NATHAN WEINBENDER:
Leaving the theater after 2021’s Dune, I felt all alone in thinking it was cold and utilitarian and, dare I say, a bit dull. But now I can join the chorus of praise for Dune: Part Two, director Denis Villeneuve’s journey back into the sprawling world of author Frank Herbert, which pulls all the dangling threads of the first film into a rousing adventure about power and faith and the blurred lines between salvation and oppression.
If the first Dune was all set-up, the sequel is mostly pay-off, and now that the particulars of the universe have been established and allegiances laid out, I was able to get swept up in the grandeur of it all. And there’s a lot of grandeur.
Because Dune is the sort of fantasy novel that concerns complicated hierarchies and lineages and requires interplanetary maps and language glossaries, it can feel a bit daunting to jump in cold. So here’s a Dune Cliffs Notes. There’s a feud between houses—the Atreides and the Harkonnens—over an element called Spice, so powerful that it can serve both as interplanetary fuel and mind reading aid.
At the end of the first film, the Harkonnens overtook the Atreides clan, and our hero, Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), and his mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) fled deep into the desert of planet Arrakis. Now Paul, who’s got preternatural abilities of his own, is being trained for combat by the stealthy desert dwellers known as the Fremen and begins a romance with a soldier named Chani (Zendaya). Jessica, meanwhile, becomes a leader within the Bene Gesserit, an order of telepathic women.
Compounding all this is the fact that one camp of the Fremen believes Paul is the messiah who has long been prophesied as his peoples’ deliverance, while another suspects that following an outsider spells certain doom.
It’s a tribute to Villeneuve as a filmmaker that this plot is relatively coherent, even though I’m sure my comprehension barely scratches the surface. What really makes Dune: Part Two worthwhile is the sheer spectacle of it all, because it really does feel like these characters are mere specks swallowed up in a vast expanse.
It’s full of explosions and gladiator battles and giant desert worms that burrow beneath the sand and that the Fremen harness and ride like stallions. This sequel also introduces some intriguing new characters, including Florence Pugh as the daughter of an ailing emperor (Christopher Walken), Léa Seydoux as another Bene Gesserit with mysterious intentions, and Austin Butler as the bloodthirsty Baron Harkonnen’s even more bloodthirsty nephew.
Villeneuve and his co-writer Jon Spaihts also commit to the pessimism of Herbert’s novel, which explores how violence is a byproduct of capitalism, and how people in power use people on the ground as bargaining chips. These are hardly new observations, nor are they doled out subtly, but it’s far more overtly political than these kinds of movies are typically allowed to be.
It’s a meticulously designed production, from Greig Fraser’s cinematography to Patrice Vermette’s production design to Jacqueline West’s costumes. But unlike so many recent blockbusters, it doesn’t devolve into sludgy CGI cacophony in its third act. I’m still not particularly moved by this world beyond its sandy, glittery surface, but I’m as surprised as anyone that I’m looking forward to the third Dune.
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Nathan Weinbender is a film critic and one of the regular co-hosts for Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM here on KPBX.
