No one is happy when a pivotal scene is left out of a movie adaptation. Sure, some things need to be cut out to make a story work. (After all, I don’t think anyone was disappointed that Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Ringsleft out the 20 pages of Tom Bombadil from the source material.) However, there are always certain scenes that get left out of movie adaptations that really sting to not see brought to life on the big screen. Dune has always had a rocky time getting adapted. With Denis Villenueve’s two-part adaptation, many fans finally got to see Frank Herbert’s masterpiece as a fairly accurate, and truly incredible film. Still, no adaptation is perfect, especially for a 700-page sci-fi epic, and Villenueve had to leave many scenes on the cutting room floor.

One of Herbert’s strongest qualities as a writer is managing to juggle well over a dozen major characters in a single book and make them each distinct, interesting, and important. One of the most fascinating characters from Dune is the Imperial Planetologist Liet-Kynes (Sharon Duncan-Brewster). Kynes has always had a reduced role in the movie adaptations of Dune, but it is specifically Kynes’ death scene that has been sadly underutilized by adaptations time after time. Kynes is an incredibly important character for understanding the themes of the story. For movie fans, Kynes is just a side character who dies in the second act saving the Atreides. In the book, he is the leader of the Fremen, the father of Paul’s (Timothée Chalamet) future wife, Chani (Zendaya), and the first person to truly believe in Paul Atreides as a messiah. Without Kynes, many of the subsequent books would take a very different turn, and readers would have been deprived of one of the best sequences in the entire story. Unfortunately, the scene has never been faithfully adapted onscreen, and as a result, many fans who have only seen the movies have no idea just how vital Kynes is to the story.

Kynes’ Death in ‘Dune’ Is Some of Frank Herbert’s Best Writing

Liet-Kynes saves the protagonist of Dune, Paul Atreides, and his mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), from death at the hands of their enemies, the Harkonnens. After helping them escape, Kynes is captured and sent into the desert of Arrakis to die of heat and dehydration. After wandering deliriously in the desert for hours, Kynes is killed by a massive explosion that comes from a build up of gas around a vein of the spice melange. Even these events are actually rarely used, with the only adaptation that even kept the basic details being the 2000 Syfy miniseries called Frank Herbert’s Dune. Meanwhile, Villenueve’s Dune changes the sequence to Kynes being stabbed rather than left to die in the desert, and the 1984 film leaves out Kynes’ death entirely. The basic description of Kynes’ death may seem modest, but what truly makes the scene exceptional is the interior thoughts by Kynes that play out in the book.

Kynes hallucinates his own father, who was the planetologist before him. With stunning prose, Herbert creates a dialogue between the two about the future of Arrakis. Herbert’s writing style is geared towards very descriptive, almost cinematic imagery and this scene is easily one of the most detailed scenes in the first book. The reader is given beautiful descriptions of the harsh desert landscape where Kynes is literally being killed by what he has spent his life’s work on: ecology. As this is happening, his father lectures him on the basic principles of ecology and the future of Arrakis. It is a tense read, as Herbert knew how to build up a scene with repetition of phrases and a constant drip-feed of information to the reader. There is a constant sense in Dune that the reader is learning something new about Arrakis, and in this scene, there is a host of information that is conveyed. Ecology and environmentalism are essential to the themes of Dune and this scene is the first moment in the books where it is truly explored to its fullest extent.

It’s Impossible To Adapt All of Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’ Effectively

A sad fact of life is that Dune is too ambitious, and too tied to the form of literature for a completely accurate book adaptation. It would be like adapting Moby Dick perfectly, whale descriptions and all. There really isn’t a way to execute some of the ideas. Herbert’s Dune constantly portrays the inner thoughts of characters throughout the book, and as Kynes is wary of Arrakis’ new arrivals, the reader only really learns things about Kynes through his interior monologue and characters who speak of him after his death. David Lynch’s 1984 version of the Dune tries to use narration to convey characters’ thoughts, and it is a painfully awkward disaster. This makes the decision by Villenueve to cut down Kynes role in the story a logical one. Villenueve is clearly more focused on the themes of caution against religious extremism and charismatic leaders, so it would make sense that the character who is primarily in the book to introduce the themes of environmentalism would have their role in the story cut down significantly.

Still, this trimming of Kynes, and especially his death scene, is always going to be a missed opportunity. If one day a new adaptation is able to actually use Kynes’ character to its fullest potential, it would be marvelous. It is unlikely that the scene will ever be adapted as it works only with the full context of Kynes’ purpose in the story. However, if a filmmaker was able to pull it off, audiences could finally understand the full narrative weight of Kynes. The leader of the Fremen sacrifices his life to save an outsider he just met, out of pure belief that this young man is going to save his people. It is a remarkable moment that changes the future of the Fremen, and quite fittingly, Kynes is killed by the natural processes he has devoted his life to understanding. It is the moment the story begins to truly feel otherworldly and without it there is a distinct feeling that a major piece to Dune’s story is missing.

Dune is available to watch on Max in the U.S.

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