The new 'Dune: Part Three' trailer shows Paul Atreides ruling the empire he spent two movies dreading

Warner Bros. and Legendary played the second trailer for "Dune: Part Three" for a room full of fans in Los Angeles on Tuesday, then beamed it to IMAX houses in Chicago, Dallas, Toronto, Montreal, London, Berlin, Mexico City and Abu Dhabi. The teaser back in March was mostly mood and menace. This one shows the movie its hand.

The footage jumps seventeen years past the end of "Part Two." Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) sits on the throne he spent two films telling everyone he did not want, and the holy war he kept seeing in his visions is no longer a vision. It is the government. Chani (Zendaya) is on the wrong side of it, and the trailer builds the whole thing around the distance between them: the man who won, and the woman who watched what winning turned him into.

What the trailer is selling

Denis Villeneuve has said since the last movie that Paul was never meant to be a hero, that Frank Herbert wrote him as a warning about the people we hand our faith to. The trailer takes him at his word. Chalamet plays Paul cold and far away, a prophet who has stopped arguing with his own worst outcomes. When Chani tells him she never wanted power taken in her name, it reads less like a lover's complaint than a verdict.

The new cut also finally shows the pieces fans have been waiting to see move. Robert Pattinson turns up as Scytale, a shape-shifting Tleilaxu agent whose job in the story is to pull Paul down. Jason Momoa is back, but not as Duncan Idaho, who died in the first film. He plays Hayt, a body grown in Duncan's image and handed to Paul as a gift with a knife inside it. Anya Taylor-Joy, teased at the close of "Part Two," steps in as Paul's sister Alia. And there are sandworms, because there are always sandworms, and Villeneuve still knows how to make them land like weather.

The craft worth caring about

Villeneuve shot most of this on 65mm film, with select sequences on 15/70mm IMAX and the desert scenes on IMAX-certified digital cameras to hold onto what he calls the brutality of that light. It is a different recipe from the first two films, which were captured on digital and printed to film to fake the grain. Linus Sandgren takes over as cinematographer from Greig Fraser, who is off shooting Sam Mendes' Beatles project. Hans Zimmer is back on the score, Joe Walker is back in the edit, and Villeneuve co-wrote the script with comics writer Brian K. Vaughan, adapting Herbert's "Dune Messiah."

December 18, in IMAX, one last time

The film opens December 18 in IMAX, and Villeneuve keeps insisting it is not a trilogy capper so much as a standalone with its own identity, which is the kind of thing directors say when they do not want you to expect a bow on top. The demand is not in doubt. IMAX 70mm tickets for nineteen premium screens went on sale in April and sold out within minutes, months before anyone had seen a full trailer.

Here is who you are watching for:

Whether it lands

A trailer is a promise, not a movie, and the promise here is a tricky one. Villeneuve is asking a mainstream December audience to spend close to three hours watching its hero curdle into a tyrant, in a story where the emotional payoff is a breakup and a reckoning rather than a rescue. That is a harder sell than a war epic, and the first two films earned the right to try it by getting better as they went. The March teaser hinted at the darkness. This trailer commits to it. Sold-out tickets in the middle of July suggest Villeneuve is not the only one who wants to see how far he can take it.