This is why the ceaseless voiceover in the David Lynch 1984 Dune is both a curse, but oddly, closer to the feeling of reading the book.

In short, the novel Dune, despite its reputation for epicness, is focused on the interior lives of its characters. (In the book there’s an entire subplot about Leto needing to publicly pretend like he’s mad at Jessica to fool his political rivals.) The relationship between Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac) and his “concubine” Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) isn’t made clear in the film, nor do we learn why the Duke is giving Lady Jessica the cold shoulder in this part of the story.

Yueh (Chang Chen), nor is it made clear that Thufir Hawat (Stephen McKinley Henderson) is a “Mentat” (a kind of walking computer who has served in House Atreides for generations). Non-book people probably have no idea the motivations of Dr. Other than the fact that Dune: Part One stops before the third part of the book begins, there are also a plethora of other details from the novel that the movie omits. It’s not that it’s not great - it is - but its basic incompleteness, the missing pieces of the narrative puzzle are, bizarrely, its defining feature. To say Dune: Part One is a masterpiece isn’t wrong, but it’s also kind of like one of those incomplete Van Gogh paintings. If you only watch Dune: Part One on HBO Max, this might make the film feel like an overly long pilot episode to a TV series that may or may not get picked up. Villeneuve has made it clear he wants to make a trilogy of films from two novels - Dune and Dune Messiah - and the ending of Dune: Part One is the set-up for the events of the rest of the proposed trilogy. More accurately, Chani could have said, “This is about two-thirds of the way through the beginning, but it also depends on how far in the series we’re going to go.” It’s also not a spoiler to reveal that right toward the end of the film Chani (Zendaya) says to Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet), “This is just the beginning.”

It’s no secret that Dune: Part One ends roughly 500 pages into the 794 pages (excluding the appendices) that comprise the bulk of the storyline of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune. Paul (Timothee Chalamet) in Dune: Part One Warner Bros

Dune audiobook part 1