Quote Originally Posted by Mechalich View Post
One thing about Dune is that spice production must continue no matter what. The consequence of failing to produce spice is civilization wide collapse across the whole Imperium. The Fremen don't have the ability to produce spice on an industrial level sufficient to sustain civilization, something that everyone, including the Fremen themselves, knows. The film actually quite carefully recognizes this and has Stilgar quickly acquiescence to this reality by telling Leto 'you can mine your spice,' because the alternative is to bring the power of the whole Imperium against them.

Spoiler
Show
Paul's insight, critically, is that properly mobilized and trained, the Fremen can take on the forces of the whole Imperium and win, and therefore he leads them to crush spice production and therefore lures the Emperor to send his forces to Arrakis where the Fremen have a massive advantage. This, ultimately, is Dune's great bit of world-building sleight of hand, in that the universe is setup in a such a way that ten million or so Fremen can mobilize a fighting force sufficient to overcome the resources of an Emperor who controls hundreds or thousands of planets, something that should be impossible even if one Fremen was worth ten other fighters.
Meh
Spoiler: the books and later books
Show
The Fremen did beat the Emperor's troops on Arrakis, but it was Paul's threat to nuke the Spice out of existence that actually got Shaddam to stand down. The Emperor had only sent a couple legions to the planet and despite every Great House having sent troops there, the Guild kept them stuck in orbit, so I wouldn't say the Fremen overcame the resources of the entire Imperium.

As for the spice production, while "the spice must flow" sounds very nice, God-Emperor tells us the production was completely halted for hundreds of years, up to possibly three millenia and the Imperium managed to carry on (albeit at greatly reduced speed) on reserves alone.