After a considerable amount of table-setting in Dune: Part One, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two lets us loose into the worlds of mostly Arrakis, but also Geidi Prime to spend some quality time with the Fremen, the Harkonnen, and all of our old pals. At least the ones that didn’t die horribly in the first part.
We pick up the story of the Dune squad almost immediately following the events of the first film. Paul (Timothee Chalamet) and Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson, once again stealing the show) have now insinuated themselves into the Fremen and are learning their ways. Paul is still not convinced that he’s the saviour that Stilgar (Javier Bardem) believes he is, but he’s willing to play the role if it means motivating the Fremen towards an uprising. Jessica has evolved from the quietly powerful Bene Gesserit underling to – after drinking the intoxicating and lethal ‘Water of Life’ spice smoothie which is harvested from dead sandworms – the full on Reverend Mother to the Sisterhood and the dance mom from hell to Paul. She’s also having full conversations with her unborn baby Alia, and it’s not quite clear who’s directing whom. Paul’s relationship with Chani (Zendaya) is evolving as well, and I understand criticisms that the real human stories of Dune, like this one, tend to be snowed under all the political machinations and moving of pieces around the board. But that’s a ‘problem’ with Frank Herbert’s story as well.
In Arrakeen, the Harkonnens, under the iron fist of Beast Rabban (Dave Bautista), are struggling to maintain control of the spice production after a series of insurgent attacks by the Fremen. With Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard) losing patience with Rabban and demanding that he bring the spice operations back online, he begins to form an alternate strategy with his beautiful, monstrous warrior nephew Feyd Rautha (Austin Butler). Feyd is also being groomed by the Bene Gesserit as an alternative saviour to the Guild and future Emperor to Paul.
During all of this, Emperor Shaddam IV (Christopher Walken) and his daughter Irulan (Florence Pugh) scheme to retain any sort of grip on power over Arrakis and the universe. Irulan, also a member of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, is being manipulated by the Reverend Mother Mohaim to seduce Paul. Simultaneously, Lady Margot Fenring (Lea Seydoux) is charged with bringing Feyd under control in an impressive display of bet-hedging on the Bene Gesserit’s part.
Performance-wise, for me, Dune: Part Two is once again Rebecca Ferguson’s film, despite being only one of an absolute pantheon of A-list actors. You can feel her power, confidence, and authority grow in each scene and with each line. No longer cowed by her love of her Duke or even her son, she is fierce and driven to make Paul the religious leader she knows he can be, and which the Fremen desperately need. Zendaya’s Chani has a lot of work to do as well, and does so much silent, meaningful communicating of her misgivings about Paul’s rise to power and her complicated love of him as both a partner and, perhaps, as a leader and saviour. Interestingly, I find that Paul himself – quiet and introspective, but somehow impulsive in the first half of Dune: Part Two, feels like a secondary character until he, too, drinks the Water of Life and becomes the Mahdi, Muad’ib, or one of the approximately two dozen other names he’s given. At that point, Chalamet and Paul both feel like they grow into the roles they’re given and command the screen in every sense.
The nakedly patriarchal worlds of Dune, with women seemingly relegated to courtesans and wives to be traded for power, feel slightly more egalitarian in Villeneuve’s films. One thing that Dune: Part Two really drives home is the multi-pronged ‘plans within plans’ of the Bene Gesserit, and how they’re really pulling all the strings here (if that wasn’t clear before) and that it’s the women of the Dune-iverse that steer the galaxy’s fate, for better or worse. Charlotte Rampling’s Reverend Mother Mohaim seems omnipresent in any scene where major decisions are being made, and her various agents – Irulan, Fenring, and (for a while) Jessica are interspersed throughout all the key Houses in the galaxy.
Villeneuve’s Dune: Part One was a smorgasbord of incredible cinematography, and Part Two is no different. Scenes on the Harkonnen homeworld, Geidi Prime, are stunning and are the most compelling part of Villeneuve’s bold vision. Starkly laid out in black-and-white, Geidi Prime looks like something ripped out of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, while retaining the HR Giger-inspired designs proposed by Alejandro Jodorowsky in his failed adaptation of the story. Unlike a lot of – far too many – sci-fi and space-set films, the worlds of this Dune-iverse don’t feel like the director lazily swapping out one green screen for another. Instead, each feels and breathes uniquely with their own energy. On Arrakis, it’s easy to feel small because when you’ve seen one desert, you’ve seen them all, but there’s an impressive scale to the buildings and vehicles, and certainly when either are placed next to the absolutely gargantuan worms, they feel truly epic in stature.
There’s a bigness in Dune: Part Two‘s sound design as well as the score, as well. If it weren’t for strikes and pandemics and all sorts of real world obstacles, to have this film alongside Godzilla: Minus One in theatres late last year may actually have done some structural damage to the bigger movie houses. When experienced in IMAX, the score bubbles up underneath and around you, and there feels like a constant low rumble as something big is always either underfoot or on the approach. Similarly, Hans Zimmer’s incredible score truly feels like something futuristic and otherworldly. Notes between notes and sounds and cadences that have no reference on earth just feel right for Dune. Both elements – score and sound – feel as though they’re baked right into the script, rather than being peppered in later to enhance certain elements, like – ahem – a spice. The aural experience of Dune: Part Two feels like a character, in and of itself. An auditory sandworm crawling just beneath the surface.
But, the world of Dune is sufficiently big that the small stories – between Paul and Jessica, Paul and Chani, even Feyd and Rabban or the Baron – often feel like fodder under the treads of a spice harvester. Villeneuve is very good at drawing this world and visually realizing a story so complex and grandiose that it fills every corner of an IMAX screen, but the details tucked between dunes and behind grains of sand get lost sometimes. It’s easy to lose one’s place in the story as it careens from house to house, and world to world. Part of it is a steadfast and (in my opinion) admirable belief from Villeneuve that showing is better than telling, and thus dialogue is a secondary concern. There’s a lot, but only so much, that one can say with a significant glance. It works for me, a person that’s already familiar with the book and every onscreen adaptation so far, but a less patient audience may feel differently.
With Dune: Part Two, and the whole of the story of Herbert’s novel now behind us, it’s natural to think of what comes next. Villeneuve seems to imply – and the presentation of certain characters and the film’s closing seem to support this – that the WB boardroom is already thirsty for a third installment, presumably based on Herbert’s ‘Dune: Messiah’ and, again, picking up where this film leaves off. To me, it’s almost perverse to think about those things just yet, when most people haven’t even seen Part Two at the time of this post. It’s also an indictment of the type of studio greed that Lana Wachowski skewered in The Matrix: Resurrections in 2021. The type that can’t let a film breathe or stand alone, or simply exist for a while before firing up the machine again to contribute to the ever-flowing firehose of content. Villeneuve, at least, seems resistant to rush back to the world after the last six or so years immersed in the sand.
Dune: Part Two does what I think every great literary adaptation should aspire to. It brings complex worlds and structures to life in ways they can only dream of on a page. Villeneuve, in expanding the story to two distinct parts with plenty of room to breathe, imbues Dune with context and layers of meaning that don’t resemble prior adaptations (including Lynch’s, which is a movie I still love and defend even if Lynch himself doesn’t) much at all. There’s also an artfulness to Villeneuve’s directorial sprit that feels too-often lacking in the big-budget science fiction world. For me, Villeneuve’s Dune makes me love the world Herbert crafted even more. It makes me want to re-read the books with the stunning imagery from these films in my head. It makes me want to re-immerse myself in that world. It feels like adaptation, done the right way.
Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two is playing literally everywhere as of March 1. See it in IMAX if you can.
