Dune: Part Two: what age is it for? 13, alone or with a parent

The codes, for parents

Taken in by the Fremen after his house is destroyed, Paul learns to live in the desert, rides a worm, and gradually accepts the messiah's role laid on him, knowing what it will cost.

The lexicon

• The sietchThe Fremen community carved into rock, with its water reserves and its rules. Paul lives there as an accepted outsider, not a guest: every gesture is a test.
• The crysknifeThe blade cut from a worm's tooth, sacred to the Fremen. Drawing it commits you: it is not sheathed again without drawing blood.
• Riding the worm (shai-hulud)The trial that turns a young Fremen into an adult: hooking a moving worm and standing on it. It is the film's great sequence and its real rite of passage.
• The Water of LifeA poison drawn from a worm that only a Reverend Mother can transform. Drinking it opens the memory of every ancestor, or kills. It is Paul's turning point in the second half.
• The Lisan al-Gaib and the MahdiThe Fremen names for the promised saviour. The prophecy was manufactured from nothing by the Bene Gesserit centuries earlier, so that one of their own could use it one day: Paul knows this, and uses it anyway.
• Feyd-RauthaBaron Harkonnen's nephew, introduced in the arena of his home planet, filmed in black and white under a black sun. He is Paul's violent mirror.
• Chani and the northern FremenChani refuses to believe the prophecy and sees what it is doing to her people. The film departs from the novel here and gives her the critical viewpoint, which changes the whole ending.
• The jihad, or holy warWhat Paul sees coming in his visions: billions dead in his name. This is not a victory being prepared, it is a catastrophe he chooses.

How the world works

This film is the second half of a story begun in the first. It does not stand alone, and it changes subject along the way: from a son's revenge to the price of a prophecy. Nothing about it is triumphant. The ending looks like a victory and the film shoots it as a disaster, which disconcerts many viewers. As in the first film, there is no artificial intelligence: humans trained to calculate, to see and to compel replace the machines.

The references

• Frank Herbert wrote the sequel to his novel precisely because readers admired Paul: he wanted to show that a charismatic hero is a danger, not a solution.
• Fremen vocabulary borrows heavily from Arabic and Islam, Mahdi, jihad, Lisan al-Gaib, and the desert points to the Middle East and to oil.
• The Giedi Prime arena scene was shot with an infrared-sensitive camera, giving that black and white in which skin seems lit from within.
• The film was shot in the deserts of Jordan and Abu Dhabi with as little computer imagery as possible, which is why you feel the heat.

Why they love it

• A teenager who sees the future and cannot avoid it is a classic tragedy in a science-fiction setting, and it lands at that age.
• The worm sequence is among the most impressive in recent cinema, and many young viewers go back for it.
• The film takes its audience seriously: it explains nothing twice and leaves the unease of the ending without instructions.

Three questions to ask

• Paul knows the prophecy is a manufactured lie and uses it anyway: is he wrong?
• Chani refuses to follow: who is right, do you think, her or her people?
• Can you want power for other people's good without ending up harming them?