10 biggest book-to-screen changes in Dune: Part Two

9. The family atomics

Once Gurney Halleck rejoins Paul in Dune: Part Two, he helps the team locate the House Atreides atomics, a cache of nuclear weapons. Every great house has them. When fighting the emperor's army, Paul later uses one of them to blow a hole in a mountain range, which lets through the great sandworms. In the book, Paul is careful not to violate the Great Convention, which forbids the houses from using atomics against humans. He figures blowing up a mountain doesn't count.

Once Paul has subdued the emperor, he still has to deal with the great houses, which have assembled above Arrakis and refuse to accept him as the new emperor. Knowing that the houses all depend on spice, Paul threatens to use his nukes to blow up all the spice reserves on Arrakis.

Things go a bit different in the book. Paul still threatens to destroy spice on Arrakis, but his plan involves turning the Water of Life into the Water of Death and using it to kill all the baby sandworms. The sandworms are the source of the spice, so eventually there wouldn't be any left in the galaxy.

Chani reacts with horror to Paul's plan, but what he says rings true. "He who can destroy a thing has the real control of it." And he who controls the spice controls the universe.

10. The ending

For such an action-packed story, the original Dune book ends on a surprisingly intimate note. As in the movie, Paul is engaged to the emperor's daughter Irulan out of political necessity, so his claim to the throne of the galaxy will be seen as legitimate. But Chani is still the woman he loves, and he intends to stay with her. As he puts it, “You’ll never again leave my side.”

In the movie, Chani — played by Zendaya — is angry about this arrangement, although she more or less goes along with it. In the book, she's seems more sad and even a bit confused, perhaps feeling out of her depth among all these lords and ladies talking about interstellar marriage pacts. The last lines of the book are Lady Jessica comforting Chani:

"Think on it, Chani: the princess will have the name, yet she'll live as less than a concubine - never to know a moment of tenderness from the man to whom she's bound. While we, Chani, we who carry the name of concubine - history will call us wives."

Again, this is an interesting ending, because while the unique family dynamics of royal houses have been a part of the story, they weren't so important a part that people would have expected the final lines of the book to address them.

The movie does not include this dialogue from Jessica, although it does end on an image of Chani about to ride a sandworm, so she still gets the last word, in a way.

And those are some of the biggest changes from the book in Dune: Part Two! If you want to keep reading in the Dune universe, there's plenty of material for you:

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