Dune: Prophecy wasted relatively little time standing out from the other films. During the first season of Dune prequel series, a war is violently declared by the murder of probably the youngest person ever murdered on screen in director Denis Villeneuve's film Dune universe.
Taking place over 10,000 years before the events of the films, Dune: Prophecy is largely focused on the invisible influence of the Bene Gesserit sister during the reign of Mother Superior Valya Harkonnen (Emily Watson). The first episode, aptly titled “The Hidden Hand”, shows the murderous origins of the Bene Gesserit and their plans to organize good unions of families to keep the sister in power. At the time, House Corrino is the ruling family of the Imperium having defeated the thinking machines who feared they would one day enslave humanity. Through silent communications and duplicitous advice to Emperor Javicco Corrino (played with imperturbable stoicism by The penguin's Mark Strong) from his truth-teller and confidant Kasha (Jihae), we see how the hidden hand of the Bene Gesserit moves the pieces on the board as it wishes, to achieve deadly results.
Every event in the Dune The film takes place during wartime. Walking like an ordinary person on the dunes of Arrakis can have you devoured by a sandworm in moments, and a simple counter-suggestion to the terrifying Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen (Austin Butler) can have your throat slit faster than you can't finish his sentence. Brutality has always been used in films as a way to never let the audience forget the life and death stakes at stake. Dune: Prophecy takes this to a level we've never seen in movies.
Desmond Hart and Pruwet Richese set the stakes Dune: Prophecy
Poor little Pruwet. All he wanted to do was play with his absolutely adorable and potentially murderous AI-controlled lizard. As the nine-year-old Richese heir, he is used as a pawn in the strategic union between his family and the Imperial House Corrino. Emperor Corrino needs the Richese fleet of ships to protect his spice operation on Arrakis from the Fremen, and duplicitous Duke Ferdinand Richese (Brendan Cowell) wants influential proximity to the Great Houses, so a marriage is arranged between the preteen Pruwet and the adult Princess Ynez (Sarah-Sofie Boussnina) to unite the families, with the surreptitious help of the Bene Gesserit.
Unfortunately for Pruwet, he becomes a sacrifice in an invisible war that Private Desmond Hart implies is being waged against the manipulative influence of the Bene Gesserit on everyone's actions. Just as death can come quickly and suddenly in the movies, Pruwet goes from hanging on every word of Hart's war stories to writhing in pain as we see his skin begin to burn. Yes, for what appears to be the first time on screen in Villeneuve's film Dune universe, a child is murdered…and we see it happen.
This is not, strictly speaking, the first time children have been killed in this series, as it can be assumed that a number of them died when Feyd-Rautha bombed Sietch Tabr, which was inhabited by hundreds of Fremen. However, we never see the death of any of the children, nor have any children been the target of on-screen murder. In the movies, we saw children, but we rarely heard about them. Dune: Prophecyeven children can be removed if it means winning the war.
Why did Desmond Hart kill Pruwet Richese?
To oversimplify the reasoning behind this shocking murder, Pruwet was killed by Hart because of his AI-controlled lizard toy. Beyond this isolated incident, Pruwet was assassinated because Hart suspected that an attack on his regiment and the theft of the Corrino family's spice shipment had been carried out in order to incite their emperor to appeal to the Richese fleet for their protection, thus bringing the family closer to the Great Houses through marriage. When Hart shared his report on the attack on the spice operation, which Kasha had carefully failed to uncover, he noted that the equipment used in the attack came from the outside world. This toy, and the Richese's convenient marriage proposal, was enough for Hart to believe they were behind the attack.
This is also why Kasha suffers the same burning fate as Pruwet. Hart feels that the Bene Gesserit are manipulating powerful people like Emperor Corrino for their own ulterior motives. Pruwet's death effectively dissolves the partnership between the families, removing them from inside the Corrino family where they can do untold damage.
We still don't know the true ramifications of Hart's actions, or how he was able to kill both of these people in the same way despite only being next to one of them. But if the first episode of the series is willing to cross a moral line that the films have never explicitly addressed, we can expect to discover, in graphic detail, just how violent this war can become.
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