As production momentum builds for Dune: Messiah, the final chapter in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune trilogy, Hollywood has been buzzing less about sandworms and spectacle—and more about silence. In early 2025, Villeneuve reportedly made a decision that sent tremors through studio boardrooms: he cut more than 400 lines of dialogue from the screenplay, reducing spoken exposition to near-zero levels. For a $300 million blockbuster, it was an act bordering on creative heresy.
But for Villeneuve, it was inevitable.
The director has long argued that modern cinema has drifted away from its core strength. In interviews dating back to Dune: Part Two, he bluntly declared, “Frankly, I hate dialogue,” blaming the rise of prestige television for what he sees as cinema’s overreliance on words. To Villeneuve, television is the medium of conversation; film is the medium of images. And Dune: Messiah—a dense, introspective novel filled with political scheming and internal monologues—became his battleground to reclaim that distinction.
Rather than translating Frank Herbert’s famously talkative book verbatim, Villeneuve has opted for what insiders describe as a “sonic exorcism.” The tragedy of Paul Atreides, now emperor and prisoner of his own prophecy, will not be explained—it will be observed. Villeneuve believes that audiences should study micro-expressions, body language, and spatial composition to understand Paul’s psychological collapse. In his view, the camera should do the thinking.
This philosophy places enormous weight on visual storytelling. Cinematographer Greig Fraser is once again central, tasked with externalizing Paul’s internal torment through light, shadow, and scale. Timothée Chalamet’s performance is designed to function almost like silent cinema: restrained, inward, and devastating precisely because it refuses to articulate its pain aloud.
Ironically, the massive budget enables this restraint. Villeneuve has likened the film to a “haiku made with a hundred million dollars,” where every frame must justify its existence. Vast desert landscapes, monumental architecture, and carefully controlled sound design replace speeches and explanations. Nothing, he insists, is allowed to be ornamental.
The gamble is especially bold in the streaming era, where films are often consumed passively, half-watched while audiences scroll their phones. Villeneuve’s approach demands the opposite. Dune: Messiah is engineered to punish distraction. To understand it, viewers must lean in, decode glances, and sit with silence.
As the trilogy marches toward its planned 2027 conclusion, Villeneuve appears less interested in pleasing algorithms than in defending a belief: that cinema’s greatest power lies not in what characters say, but in what images make us feel. If Dune: Messiah succeeds, it won’t just end Paul Atreides’ story—it may stand as one of the boldest arguments yet for why movies should still be seen, not merely heard.