this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2024
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Well, it's a little more complex than that. he's the good guy in macro scale. (if you believe his own presciece. Which is admittedly dubious due to the obvious conflict of interest. But Paul shows on numerous occasions that he can indeed see the future.) everything Paul did (and by extension everything Leto II did) was to guarantee humanity's survival as a species. Paul essentially sacrificed billions of lives across the empire in order to ensure humanity wouldn't go extinct. That being said he is definitely not the good guy to the Fremen. He and Leto II fucked that group of people over big time.
He's a coward. Rides the whole "messiah" thing to get revenge for his family, thinking he can avoid the bad parts, then it happens anyway. He glimpses the Golden Path but instead of going through with it he gets depressed and dies. If his son didn't do the job for him, billions would have died in his Jihad and then humanity would have gone extinct anyway. I remember Leto II's feelings towards his father were... complex in God Emperor.
Anyway I'm very happy with Villeneuve's adaptation because he did a much better job than Herbert at writing Paul as a Villain (Herbert famously regretted that his depiction wasn't clearer which is the why he wrote Messiah).