If Dune is this generation's Star Wars, Paul Atreides is its Anakin — and Part Three is his Revenge of the Sith
A critic warned that Dune worships its hero. The sequel arriving December 18 is adapted from the book Frank Herbert wrote specifically to punish that reading.
The phrase came from inside the franchise: in the New York Times' cast profile on November 4, Florence Pugh called the Dune films "our generational kind of Star Wars." The Guardian's Ben Child answered with a column arguing that if that's true, we're all in trouble — because, in his reading, the story is insufficiently critical of its morally ambiguous hero. The r/movies thread where the column landed did not take it gently:
"Yes, Dune, famously a movie and book completely uncritical towards its morally ambiguous main character and the weird fucked up social order he exists in."
A second reply filed the column under "Absolute boomer-ass article" — from a self-described fan of both franchises.
The correction is already scheduled
The column's real problem is the release calendar. Dune: Part Three opens December 18, and it adapts Dune Messiah — the 1969 novel Herbert wrote precisely because too many readers of Dune had crowned Paul a hero. Herbert spent the rest of his life repeating the point; "beware of heroes" was his own summary of the saga's bottom line, and Denis Villeneuve has said Herbert conceived Paul as an antihero critiquing the very idea of a messiah — the reading that shaped his Part Two.
The film picks Paul up nearly two decades into his reign as Emperor — "ruthless" is the word in the official synopsis — facing conspiracies, a rebellion, and the consequences of the holy war unleashed in his name. Pugh's Irulan, Anya Taylor-Joy's Alia and Robert Pattinson's shape-shifting Scytale fill out the plot against him.
Herbert published Dune Messiah in 1969 because readers mistook Paul for a hero. The correction reaches theaters 57 years later.
The Star Wars math, done properly
Here's the irony: Pugh's comparison holds, just not the way the column took it. If Dune is this generation's Star Wars, then Paul — the gifted chosen one who takes power to protect the woman he loves and becomes the empire — isn't Luke. He's Anakin, and Part Three is his Revenge of the Sith: the chapter where the fall stops being subtext. George Lucas needed prequels to show how a hero curdles into a tyrant; Herbert built the curdling into the saga's second book, and Villeneuve gets to film it as a finale instead of a flashback.
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Worrying that audiences admire Paul isn't a case against Dune — it's the condition Messiah was written to treat, now with a December theatrical slot and a three-week IMAX window. The viewers who spent two films cheering the Lisan al-Gaib are about to sit through the bill arriving. Herbert planned that ambush in 1969; the critics warning about it in November 2026 are standing on the tracks, facing the wrong direction, describing the train.
Previously we wrote: Who exactly is nostalgic for 1955? Netflix's Stranger Things prequel is about to find out