A Beginner’s Guide to Dune
I haven’t seen anyone make one of these that is comprehensive enough as someone who got into this universe after the first movie of Denis’ trilogy came out, so here is my quick guide to get you started on watching the movies in a way that makes sense.
Dune, the novel by Frank Herbert, is an expansive story, made into three films by Denis Villeneuve. The book’s continuity and the films’ differs drastically, and so does its backstory. However, some elements remain the same. It is a dense story, with a lot of confusing details, but here is a condensed version to get you through Dune Part One and Dune Part Two.
Watching the films, don’t expect to see a story set a few hundred years from now. Dune is set a whopping 20,000 years in the future. It’s an era vastly different than ours, where humans have already settled and colonized many planets throughout the universe. Advanced weaponry and technology are used in the universe, but it is different than the usual sci-fi assortment we see. Kind of. 10,000 years before Dune begins, humans created thinking machines, (machine built in the likeness of a human mind) but it didn’t result in a better world. Instead, these thinking machines became too powerful and war between humans and sentient machines broke out. The war, called the Butlerian Jihad, lasted for two generations and left a great hatred among humans for advanced computers. Now, thinking machines are banned, i.e. any machine that has the capability to do a job that a human could otherwise do, or a certain level of sentience. Enemies often fight in hand-to-hand combat but also use laser beams or lasguns, force fields known as shields, and other technology so long as it isn’t too similar to sentient machines. They do have hyper intelligent humans known as Mentats which are basically like human calculators and extreme critical thinkers. There is also an organization of doctors with special abilities and programming to do no harm to their masters.
Within these last 20,000 years a few major things happened. For one, the known universe, or otherwise referred to as the Imperium, came about in response to the Butlerian Jihad’s end, and is a feudalistic empire with an overarching Emperor, and feudalistic laws like kanly. Kanly is the allowed conflict between major houses in the Imperium that don’t need to be approved (or sometimes can be on behalf of) the emperor.
Secondly, in this time jump, a group called the Bene Gesserit was created. A secret organization of women with superhuman powers of the voice, telepathy, and time-sight came along and started controlling the universe according to their demands to bring about a supreme being called the Kwisatz Haderach. By breeding select women, sometimes as concubines (referred to as “Lady NAME”), with certain houses they were going to bring about this supreme being, the Kwisatz Haderach, by blending the bloodline of Atreides and Harkonnen houses, and that is where our story starts. One last important thing to mention about this universe is the most crucial to the plot of the movie, and that is the spice melange. The spice is the breath of the universe and is actually more important than money or any other resource in the Dune universe. Spice is a hallucinogen that has geriatric qualities that can double the human life cycle, and also is the only thing that allows Interstellar space travel (achieved through time-sight, i.e. seeing the future possibilities of travel and selecting the right one). The spacing guild uses it for this purpose. Whoever controls the spice, controls the universe. The spice is created by the giant sandworms’ simple existence and life cycle on Arrakis, and Arrakis is the only known place in the universe to harvest spice.
