Why It's A Good Thing The Dune Movie Doesn't Include The Guild
Warning! Spoilers for Dune ahead.
Denis Villeneuve's Oscar-nominated Dune adaption introduces Frank Herbert's challenging, seminal works to a new generation but wisely leaves out The Guild. The movie follows Timothée Chalamet's Paul Atreides on a journey to the sandy heart of the Fremen desert home planet, Arrakis, and stops at the halfway point of the original Dune novel, which Herbert split into two parts. There are several changes between the movie and the book, not least of which is Villeneuve's decision to leave the Spacing Guild on the scrapheap.
In the novel, The Spacing Guild has extraordinary power among the many Houses, with the Emperor, and among the Bene Gesserit breeding program. It singlehandedly controls faster-than-light space travel across the universe using spice – the cinnamon-flavored hallucinogen that hails from Arrakis. Spice allows the genetically engineered Guild Navigators to see the future for a limited time, letting them manipulate folds in space-time and travel between planets instantly. It's spice's role in intergalactic travel that makes it such a sought-after commodity and kicks off the transfer of power from House Harkonnen to House Atreides that underpins the first novel and movie.
Related: Why Dune 3 Is Even More Important Than Part 2
It seems strange, then, that such a narrative lynchpin of the books would fall by the wayside for the first Dune movie. The simple truth is that some characters and stories read better than they scan onscreen. The Guild would have taken an already complex space opera and added an extra layer of convolution, and it was so important for Herbert's legacy that Villeneuve did what he could to avoid overcooking the narrative. After David Lynch's much-maligned
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