Is "Dune: Part Two" the Definitive Sci-Fi Movie of the 2020s?
The second part of Denis Villeneuve's sci-fi/fantasy franchise is blockbuster filmmaking of the highest grade.
Note: I don’t exactly spoil the ending of Dune: Part Two, but I don’t not spoil it either. Either way, I talk about plot details that you might not want to read if you haven’t already seen it.
In an age of endlessly recycled intellectual property, the existence of a movie franchise like Dune is miraculous. How Denis Villeneuve managed to convince Warner Brothers to put $200 million behind an adaptation of a 60-year-old ecological allegory with aristocratic white boys and liberation theology is beyond me—and not simply because of its endless accusations of white saviorism and retrograde gender ideals, which it has weathered since Frank Herbert first published the novel in 1965. Unlike The Lord of the Rings—the sole fantasy series to which Dune’s megabudget scope can be accurately compared—Dune was designed as a trial-by-fire franchise: Warner Brothers would only greenlight a sequel if the first film was a financial success. And for as much monetary sense as that may make for studio executives, that’s a much tougher ask for Villeneuve, who suddenly became responsible for producing a hit blockbuster about warring intergalactic colonizers, secret matriarchal societies, and messianic ancient prophecies for a general audience, which was itself still suffering from a COVID-stricken global box office.
Lo and behold: In 2021, Dune managed to bring in $434 million from a COVID-stricken global box office. It wasn’t because the film was a masterpiece. It had many things going in its favor, not least of which was a visual aesthetic that envelops you in a world of jaw-dropping spectacle and Machiavellian palace intrigue. Yet among those highlights, narrative satisfaction was not one of them, as the first Dune film bore the brunt of the novel’s remarkably exhaustive (and exhaustively remarkable) storyworld. Frank Herbert’s Dune is a universe filled with patrician fiefdoms known as Great Houses; an impoverished desert planet called Arrakis that has long been pilfered for the Spice, a lucrative psychoactive substance that singularly allows for interstellar travel; and the Islam-adjacent Arrakis natives known as the Fremen, who prophesize about a savior from another world.
Dune is a dense, fascinating world in which to lose oneself, but it’s one that comes at a price. The first film suffered because of it, unable to manage an extensive mythology and tell a compelling story all at once. But while that first foray into Arrakis may have been something of a slog to get through, there’s good news: Dune: Part Two has none of the expositional homework of its predecessor, and is a much better film for it. Where Part One focused almost solely on systems of power and the means by which they rise and fall, this sequel shifts its focus towards systems of belief: systems of prophecy, mass religion, and their relation to inexorable realities. In other words, the subjects in which Villeneuve is the most interested.
The film picks up from where its predecessor left off with startling immediacy. After a brief recap of the first film, delivered in compelling monotone by Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh)—a new character to the Duneverse, and the daughter of Emperor Shaddam IV (an imperious Christopher Walken)—we begin straight after the events of Part One, where boy wonder Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and his pregnant mother Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) have fled into the desert after their family was attacked by the Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård) in an Emperor-backed act of betrayal (the Dune equivalent of breaking the Geneva Convention). Among the victims are Paul’s father, the Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac), thus setting Paul on a path of Harkonnen revenge.
In the desert, Paul and Jessica come into contact with the Fremen, who have been exploited by the Harkonnen military-industrial complex for decades. Paul does a quick “enemy-of-my-enemy” check before realizing that he and the Fremen ought to be allies, and while the two of them are quick to agree on that front, the Fremen see Paul as something more than that. They proclaim Paul as Lisan al Gaib from the moment they see him: the prophesied Voice from the Outer World, and the fated Fremen Messiah.
Paul, ever the secular aristocrat, rejects the prophecy: He wants only to avenge his father’s death through a Harkonnen killing spree. But several of the Fremen have different plans for Paul, as does Lady Jessica herself, who knows that their only means of survival with these desert fundamentalists is through the creation of religious legend.
Paul’s push-pull relationship with the Fremen prophecy is the film’s spiritual core, and a brilliant piece of adaptation on the part of Villeneuve and co-screenwriter Jon Spaihts. The two understand the impossibility of translating every detail of a 500-page novel to the screen, and have resultingly elided or entirely removed several plotlines from the book in favor of a more focused cinematic experience. The film’s questions are pointed and philosophical: If Paul does not believe in the Fremen prophecy, does that mean that he cannot enact it? If the Fremen push him to fulfill his role without believing it, does that make their anti-colonial resistance movement any less authentic? Later in the film, we learn that the prophecy of the Lisan al Gaib was itself created by the Bene Gesserit, a secret society of matriarchal manipulators who for centuries have gained power by inseminating their religious order into planets around the galaxy—and of which Lady Jessica is a prominent member. What, then, does it mean for a religion to be externally imposed, rather than birthed naturally from its own peoples?
Dune: Part Two asks these questions with sweeping excitement over the course of its two-hour-and-forty-five-minute runtime, but especially so in its first act, when the bulk of the film’s spiritual and political arguments take place. This is when Paul struggles the most to accept his imposed prophetic title, rejecting the notion that he is anything more than a skinny princeling trying to avenge his Daddy’s death. He continues to aid the Fremen in their rebellion against the Harkonnen with his father in mind, which only pushes his mother and his Fremen compatriots into religious frenzy.
It is also during this sequence that Paul falls in love with Chani (Zendaya), a Fremen warrior who, like Paul, hates the Fremen religion. Chani is of the Northern Fremen tribes, who, in stark opposition to the more fundamentalist Southern tribes, are fiery anti-colonialists with an atheist bent. (It is worth noting that this North-South political divide, like much else in Dune: Part Two, did not exist in the novel; it is rather another of Villeneuve and Spaiht’s acts of adaptation.) Out of this political alignment do the two begin their affair, and Villeneuve does a magnificent job capturing their romance in the manner of Doctor Zhivago, framing Chalamet and Zendaya’s movie star beauty against the backdrop of political turmoil and grand natural spectacle.
Whatever his vision, Paul’s path is bent towards messianism, which increasingly tests the boundaries of his and Chani’s relationship. The two lovers grow distant as Paul grows closer to the more fanatical Stilgar, a Southern fundamentalist played by a standout Javier Bardem, playing up his character’s radicalism with a degree of humor that is decidedly and welcomely un-Dune. The crux of Stilgar’s character arc lies in him having to convince his desert brethren that this skinny white boy will somehow bring them salvation—an endlessly funny joke, given just how skinny of a white boy Chalamet truly is.
It’s enough to know that Chalamet, a gifted actor who has proven himself enough times (in dramatic roles like Call Me By Your Name and Little Women and comedic roles in Lady Bird and Don’t Look Up), will have achieved DiCaprio levels of stardom by the time this film settles into its role as an epochal classic, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I found it hard to believe in Chalamet as a desert warlord. It could be that the nature of the story is fairly outré (“pretentious one-percenter leads oppressed natives into glorious jihad” is a pretty tough sell), but there’s something about Chalamet himself about which I remain unsold. It could be in how Chalamet makes no effort to play Paul with timelessness. His accent is stubbornly 21st century American, entirely missing the point of a fantasy epic. (We’re supposed to believe that these characters are living on other planets, not TikTok-era Los Angeles.) Zendaya, in the same age bracket as Chalamet, faces a similar issue: She looks and sounds far too American in a role that should feel hypnotically alien.
All of this is true, and for as much as it pains me to say, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I found myself swept up in their grand romance. Theirs is the film’s emotional anchor, and though their onscreen chemistry doesn’t quite hit the Lawrence of Arabia-level highs at which Villeneuve aims, it manages to hold together a tale of genuinely intergalactic scale.
By the film’s third act, as Paul fully embraces the role of Messiah while Chani begins falling ever further into her atheist fury, their romance takes on an altogether new significance. Paul’s feelings for Chani have grand implications: In loving a Fremen woman, he further solidifies his place within their culture, but in doing so risks cutting himself off from other, more politically necessary marriage prospects. I suppose that makes it sound like Downton Abbey if it was set in a war-torn desert, and while there’s a funny truth in the comparison between this movie and the palace intrigue side of Masterpiece Theater, the magic of Dune: Part Two is in how it weaves the personal, the political, and the spiritual into a majestically operatic mélange.
Paul and Chani’s relationship is but one element in the film’s sprawling-yet-contained cinematic universe. The world design of Arrakis, already executed to gloriously in the first film, manages to be even more engrossing here, as in magnetic action setpieces in which Sardaukar warriors float up the side of a cliff rock face while Fremen guerilla warriors emerge snakelike from the sand below. Villeneuve and DP Greig Fraser are unparalleled in cinematizing the grandeur of political ritual: the facial tattoos and ornate headwear that adorn Lady Jessica when she takes on the high religious role of Reverend Mother and the rapturous crowds of thousands that fill out when the Lisan al Gaib takes center stage are utterly striking. And there are, of course, the sandworms: beasts as towering and inhuman as they come, and on whose backs Paul and the Fremen manage to ride by placing hooks in their unruly spines.
Villeneuve’s Arrakis is one of the great places in the movies—and it isn’t even the only planet in which Dune: Part Two takes place. The middle act of the film shifts its focus away from Paul and towards Giedi Prime, the homeworld of the Harkonnens: an immaculately designed miasma of evil, with black-and-white skies that accentuate its fascist architecture. Here we meet Part Two’s hairless hunk of a villain, Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen (Austin Butler). He is a warped mirror-image of Paul: a scion of a colonizing royal family, though with blade-licking, concubine-stabbing masochism that marks him apart from Mr. Atreides. Such actions might come across absurd were it not for Butler’s delightfully crazed performance, functioning in no small part because of his decision to imitate the particularities of Stellan Skarsgård’s Swedish accent. His vocal imitation adds color to Giedi Prime’s colorless world, giving that hint of exoticism that Chalamet and Zendaya’s performances sorely lack.
The film slogs a bit in its third act, once it returns from Giedi Prime to Arrakis. Or perhaps more accurately, it careens: There’s a rush to wrap up all the plot threads established since Part One, including the return of characters Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin), Atreides military leader and Paul’s old master, and Rabban Harkonnen (Dave Bautista), who loses the title of Arrakis governor to Feyd-Rautha after failing to manage his anger issues. There’s also quite a bit to do with Paul seeing the future through Spice ingestion, giving him a corporeal understanding of his role as the Lisan al Gaib, and with Lady Jessica’s unborn child, with whom she begins mystically communicating while in utero. It’s a lot to deal with—too much, in fact. There’s credence to the notion that the first Dune novel alone could justify three feature films, rather than the two-part structure Villeneuve currently in place. Then again, Villeneuve appears to have fit Dune: Part Three into his grand plan, so we’ll have to wait and see whether that crackpot theory holds any water.
Even with a third entry on the way, it’s impressive the extent to which Villeneuve has delivered the sense of a complete Dune arc across two 160-minute films. Dune: Part Two concludes with a nail-biting knife duel of interstellar significance—one that echoes a similar fight scene at the end of Part One. At the end of Part One, Paul found himself forced deeper into the Fremen world, introduced to a prophesized role that will have lasting consequences for the world around him whether he believes in it or not. At the end of Part Two, Paul seizes power in an act of symbolic violence that unites and severs his connection with the Fremen all at once. All the while, his belief in his role remains uncertain. Even as he becomes the Messiah, he retains a pragmatic self-awareness that, it seems, will forever hold him back from total belief. What might the consequences be?
Villeneuve is never blunt with these ideas; he instead gives them the cinematic treatment at micro and macro levels alike, never once losing sight of their harmonic whole. It’s a magnificent experience. The film’s themes and spectacle that aren’t just aligned, but symbiotic—a rarity in science fiction cinema. This is refreshing, at times radical blockbuster filmmaking of the highest grade, and with an unmistakable brand of theology and psychedelia that will last for decades.