Ending it all here would be a bit like deciding there was not much point in following Frodo all the way to Mount Doom to watch him dispense with the One Ring, when the story could be neatly tied up before anyone has even set so much as a hairy hobbit foot in the Mines of Moria. Without wishing to give too much away (and this piece will inevitably contain spoilers for those who have not read the novel), the whole point of Frank Herbert’s novel is for Paul to achieve his destiny as the messianic Kwisatz Haderach and take revenge against the horrible Harkonnen following the death of his father and brutal destruction of House Atreides. Thank goodness the worst did not happen, for Dune would make no sense if the story had ended right there, with Timothée Chamalet’s Paul Atreides having only just bumped into the dusty Fremen. But fortunately for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, the critics were kind, the box office has been impressive for a movie released simultaneously on HBO Max in the US, and we’re going to get a chance to see what happens in part two. I t might easily have been the 21st century’s answer to Ralph Bakshi’s unfinished The Lord of the Rings, left dangling for the rest of eternity.

How to set up brutal doom