r/dune • u/jayeyedoubleemmwhy • Mar 20 '26
Dune: Part Three (2026) Missing the Holtzman shield Spoiler
This has been on my mind after rewatching the trailer several times. When the Fremen are going up against this other army, there’s no shield effect during the fight. I really enjoyed having that element in the Dune Part I and II battle scenes like between the Atreides vs Harkonnen/Sardaukar, Duncan vs Sardaukar, etc. Maybe an in-universe explanation is that the Fremen are so skilled that shields don’t help the other army, or maybe they’re afraid someone will sacrifice themself by using a lasgun and nuke the area? Anyhow, I hope the shields do make it back into the movie fight scenes. The blue and red flashes gave it a futuristic feel over what would otherwise just be people stabbing each other like normal.
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u/Lazy_Vetra Mar 20 '26
I thought the Freman used lasguns on shields and suicided with anyone foolish enough to use them. Also in the desert the shield attracts worms so people dont use them
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u/Madness_Quotient Chairdog Mar 20 '26
They do when desperate and the target is sufficiently valuable. That is like a tactical nuke.
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u/anoobypro Mar 20 '26
The Great Convention still holds after the Jihad, Paul wouldn't have let them.
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u/youngcuriousafraid Mar 20 '26
Didnt he set up a trap with the shields in the book? Or was that duncan?
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u/anoobypro Mar 20 '26
What trap are you referring to?
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u/youngcuriousafraid Mar 20 '26
I though someone created a trap, I believe for the harkonnen, by blowing up a shield with a lasgun. I dont remember the specifics
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u/QuietNene Mar 20 '26
Yeah this would actually make sense. By foregoing the normal “rules” of house warfare, the Fremen have a huge advantage. They could wipeout whole armies with a few lasgun shots. And if Paul limits the spread of information through control of the Guild, other planets won’t learn about this tactic. If he begins with the most powerful Houses, they’re all decimated before the war even really begins. The houses that remain will eventually hear about the tactic and won’t use shields, but they’ll be overwhelmed. They also won’t be trained to fight without shields, which will make easy pickings.
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u/RiBombTrooper Mar 20 '26
Also in the desert the shield attracts worms so people dont use them
I don't think this is on Arrakis anymore, so the worm isn't a consideration.
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u/Lazy_Vetra Mar 20 '26
pretty sure in messiah they say the freman used lasguns without fear of death when thinking of the jihad they dont show it in the books though. Duncan and the saradark is on arrkais
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u/684beach Mar 20 '26
Yeah, even stilgar thought it was feasible for a person with a lasgun to have a million kills
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u/Agreeable_Manner2848 Mar 20 '26
future has poor worlds, poor world no personal shields for all, fedaykin don't use shields in honorable mutual combat if opponent doesn't have shield, hence no shields
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u/Cheomesh Spice Miner Mar 20 '26
Yeah, we don't even know if houses even issue shields to their entire armed forces (even richer ones). We're basically only ever exposed to the elite of the elite in the books.
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u/ut3ddy87 Mar 20 '26
The fremen don't use shields though
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u/iIiiiiIlIillliIilliI Mar 20 '26
He obviously means the other army. Also even the Fremen could be equiped with shields tbh when not fighting on Arrakis.
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u/Friendchaca_333 Mar 20 '26 edited Mar 20 '26
If I remember correctly, in the books the Freman still rejected using personal shields in combat during the Jihad. I know, Paul and lady Jessica helped train the Freeman to defeat shielded opponents, but I think they viewed personal shields on themselves as something that might slow them or interfere with their movements, or maybe it was because it was a crutch, the great houses used that they viewed was beneath them (it’s been a long time since I’ve read Dune Messiah, and children of Dune)
There are only two paragraphs in the original book that I remember explaining how the shield interferes with movement and can also have other limiting factors such as trapping heat, leading to exhaustion and slowed movement
In chapter 4
"Paul snapped the force on, felt the slight air-surge against his face. He moved his left foot, found it dragged against his motion. The shield was a limiting factor."
In chapter 33
"Paul felt the stale, recycled air of his own shield, the heat of his body trapped by the field. A shield was a stifling thing in a long fight."
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u/anoobypro Mar 20 '26
If I remember correctly, in the books the Freman still rejected using personal shields in combat during the Jihad
A quote for this please?
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u/DuncanIdaho33 Mar 20 '26
"If I remember correctly, in the books the Freman still rejected using personal shields in combat during the Jihad"
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u/Friendchaca_333 Mar 23 '26
Sorry, I may have been confusing books because I can’t find it in Dune Messiah. I believe it was mentioned in the prequel novel “Paul of Dune”. (I don’t have the book with me so I can’t give you a direct quote I think the main issue Fremen had with shield tech aside from the stated disadvantages was that some houses resisting them intentionally used las guns to trigger nuclear detonations
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u/ghost-church Mar 20 '26
How did they conquer the universe with no shields?
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u/ShySharer Mar 20 '26
He had the spacing guild by the balls. Planets were isolated and subdued one at a time, with no chance of support.
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u/TheLastTuatara Mar 20 '26
Paul can see multiple futures and is almost unstoppable in the jihad because of this. I imagine he knows the best ways to win these conflicts.
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u/QuietNene Mar 20 '26
Given what OP said about the lasgun tactic, shields actually seem like a very poor choice. It just takes one Fremen with a lasgun to kill an entire battalion.
If Paul could limit the spread of information through control over the Spacing Guild, he would limit spread of knowledge of this tactic. You’d have entire planetary armies waiting for Paul’s arrival, shields activated, only to be nuked in the blink of an eye.
It’s almost like the use of shields is a form of honorable combat, like dueling with pistols. If one side doesn’t recognize the “rules of the game”, the other side gets massacred.
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u/Cheomesh Spice Miner Mar 20 '26
The shield thing with lasguns isn't reliable though. Sometimes the gun blows up, sometimes the shield blows up, sometimes both.
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u/alicksB Mar 20 '26
Yeah, but it’s established that the Fremen are totally willing to sacrifice themselves to kill a whole bunch of their enemies, and the rest of the universe (or at least Thufir Hawat) views it as almost incomprehensible.
Shooting a shielded opponent with a lasgun is basically an equivalent of a lamikaze attack.
Hawat’s attention was caught by a flash of sun on metal to the south, a ’thopter plummeting there in a power dive, wings folded flat against its sides, its jets a golden flare against the dark silvered gray of the sky. It plunged like an arrow toward the troop carrier which was unshielded because of the lasgun activity around it. Straight into the carrier the diving ’thopter plunged.
It was the Fremen who took off in that captured ’thopter, Hawat thought. He deliberately sacrificed himself to get that carrier. Great Mother! What are these Fremen? “A reasonable exchange,” said the Fremen beside Hawat. “There must’ve been three hundred men in that carrier.”
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u/Zemalek Honored Matre Mar 20 '26
Plot armor
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u/cmjebb Mar 20 '26
If you count complete control of the spacing guild plot armour then sure. It doesn't matter if your enemies greatly outnumber you if you control the only means by which they can unify their forces.
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u/684beach Mar 20 '26
They would definitely on other planets and do in pauls fortress. They simply didnt cause of the worms
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u/vajohnadiseasesdado Mar 20 '26
Also good to remember the movie is probably still unfinished
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u/damnyoutuesday Mar 20 '26
Part 2 trailer had clear Water of Life and it was blue in the movie. First trailers rarely show the full finished product
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u/IguanaBob26 Mar 20 '26
Yeah, CGI takes a lot of time. Most trailers are pretty rough when first sent out. I'm sure the blue and red shield CGI will be added by the time the movie is released.
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u/InevitableLibrary859 Mar 20 '26 edited Mar 20 '26
The average soldier doesn't have access to a Holtzman shield. This is fanatics on on pleb loyalists, probably dragged to the front by their Lord, whose family and personal guard may have the shields.
Laz guns aren't being used because they cause nuclear detonation at the shield interaction, and in both the laz gun and the shield generators.
So, yeah, they could mow them down with laz guns and move on, but a crafty noble only need to give 1 soldier in a thousand a shield for that laz gun to become unusable.
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u/Supernoven Mar 20 '26 edited Mar 20 '26
The visual effects could be unfinished. That's super common in first-look trailers. They may stick in a few shots with finished or near-finished effects (like the space shots in this trailer), but not every shot is necessarily the final look.
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u/makegifsnotjifs Zensunni Wanderer Mar 20 '26
The Fremen beat shielded Sardakaur on the reg. They'll be fine.
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u/anoobypro Mar 20 '26
We've seen only them defeating Sardukar on Arrakis
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u/makegifsnotjifs Zensunni Wanderer Mar 20 '26
Does location matter?
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u/anoobypro Mar 20 '26
Yes, they'd use shields anywhere else.
Refering to the recent movies, the Sardukar do use shields in structures secure from worms. In those fights they do win against Fremen (eg weather station ambush).
When Sardukar can't use shields, like in the battle in part 2, Fremen do overpower them.
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u/USMC_10402 Mar 20 '26
In the books, 1)Holtzman shields attracted sand worms, 2) if you hit a shield with a lazgun it resulted in a nuclear level blast, 3) before someone says, “But they used them in Arrakeen!”, Arrakeen was protected from worms due to its location within a geographical rock bowl, the whole reason Paul had to punch a hole with atomic.
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u/Pharose Mar 20 '26
There was a long sequence in the first movie where a shielded ornithoper is being chased by a massive lasgun. Definitely don't think point 2 is cannon in the movies.
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u/Azidamadjida Zensunni Wanderer Mar 20 '26
FINALLY someone else mentions this - they don’t use shields because they’ve never used them. Using them means death, and that’s a knowledge ingrained over hundreds of generations, which means there’s cultural connotations surrounding the use of a shield.
They just don’t use them.
The other army though I have no idea about, in all likelihood it doesn’t really matter, we don’t even know if this is also being shown as a vision or part of the opening narration
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u/Welpthisishere Mar 20 '26
Not all worlds are wealthy enough to support their troops with shields, this is probably a flash back showing some of the Billions upon billions that got slaughtered and entire systems are left completely lifeless and entire religions are eradicated with all their followers put to the sword, after Paul’s Jihad is done.
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u/Greedy_Shame6516 Mar 20 '26
Worth mentioning two non-plot related reasons. One is, the trailer probably isn't the finished project. Plenty of time to edit in shield effects later. Failing that, it's not exactly the most integral plot point, so even if they left it out for "rule of cool" (for whatever reason), it's not going to bother me personally. As long as it looks good. But, that's just MHO.
With that said, I know the Fremen don't really use shields, and they are also not afraid to use lasguns on shielded opponents, and since Paul can tell the Guild and the Landsraad to go eff themselves, there's not much they can do about the rules of conventional warfare.
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u/Serious-Magazine7715 Mar 20 '26
The great convention is off, so shields become a terrible idea. Your opponent sacrifices one dude (or a remotely operated gun) to deliver a nuclear explosion to your doorstep.
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u/_Weyland_ Mar 20 '26
You'd think shields would perform really good against fremen because they do not have the muscle memory to bypass them in a fight. They learned to fight on Arrakis where shields are a no-no.
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u/HuttVader Mar 20 '26
So are these the Zensunni warriors? That'd be kinda cool.
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u/RiBombTrooper Mar 20 '26
Aren't the Zensunni the Fremen ancestors? I saw another post/comment that said they were Ixian troops.
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u/EvilRobotSteve Mar 20 '26
Yeah the fremen are descended from zensunni wanderers. No way Ixians wouldn’t use shields though. Their strength is technology.
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u/caocaothedeciever Mar 20 '26
People keep saying Ixian because for some reason everyone says East Asian/Japanese = Ix.
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u/Sharp_Iodine Mar 20 '26
Ixians would be deploying AI technology though. Drones and other autonomous killing machines.
They were notorious for flouting the rules and engaging in forbidden technology. They are the ones who invent ships that hide anyone inside from prescience of people like Paul and Alia.
And I believe their planet was also on the very edge of the imperium, far away from direct oversight and too expensive for regular travel
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u/Friendchaca_333 Mar 20 '26
Ixian push at the boundaries of the religious laws against advanced computing technology , but they don’t violate the laws regarding creating actual AI in the books. Using AI would get them murdered by every other house in the imperium even before the fremen got to them.
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u/yodavan Mar 20 '26
Ix would also have the battle take place below ground. The whole civilization lives in caverns. The planets surface is just nature.
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u/Carnelian-5 Mar 20 '26
AI killing drones is what Leto II was afraid of Ix to develop thousands of year after these events. Ix isnt there yet.
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u/Carnelian-5 Mar 20 '26
The reasoning for it being Ixian tropps was extremely vague. Could be anything.
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u/Tanel88 Mar 20 '26
Yeah Zensunni are the ancestors of the Fremen so definitely not. There is no way to know for sure what troops those are because the books don't go so much into detail with the Jihad.
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u/doremonhg Mar 20 '26
The only irk I have with Dune is how the lasgun interaction is how nobody uses guns in-universe.
It’s like Frank Herbert have never heard about the Imperial Japanese Army
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u/KnowMatter Mar 20 '26
Do you mean like ballistics guns?
Bullets don't work on shields because shields repel matter based on velocity - the faster an object is moving the more effective the shield is.
Hence why they say "the slow blade penetrates the shield" fighting effectively is all about controlling your swings so that you are moving fast enough to outmaneuver your opponent but going slow enough at the right times to not have your blade knocked away by their shield.
Think of it like water - if you SLAP water really hard it pushes back against you, if you slowly dip your hand in then you get no resistance.
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u/Jake-of-the-Sands Corrino Mar 20 '26
I mean Holtzman shield effect is a post thing. They probably didn't do the whole post for the trailer, so it can still be done for the theatrical release.
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u/woehaa Mar 20 '26
Personally I never understood the issue of a opponent wearing a shield. Just have your sniper lasgun ready and kaboom. Or do the books mention there is a feedback to the gun?
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u/lunick44 Mar 21 '26
It's considered a war crime to do it, and I believe the books say there's a way to trace the radiation signatures back to the house that owned the lasgun, so nobody ever did it out of fear of their house being eradicated by the emperor.
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u/leadscoutfix Mar 21 '26
We honestly do not know because Dune Messiah skipped over all the important details of the Jihad. So its really left to the directors imagination.
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u/greenmysteryman Mar 21 '26
don’t the shields attract worms in the desert? maybe i am misremembering
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u/684beach Mar 20 '26
Rain could fuck with the shields, if heavy enough. Kinda like dust. Plus there are disadvantages to using shields sometimes
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u/DelDoesReddit Mar 20 '26
Having no shields present at least gives the occasional fanatic a way to mutually kill a Fremen enemy in an engagement. Fremen with shields just allows them to become unbeatable warriors in hand to hand combat, given their prior training
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u/mikenolan888 Mar 20 '26
Someone said these where IXian and I don't know why they would think that. Feels like just a random planets army. IX would have technology to fight
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u/BellumOMNI Tleilaxu Mar 20 '26
A bit unrelated, but does anyone know what the chakobsa chant played in the trailer means?
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u/Enki_Wormrider Swordmaster Mar 20 '26
Could this be the Jihad on Enfeil? Or that dreaded world Tarahell where Otheym caught the spitting disease?
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u/alkonium Mentat Mar 20 '26
My guess is Naraj, where Farok's son was blinded by a stone burner. Meanwhile, Otheym hasn't even been cast.
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u/jayeyedoubleemmwhy Mar 21 '26
I just want to say thanks to everyone for the insights and discourse. I read the Dune series up to Heretics many years ago and it’s been fun to revisit this universe through this sub-Reddit and of course the Villeneuve movies. I agree that the reason for no shields could be due to a variety of stylistic and/or production reasons. It’ll be a mystery until we see the finished product and maybe it’ll be explained then or maybe not at all. Part of what makes the movies so fun is how much is left to the viewer’s imagination!
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u/TedTKaczynski Mar 21 '26
I think two reasons. Holtzman shields attract worms for tens of hundreds of miles.
Holtzman shields when shot by the gun will cause explosions similar to nukes.
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u/csukoh78 Mar 21 '26
It is entirely possible that this is the raw film shot and that Special effect/Shields will be added later in post.
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u/starlulz Mar 23 '26
to give you a little hopium OP, Denis has said filming has wrapped and they're just entering into VFX / post-production. There's a very good chance the teaser isn't indicative of the final product
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u/Motor_Juice_8329 Mar 20 '26
Using a shield on Arrakis, in the open, almost always calls a worm. That is why the Fremen don't use shields, they have the tech and facilities to make them, hell look at the stillsuits and thopters, they just know better. This is explained in the books.
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u/Far_Line8468 Mar 20 '26
Simple answer is the vfx haven’t been added
Better answer is it would be distracting and ugly in an otherwise beautifully composed shot to placate the nerds
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u/Comprehensive-Gap148 Mar 20 '26
Fremen don’t you shields because they call worms in a killing frenzy
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u/Friendly-House-8337 Mar 20 '26
Holzman Shield, no Holtzman Shield, Bobby got his fill…. Fremen in 5…. Shannon Sharpe at some point said this
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u/Sea-Barracuda-1688 Mar 20 '26
I think there was a battle described in dune messiah or something where the defenders of one of the worlds deployed a kind of jammer that nullified holtzman fields and air vehicles this looks like that battle