'In your nightmares, you give water to the dead. And it brings joy to your heart.' The Mahdi’s words bend the minds and the knees of the attending naibs in Dune Part Two, these strange idioms losing none of their power when translated from Chakobsa, in a film that charts the liberation and advancement of the indigenous peoples of Arrakis. An anthropological study of this fictional civilisation, the script explores the history, theology, and agriculture of the Fremen, as Paul Muad’dib weaponises the dreams of the faithful to generate a holy war that will consume the entire galaxy. The seed which enables this campaign was laid down thousands of years earlier in the teachings of the Bene Gesserit, their 'black arm of superstition' stretching across the galaxy where it produced a threat far more potent than any atomic arsenal, the corrupting influence of theism something which is continually interrogated. One only has to turn on their television set to understand why Frank Herbert’s story remains pertinent to modern geopolitics, the dynamic between Fremen and Harkonnen something that can be observed in any number of real-world conflicts, the fight against colonial occupation taking on strange and gruesome forms throughout the course of proceedings. The film begins and ends with a mountain of corpses being casually incinerated, the cyclical nature of this exchange bringing to mind Paulo Freire’s thesis that ‘when education is not liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor’, the Fremen shown to reject their most sacred customs (such as preserving the bodily fluids of their quarry) in the endless pursuit of power. The emerging leader appears to gain everything and lose everything in the same exact moment, his armies setting off to conquer the universe whilst his concubine abandons him, the film stressing the grim reality that vengeance is a double-edged sword.