dune 2021 depicts Paul’s powers of prescience to be flawed and prone to misinterpretation. At the same time, Villeneuve’s Dune covers only the first half of Herbert’s cult sci-fi novel, which means that Paul’s power is in its infancy. The Dune sequels – should they push through – are likely to reveal much more about Paul’s emerging powers as the prophesied Kwisatz Haderach. As the very first scene of Dune explains, “dreams are messages from the deep.”
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