Sorry, missed this response.
Paul is definitely a messiah figure, but there is no mention of his skin color in the book. His father and grandfather are described as having dark/olive skin, same as some of the Fremen and others, including (I assume) the Emperor. But for most characters, including Paul, Jessica, and the Baron, we don't what color is their skin.
Skin color isn't important in the book because it's not particularly useful for coding because books aren't a visual medium. If we look at the coding that
is present in the book for Paul: He has a Christian first name, a Greek last name, and he's the son of Duke Leto. Duke being a European title, and Leto being an Italian name. The religious leaders are known as Reverend Mother, and their holy book is the Orange Catholic Bible. Meanwhile, the Fremen are desert nomads, and use terms like "jihad" and "Madhi." They call their religious leaders Sayyadina, which is rooted in the Arabic and Muslim term Sayyid used as an honorific title for the family of the Prophet Mohammed. They are very clearly coded as Arabic or Muslim or both. Just like spice is coded like cocaine, like pepper and nutmeg, and like crude oil all at once.
Once we move to the movie, however, we see a difference. Suddenly skin color is quite relevant to coding because we lose some of this other coding simply because the characters don't constantly use these terms like the book has to. It's something the actors can't hide. It's as much a part of their costume as anything else. The major characters that have a dark complexion that are not Fremen are Leto and Duncan Idaho and Thufir Howat, each of which are characters that in the book seek to bridge the gap between the off-world Atreides and the Fremen to block the Emperor's plan. What's more, when we see that Harkonen, they're often
marble white and literally bathe in
black oil spice. This is not a subtle metaphor for this movie. And who is the one with the darkest skin? None other than Liet-Kynes, the Fremenest Fremen who Fremens. Also Jamis, who also rejects Paul. Meanwhile Stilgar and Chani are, like Leto, Thufir, and Duncan, both middle brown complexion and they eventually become two of Paul's strongest allies.
The big exception is the Emperor's Herald of the Change, portrayed by Benjamin Clementine. However, that character is literally in the movie to be an embodiment of the Emperor's deception. Of course his physical appearance is false.
So, yeah, I think skin color is extremely important to the Dune movies, and I don't think Villeneuve is really trying to be that subtle about it.
Personally, I believe that more than 10 000 years of bloodlines manipulations by the Bene Gesserit makes mapping skin colours of the people in the Dune universe to the current day ethnicities and related economic/cultural/political dynamics kind of a moot point, at least to the main characters who all come from the noble families which were the focus of BG breeding program.
I never got the impression that skin color was a factor in Herbert's message, while religion, ideology, and social status had everything to do with it. Paul is disruptive to the Fremen not because of his skin color, but because he is the messiah. And Fremen are vulnerable to this due to blindly following a religion in the first place. So they fall prey first to the Keyneses and then to Paul. Even the BP Missionaria Protectiva builds on the underlying substrate of the Fremen original religion, twisting it so that the saviour they were waiting for would match the Kwisatz Haderach.
I don't think it's useful or meaningful to try interpret the movies as though they're not adaptations. That is to say, that the artists that made the movies aren't going to use their talents to express the themes and ideas using just the visual aspects of the film even if they're not literally textual in the books.
So, saying, "Well Herber didn't do this..." is a little weird if we're talking about the movies. Yeah, Herbert didn't do it, but
Villeneuve did.
