Decoding Dune: Part Two’s Ominous Visions of the Future

A talking fetus, dreams of the ocean, and Anya Taylor-Joy — here’s what it all means.
Photo: John Nacion/Getty Images

Spoilers for the events of Dune: Part Two, as well as speculation about what might happen next.

If you’ve watched Dune: Part Two, or at least seen photos from the movie’s red carpet premiere, you may have discovered that, surprise, Anya Taylor-Joy is in this franchise now. The actress, who also happens to be leading another sandy Warner Bros. property soon, only appears late in the film in a brief dream sequence where Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atreides sees visions of the future. She’s the grown-up version of his sister Alia, who ominously promises him that she loves him and explains their familial connection to the evil Harkonnen dynasty. She stands right where a bunch of sand dunes meet a vast ocean, portending big changes ahead for Arrakis.

So, who is this Alia? As you might imagine, she’ll probably have a much larger role in the third film, whenever that gets made. Alia Atreides is a key figure in Dune Messiah, Frank Herbert’s wild and pulpier sequel to Dune, though her role in this film is actually cut down from what happens in the novel. Throughout the film, Alia is still in utero, though her fetus communicates telepathically with her mother Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) and by proxy with Paul. While that alone is a pretty wild bit of sci-fi, the book goes even further: Paul and Jessica spend years in the desert with the Fremen before staging their attack on the Harkonnens, so Jessica gives birth to Alia there. Her daughter is then born with all sorts of precognitive abilities and mentally develops preternaturally quickly. Basically, you have a four-year-old with bright blue eyes holding her own in debates with the adults around her (in David Lynch’s 1984 version of Dune, Alia was played by Alicia Witt in a tiny Bene Gesserit costume). Paul kills Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skårsgard) in the climactic battle between the Fremen (the indigenous people of Arrakis) and the Harkonnens in Villeneuve’s movie. But in the book, Alia gets involved in the fight herself. She leads Fremen fighting parties, gets captured by the Harkonnens, and then kills the Baron herself with a poisoned Gom Jabbar (it’s pretty badass, and also like that one meme). Her skills in battle earn her the title St. Alia the Knife.

So why is Alia… like that? Remember, Paul is the product of years of selective breeding by the Bene Gesserit, and his mother jumped the gun on the secretive sisterhood’s plans by giving birth to a son instead of a daughter in the first place. (Jessica believed Paul could be the messiah-like Kwisatz Haderach, a man who can take on the abilities of a Reverend Mother, the most powerful among the Bene Gesserit. The rest of the sisterhood, meanwhile, thought it might take another generation.) So Alia, like her brother, has all those highly-powerful genes. When her mother gets exposed to the Water of Life in that Fremen ritual we see in Part Two — an act which, as Jessica discovers, mirrors the Bene Gesserit process of anointing a Reverend Mother — Alia goes through the same experience in the womb. She, like Jessica and eventually Paul (once he completes the ritual himself and survives, which a man could supposedly only do if he’s the Kwisatz Haderach), gains the ability to access generations of memories based down through all that breeding. That gives her telepathy, as well as the ability to project her memories into others, and all sorts of other skills. But in this case, that kind of power is also dangerous — it’s risky to give someone superpowers before they’ve fully developed eyes and teeth. The Bene Gesserit consider Alia an abomination because she may become overwhelmed by the personalities of those who came before her. As the movie reveals, Jessica is the Baron’s daughter, and you really wouldn’t want those ancestors banging around in your brain.

As a side note, it’s interesting to place her in a vision in front of a giant body of water. Villeneuve’s movies’ have underemphasized it, but a key aspect of Herbert’s novels is that the Fremen are engaged in a long (like, millennia-spanning) project to transform the environment of Arrakis itself from desert into greenery (Herbert was really inspired by dune reclamation projects in real life). When Paul sees Alia by the water, he’s also seeing a future with a successfully transformed planet — though of course, flooding Arrakis with water would drown the sand worms, which produce the spice, on which depends so much of the empire’s whole economy. What an ecological metaphor!

So what’s Anya Taylor-Joy going to get up to in Dune: Part Three? It’s to hard know how Villeneuve and company will work around the ages of their cast of movie stars, but Dune: Messiah takes place 12 years into the future, so we can assume we’re in for a time jump and will be seeing Taylor-Joy playing grown-up Alia there. (Maybe they’ll also say that she’s matured quickly thanks to those powers, or find some other way to obfuscate the fact that Timothée is one year older than Anya in real life). The key thing is that, in the book, Alia works as Paul’s ally, helping him shore up support within his ever-growing empire, while also entering into a romance with a newly-revived Duncan Idaho. Yup! Jason Momoa will be coming back, because his Han Solo-esque rogue (to be clear, Dune inspired Star Wars, not the other way around) gets revived as a “ghola,” or clone, named Hayt. (Let the age gap discourse begin.) He and Alia work together to try to unravel a plot against the empire — it’s all very Attack of the Clones, in more ways than one. Their dynamic is complicated by the fact that Hayt is actually a sleeper agent, programmed to take down the Atreides. That plan doesn’t succeed due to various plot developments and Alia and a de-programmed Duncan do get together, but the key thing is that as Alia grows more powerful, she also tends to become more ruthless. At the end of the book, acting as regent, she defies Paul’s wishes and orders the execution of those responsible for a plot against him.

That arc sets up some even wilder developments in Children of Dune, which Villeneuve may not adapt, but which has one key storyline he seems to be hinting at with those visions in Dune: Part Two. You know how Paul keeps seeing an imperious figure walking through the desert surrounded by masses of people in despair? And then he discovers that the figure is… a woman? (In one shot that figure looks like Ferguson in profile, but let’s just say this is general “women in the bloodline” foreboding.) Well, in the books, when Alia is regent, she succumbs to the personality of her grandfather Baron Harkonnen and becomes a tyrant in her own right. Because he’s in control, she also becomes obsessed with sex. Alia’s only stopped by Paul and Chani’s twin children, who come into the picture at the end of Dune: Messiah and are pre-born themselves but more in control of their powers. With their help, she tries to wrest control of her faculties from the Baron’s influence, but then jumps out a window to kill herself. (In the 2003 Children of Dune TV miniseries adaptation, she stabs herself with a crysknife instead, which has a nice “live by the knife, die by the knife” poetry.) Possession and defenestration might be plotlines too far out for Warner Bros. to adapt. But I really do hope that Villeneuve gets to some of that part of Alia’s arc, if only because I hope Taylor-Joy’s take on the Harkonnen voice is as wildly Skarsgårdian as Austin Butler’s.