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Originally Posted by GreenLantern2814
Never getting to see the emperor, we don’t know why he has beef with House Atreides - seems like an awful lot of rigmarole to go through just to immediately try and knock them off.
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The emperor basically killed two birds with one stone. Atreides was getting too powerful politically, as was mentioned in the early going, while Harkonnen was getting too rich from the spice trade. Well, he managed to kill off basically the entirety of Atreides while causing Harkonnen to have to spend enormous sums of money in carrying out their plan (you heard Baron Harkonnen say to Rabban when he was in his, er, bath, that he has no idea what the whole enterprise cost him).
Pretty shrewd move on the whole, if you can get away with it. But as Paul tells Kynes later on in the movie, it depends on the Great Houses letting it pass without incident - if they decide that this sort of thing can't be allowed, they could band together and remove the Emperor, so it's a risky play.
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Please correct me if I’m wrong, but from a character perspective, does he learn anything else?
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Yes. Quite a lot, largely due to the visions. If you can see a bunch of future possibilities for yourself, you basically age very quickly because in some ways you already "are" your future self, if you're seeing through your future self's eyes. You can see it in the scene in the tent where he realizes what he could become, the line about a thousand voices shouting his name and how she's made him into a sort of freak. After that his whole demeanour changes and he basically starts telling her what to do rather than the opposite - he becomes more in charge as the movie goes along. But it's pretty subtle so I don't blame people who haven't read the book and don't appreciate the change in his demeanour.