How The Success of Dunes Reboot Will Be Decided By One Side Character

How The Success of Dune’s Reboot Will Be Decided By One Side Character

The Dune reboot has big shoes to fill, and its box office success may depend largely on how the new movie tells the story of planetologist Liet-Kynes.

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How The Success of Dunes Reboot Will Be Decided By One Side Character

Whether or not the Dune reboot will be a success depends on how the new film fleshes out its most pivotal side character: imperial planetologist, ecologist, and Fremen leader Liet-Kynes. Based on the Hugo award-winning science fiction novel of the same name by author Frank Herbert, director Dennis Villeneuve’s new take on Dune is one of the most anticipated movies of 2021. Out of Dune’s many crucial side characters, why is Liet-Kynes the most pivotal?

Liet-Kynes, who is a man in the book, has been played solely by white male actors throughout the previous adaptations. These actors were Karel Dorby in the Sci-Fi Channel miniseries Frank Herbert’s Dune and Max von Sydow in the 1984 Dune film by David Lynch. In the reboot, actor Sharon Duncan-Brewster, a Black woman, will be stepping into Liet-Kynes’ shoes. Despite this and a handful of other changes previously revealed by Villeneuve, the director has promised fans that his adaptation will be largely faithful to the book and what it represents.

In the book, Liet-Kynes is a single person with two different but connected personas: Liet, the leader of the native Fremen, and Dr. Kynes, the appointed imperial planetologist of the desert planet of Arrakis, also known as Dune. Liet-Kynes’ father was Pardot Kynes, the previous planetologist assigned to the planet. The Kynes family’s work and history are further outlined in The Ecology of Dune, the book’s first appendix. Liet continued Pardot’s work with the Fremen while also serving as the planetologist for the imperial government, contributing to how both have efficiently adapted to the harsh climate of Arrakis. Amid Dune’s interplanetary and inter-generational political scheming, Liet-Kynes represents the united political will of the ecologists and indigenous knowledge keepers. As Pardot explains, “The highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences,” and it is through this lens that Liet’s work eventually transforms Dune, the desert planet, into a lush paradise. While the major character factions in Dune duke it out among themselves, Liet-Kynes oversees the actual work necessary to make life on Arrakis better for its people.

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In fact, theologist Peter Herman (via MDPI Open Access Journals) postulates that although Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet in the reboot) emerges as the story’s messiah, it is Liet-Kynes who fulfills a truly messianic role. In Herman’s 2018 essay The Blackness of Liet-Kynes: Reading Frank Herbert’s Dune Through James Cone, he explains that when examined from the perspective of Black liberation theology, “Liet-Kynes not only represents a more authentic messianic figure, but he also represents a man who has died to whiteness and been reborn into blackness in order to become such a messiah.” This is certainly congruent with the fact that the character will be played by Sharon Duncan-Brewster in the 2021 reboot.

Moreover, as Liet-Kynes is Chani’s father in the book, she could be Chani’s mother in Villeneuve’s Dune. Chani will be played by Zendaya, and Villeneuve has already said that she’ll have a crucial role in his planned sequel – likely involving the mysterious Fremen of Arrakis. Furthermore, if Liet-Kynes is Chani’s mother, this would make her the grandmother of Paul and Chani’s prescient twins, Ghanima Atreides and God-Emperor Leto Atreides II the Younger. This is important because, in the Dune universe, male and female lineage affects how prescient beings access ancestral memories. And with the reboot casting Liet-Kynes as the maternal instead of the paternal ancestor of the twins, they could become even more powerful than their literary counterparts.

While it’s unclear how much Denis Villeneuve’s Dune will deviate from the book, what’s certain is that its version of Liet-Kynes will determine whether or not the highly ambitious franchise reboot will succeed. There’s certainly a lot of pressure on the director. Despite the commercial failure of Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, both HBO and Warner Bros. are betting big on Dune. Likewise, long-time fans of the cult sci-fi novel have their eyes affixed on the reboot as well. And if the new Liet-Kynes proves to be as pivotal as her literary version, the new Dune, along with any planned sequels down the line, might just exceed all expectations.

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Link Source : https://screenrant.com/dune-movie-success-failure-liet-kynes-character-important/

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