At fifty-six, Denis Villeneuve has built up a substantial filmography, with movies such as Prisoners, Sicario, Arrival, Blade Runner 2049, and, of course, Dune. Dune: Part Two is his biggest achievement yet. Right from the beginning, five minutes into the film, when gravity-defying Harkonnen soldiers float to the top of a rocky outcrop in a desert bathed in orange light, Villeneuve’s panache and assurance are on full display. The first Dune, winner of six Oscars, was an arthouse blockbuster. This sequel is on another level: it is a more muscular, more action-packed and more ambitious film.
It picks up right where the previous instalment left off. While Princess Irulan, the Emperor’s daughter (Florence Pugh), provides a quick recap at the start in the form of a diary entry, you may want to (re)watch Dune before going to the cinema. The audience follows the flight of Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) into the desert with his mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) after the evil Harkonnens invade Arrakis and kill his father. The pair join the native “Fremen”, the desert people. One of the Fremen, Chani (Zendaya), takes a liking to Paul and introduces him to their way of life. While the tentative relationship stumbles through some questionable dialogue (“You sandwalk like a drunk lizard”), they have good chemistry and are credible as a couple falling in love. Indeed, Zendaya is the emotional heart of the film, which puts a lot of pressure on a young actor (the budget falls just short of $200 million), but she rises to the responsibility with powerful screen presence.
There is a huge and impressive ensemble cast, too long to list here. Josh Brolin returns, as does Javier Bardem, who provides moments of comic relief as the tragic character of Stilgar, whose faith leads him to fanaticism. New actors join, among them Austin Butler as the psychotic Feyd-Rautha, the nephew and heir of big baddie Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård). Butler has lost his Elvis hairdo and throws himself into his performance with no inhibitions. I do not agree with some comments that the film is overly long, but things really get going after Butler’s appearance. Léa Seydoux makes a brief but memorable cameo in a BDSM-themed scene with Butler. One of the film’s few jarring notes could be Christopher Walken as the Emperor: I’m not entirely sure he knew who he was playing or where he was.
For Dune, Hans Zimmer deservedly won an Academy Award. Wanting Arrakis to sound like an alien world, he dispensed with the usual European orchestra; he and his musicians experimented and invented instruments, and he used the cries of vocalist Loire Cotler to brilliant effect. This time around, the inspired bagpipes do not reappear, but the score is once again one of the strongest aspects of the film: plangent, percussive, otherworldly, and very loud.
Throughout, Villeneuve is bold and surprising. Many creative touches set Dune: Part Two apart from other big-budget epics, such as the eerie yet beautiful shots of a growing foetus, Paul’s younger sister, or the monochrome sequence on the Harkonnen home planet, with its gladiatorial combat and inky fireworks. Villeneuve was insistent on using natural light as much as possible. This presented a significant logistical challenge during shooting in the deserts of Jordan and Abu Dhabi, but the cast and crew must know that their sacrifices were worth it: Greig Fraser’s cinematography is spectacular. In fact, the film offers one of the best examples ever of a combination of cinematography and VFX. The set pieces are awe-inspiring, from a guerrilla-warfare-style Fremen attack on a Harkonnen harvester, to the first time Paul rides a sandworm (this must sound crazy if you haven’t seen the film; it is hallucinatory and out there), to the final showdown featuring atomic weapons. The superlatives you will hear about the new Dune can sound trite, but it truly is gigantic, colossal, in scale.
Unlike the first movie, which had to end halfway through the events of the book, there is an ending here, but it is ambiguous. Villeneuve is true to the original intentions of author Frank Herbert’s vision, meaning that it is a cautionary tale about the danger of messianic figures. It concludes as “the holy war begins”, precisely the nightmare that Paul had wanted to avoid. An adaptation of Dune: Messiah, the next book in the series, will now surely follow. I, for one, will be there to see it. Yes, some critics will label Dune: Part Two silly, or portentous, and yes, it is based on a badly written pulp sci-fi novel, but I don’t understand how someone could fail to be entertained and swept up in the romance of it all. If I had seen it when I was ten years old, I probably would have thought it was the single greatest film ever made. As it is, it is a thoroughly immersive and exciting experience, one that reminds you what blockbuster cinema is all about, and I will go to see it again. As director Christopher Nolan has already said, it is Villeneuve’s Empire Strikes Back.
WORDS: Michael Healion
