A Book Reader Explains the Plot Points in 'Dune 2' That Made No Sense To You

By Alexander Joenks | Film | March 4, 2024 |

By Alexander Joenks | Film | March 4, 2024 |

Dune: Part Two: The Sandening is a fantastic science fiction movie. It also contains a number of plot details that are impenetrable to the pitiable individuals who have not been able to find a copy of the book yet since it’s only been out for 59 f**king years. This article will attempt to explain to you what the hell is going on in the parts that left you clueless.

What is with the nuclear missiles? Why not just nuke the big city?

OK, see atomic weapons are super ultra frowned upon. Using them against an army will get you nuked by everybody else, just like during the Cold War. And Paul doesn’t want to nuke the city because he needs the Emperor to bow down, and more importantly, he needs all the ships sitting there to get off planet. There is only one city on Arrakis, and they need what’s in it. There’s a great snarky line in the book when Paul gets accused of war crimes for using nukes he just says “well actually, there’s no Geneva convention protecting mountains,” which is pretty layered snark for a book famously about ecology.

OK, wait, that’s what those ICBMs were shooting at? Some stupid mountains? WTF?

The capital city of the planet is protected on all sides by a massive set of mountains called the shield wall. That’s why it doesn’t get hit with sandstorms or sand worms. Paul nukes the shield wall to knock down the mountains so the massive sandstorm can fly in and screw up all the enemy shields — which can’t hold up to all that sand — and so that his forces can ride mile long sand worms right into downtown and over the enemy armies. You got to see that last bit magnificently, but that’s why the Fremen had never done it before.

What’s the deal with riding sandworms with grappling hooks?

The rider uses the grappling hooks to pull up one of the rings of the sandworm’s heavily plated external skin. This lets crazy sand into their soft bits. I don’t know if they grade sand, but it’s coarse. The worm rotates so that the vulnerable part is up above the flowing sand. Two grappling hooks mean that you can steer the worm by moving one of the hooks to cause the worm to rotate in order to keep the vulnerable bit up at all times.

Why don’t the Great Houses just bombard them from orbit at the end?

Because he announces that he’s placed the rest of the nuclear arsenal under all the spice fields on the planet and that if they fire, he’ll destroy all the spice permanently.

OK I caught that, but why do they care that much about space paprika?

Two reasons: first, spice isn’t just tasty, it’s fatally super addictive. As in, once you eat it in any quantity, if you can’t get anymore you will die in horrific agony. No cure. It’s like what Fox News tells you fentanyl is like. So Paul’s threat is utterly beyond insane because doing so would condemn every Fremen on the planet to a horrible death over the next couple of weeks.

Imma let you finish, but why would anyone eat ANY of this stuff then? And further, how is that a threat to anyone but his own people?

Oh, you mean like how rich people don’t do cocaine in the real world? Well, there’s the added twist that spice gives you visions of the future. The oligarchs themselves might not all dabble, but in the universe of Dune, faster than light travel is only possible when in a spice trance. Basically, imagine if you had hyperdrives like in Star Wars, but you could only navigate hyperspace by being super high on Jeremy Bearimies. There’s a guild that has a monopoly on all space travel because they’ve got all the people capable of highperspace navigation. All of them will die in agony and all of galactic civilization will collapse if the spice is destroyed.

Bummer.

Right? When all the Fremen run out to the ships and take off, they’re flying up into orbit where the guild will take them wherever they want because Paul has the guild by their spicy bits. He can invade all of them one by one because he’s got the only ride in town.

Any more questions? Ask in the comments, and I’m sure that there will be answers that don’t start with the words “well actually” because we’ve preemptively added that phrase to the block list.