The funniest moment in Dune: Part Two sees a random enemy soldier get impaled on a rocket launcher and blasted across the desert of the planet Arrakis. It is hardly gag material (unless Arnie was at hand with a “you’re fired” quip) but it is a welcome moment of playfulness, even glee, in what is otherwise the most self-serious blockbuster in years.
Serious is the order of the day for director Denis Villeneuve, continuing the story he started in Part One back in 2021. Villeneuve’s filmography is, despite the desert setting of these last two films, intensely cold. His characters are memorable but not likeable whilst his undeniable visual power (shown in films like Blade Runner 2049) is used to evoke a feeling of dread or melancholy, even emptiness, rather than joy. In many ways he is a modern day Stanley Kubrick or Ridley Scott; a stylist who creates sensory cinematic experiences rather than enrapturing character dramas.
But this suits the world of Dune perfectly. Frank Herbert’s book series is itself more a parable or an exploration of themes than it is a straight story. Fascinated by ecology and how environments shape people, Herbert’s writing is far more concerned with world building than offering a satisfying narrative. Case in point: the final ‘battle’ in Part Two is staggering in its size and power – in the book it is barely two small paragraphs (but if you want a highly detailed discussion about Bene Gesserit breeding programmes, you’ve got it). Luckily, for the film, there does not seem to be an ounce of studio interference here in making this a ‘safe’ blockbuster, with Villeneuve able to circumnavigate the exposition by thrusting striking, unique imagery in our faces like flying mines and silent jetpacks. That he jumps around from scene to scene without telling us how we got there is sort of the fun.
In his review for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Roger Ebert wrote that “[it is] such a visionary use of all the tools of special effects, such a pure spectacle, that it can be enjoyed even by those who have not seen the first two films.” This almost stands true for Dune: Part Two: the power that cinematographer Greig Fraser, composer Hans Zimmer and the incredible sound team have over the audience is so overwhelming we can only cower in awe in our cinema seats. However, the three Lord of the Rings films (of which this sci-fi series keeps getting compared to in terms of spectacle and story) each have a three act structure for people to dial into. Conversely, Dune: Part Two really is the second act of the overall story that was cruelly cut off at the end of Part One and it offers only the faintest outline of what happened previously to remind the audience.
What story there is sees Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet, with far fewer silver sovereigns in his pocket than a few months ago) induct himself into the Fremen culture in the heart of the desert. Some Fremen, led by Javier Bardem’s Stilgar (No Country For Fremen), believe Paul to be ‘Lisan al Gaib’, a promised messiah who will lead the Fremen to ‘paradise’. Others, like Paul’s romantic interest Chani (Zendaya, offering her best film performance as penance for the Spider-man films), thinks of the prophecy as a means of control from outside Arrakis and that Paul is just a nice guy and all the signs are accidents.
Elsewhere in the galaxy, the Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgaard) enlists his nephew and heir, Feyd Rautha (a deliciously evil Austin Butler, shedding his Suspicious Mind for a Psychotic Mind), to return order to Arrakis. In other words: bad guys want the desert planet for wealth, natives want it back.
Dipping in and out is a ridiculously well-costumed ensemble that includes a calm Christopher Walken, Florence Pugh, Rebecca Ferguson, Josh Brolin, Charlotte Rampling and Dave Bautista. Chances are you won’t have a traditional ‘favourite’ character but you might enjoy Bardem’s kiss-ass performance the most. I certainly did. One can only imagine them in their dressing rooms practising saying “Kwisazt Haderach,” “Bene Gesserit,” “Shai-Hulud” or “Sarduaker.” Few words in Dune’s screenplay begin with a lowercase letter.
The action scenes are electrifying. The opening, set against an eclipse that turns the desert into a rusty field, grabs you by the throat and continues to squeeze for the next 150 minutes. There is extensive use of the great sandworms here with the stand-out being Paul’s first ride on one, a thrillingly staged moment in which our lithe hero is dragged through the Arrakis underworld before emerging to Zimmer’s pulsing music, his right foot finding the support to allow him to stand straight. This is a film where bullets, lasers, fists and knives carry a propulsive weight to them, where Dave Bautista can bash a skull in on a computer monitor and Austin Butler can slash throats with a simple swish all within the confines of a 12-rated certificate. It all looks astonishing – not a single frame is incomplete. The integration of miniatures and models with precisely rendered CGI is seamless. In a time where CGI is seen as cinema’s worst enemy, this is a reminder of how powerful a tool it can be in the right hands.
It ends with triumph and disaster. You may be tricked by the press into thinking this is ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ or ‘The Two Towers of this generation.’ I too found myself thinking of those sequels but, as Dune piles on the effects and reaches a point fairly early on of maximal breadth and vision, it seemed that The Godfather Part II was the sequel rattling around my head. It was not just the long breaks we take from the different story strands but the arc of Paul bears a startling resemblance to Michael Corleone as he is forced into the unforgivable. The once innocent heir to a loving father ends up forsaking his own inherited values in the quest for revenge. Like The Godfather, it is the face of his lover we leave the film on, horrified by her other half’s mutation. All this is swirling around a simple thesis that the corruptible are drawn to power and that even Messiah figures are created not by themselves but by their scheming parents, their loyal believers and the political constructs.
In that same Return of the King review, Roger Ebert also observed that the “epic fantasy has displaced real contemporary concerns” and that the audiences of the early 2000s were more interested in Middle-earth, Hogwarts or Tatooine than they were in planet Earth. Would Ebert have preferred Dune, which feels almost too obviously connected to the world affairs of today? Like all epic stories, it plays just as well as an immersive work of escapism as it does an allegory for the potency of religion, power as an inherited value and even the joys and perils of drug use.
All of what I have written here is formal filler; a review must abide by certain rules and the experience I had watching Dune: Part Two cannot be adequately described. Many directors and actors talk of their first cinematic awakening as this earthquake in their life; Danny Boyle watched Apocalypse Now and was “sandblasted” by it its power. In much the same way, Dune: Part Two was, like Mad Max: Fury Road, The Revenant and Blade Runner 2049 for me, an audio-visual experience that I found overwhelming. I felt small watching it.
For A Few Thoughts More 