10 biggest book-to-screen changes in Dune: Part Two
By Dan Selcke
7. The spacing guild
There are a lot of factions in the Dune universe. There's great houses like the Atreides and the Harkonnens, as well as several other houses that show up towards the end of the movie. In the book, the houses are represented by a group called the Landsraad, although the movie didn't name them as such. There's the scheming Bene Gesserit, the Fremen of Dune, and so on.
One of the factions that Denis Villeneuve's movies leave out is the spacing guild, which holds a monopoly on space travel and banking throughout the galaxy. Much of that is due to the Guild Navigators, people who have ingested so much of the spice melange that they have limited prescience they use to navigate through the stars. The spice has transformed their bodies so they look like giant monster babies floating in tanks. David Lynch, never one to turn down a weird visual, included them in his 1984 Dune movie:
In the book, we learn that the Fremen use spice to bribe the spacing guild to disallow satellites over Arrakis, which is why it's hard to find where the Fremen live. The Fremen use this anonymity to begin terraforming the planet in the south. Dune: Part Two doesn't include any of this.
8. The emperor and Princess Irulan
But it's not all cuts. Dune: Part Two also adds in a few things the book didn't have. For instance, in the book, Shaddam Corrino IV (Christopher Walken) and his daughter Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh) only show up at the very end of the story, just in time for Paul and his Fremen to attack and for Paul to replace the emperor as ruler of the galaxy. In the movie, we check in with the emperor and Irulan throughout, perhaps so there's more impact when they encounter our heroes at the end.
Also, Irulan plays a bigger role in the first sequel to Dune, titled Dune Messiah, so Villeneuve wanted to get her out in the camera beforehand. Each chapter of the original Dune novel begins with excerpts from the history books Irulan has written over the years. Dune: Part Two nods to this when we see Irulan talking into a tape recorder...or whatever the freaky sci-fi equivalent of a tape recorder is.