These are uncertain times for big, ambitious science fiction films, but with the release of French Canadian auteur Denis Villeneuve’s enveloping Dune: Part Two, the sandworm has turned. In bringing his thematically rich, visually stunning, formally bifurcated adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 space opera to a finale, Villeneuve has solved a riddle that’s beguiled big-brain filmmakers from Alejandro Jodorowsky to Ridley Scott, to David Lynch, all of whom struggled to adapt Herbert’s doorstop of a novel. (Unlike the former two, Lynch actually did make his Dune, but that 1984 flop is a camp curiosity, and Lynch has disowned it, as have many devotees of Herbert’s book and its five sequels.) Villeneuve reportedly wants to a make a third entry adapting Herbert’s follow-up, Dune Messiah, but just the fact he got to finish this one feels miraculous given that its precursor, Part One, was one of the very pricey movies that Warner Bros. sent sent straight to the Streaming Service Formerly Known as HBO Max in 2021, concurrent with its theatrical release in the U.S.
Urgent and compelling even to those who haven’t read or only vaguely recall Herbert’s dense far-future saga, Part Two runs a fleet 168 minutes, bringing the two halves’ combined run time to five hours, 23 minutes—none of them wasted! This latter part won’t prompt a reappraisal from anyone who complained that Part One was meandering or humorless, but this movie isn’t for them. It is largely humorless, save for a few sly line readings from Javier Bardem, and all the more absorbing for it. Bardem returns as a leader of the desert-dwelling Fremen of planet Arrakis, who are hunted by the brutal, colonizing, glabrous, and chalk-complected Harkonnen clan. The somber tone is actually a strength of the film—Villeneuve isn’t throwing in quips to try to make all this fantasy glib or palatable to civilians in the tiresome way so many superhero films of recent vintage have tried to do. Even Christopher Walken, in a handful of scenes as two-faced puppetmaster Emperor Shaddam IV, plays it straight.
A world in which Game of Thrones becomes a spinoff-spawning hit is a world ready for a straight-arrow Dune, which is basically Game of Thrones meets The Godfather anyway, though the book predates both.
Anyway, that Bardem character, Stilgar, believes the prophecies claiming that Timothée Chalamet’s Byronesque Paul Atreides, who, with his mother Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), is among the last survivors of a clan sent to harvest Arrakis’ precious life-extending, consciousness-expanding substance “spice,” will become a savior to the Fremen. Younger generations of these desert dwellers—chief among them Zendaya’s Chani, whose romance with Paul adds melodramatic sweep to the movie’s abundant scope—dismiss these religious convictions as propaganda, as does Paul himself. (He’s also haunted by visions seeming to suggest he’ll become a despot—a troubling thing to learn about oneself.) Much of this ancient dogma, we learn, has been seeded over generations by the Bene Gesserit, a secretive sisterhood devoted to the enlightenment of the human species. But they play the long, long game, making their motives opaque if not sinister. (As a reminder, Paul’s own mom belongs to this intergalactic coven of maybe-good witches!)
I don’t know why I’m indulging in the mortal critical sin of ladling on a plot summary here. Perhaps it’s to convince myself I actually understood a film I very much enjoyed. I think I got maybe 77 percent of it. Villeneuve (who co-wrote the screenplay with Jon Spaihts) is so adept at filling the frame with tension and mystery, and at slicing away the exposition Lynch left in, that you can just let the experience wash over you. Cinematographer Greig Fraser shot the movie in IMAX, and it warrants the maximalist format.
Like his fellow Canadian visionary James Cameron, Villeneuve upped his profile by making a superb sequel to a seminal, paradigm-shifting Ridley Scott classic—Aliens in Cameron’s case, Blade Runner 2049 in Villeneuve’s. But where Cameron has chosen to spend his remaining creative years on planet Pandora, manufacturing worlds out of whole digital cloth, Villeneuve is still shooting his movies in real places. Arrakis is played (mostly) by Jordan and Abu Dhabi, and that tactile mise-en-scene yields visceral dividends. You might actually feel the sand between your toes.
Villeneuve has expanded his already-packed cast from Part One, giving us brief but memorable turns from Florence Pugh as the Emperor’s daughter (and narrator) Princess Irulan, Léa Seydoux as a Bene Gesserit femme fatale—though I guess they’re all femmes fatale—and most intriguingly, a smooth-pated Austin Butler as Feyd–Rautha, the Harkonnen nephew sent to replace his brutal but bumbling sibling Rabban, played by Dave Bautista. (Rabban makes a big show of killing subordinates who displeased him, just like Darth Vader used to do.)
Lady Jessica and Paul both spend parts of Part Two in conversation with the unborn child growing inside of Jessica—a being Villeneuve actually shows floating in the womb like the Star Child at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. “This world is beyond cruelty,” her big brother tells her. Why wait until she’s actually born to let her in on what a sandy bummer it all is? Taken in tandem, Villeneuve’s grand, enveloping Dune splits the difference between Stanley Kubrick’s chilly exploration of human evolution and the pulpy Star Wars flicks that George Lucas fashioned out of Herbert’s novels, Akira Kurosawa movies, and ’60s Marvel Comics. Butler, playing the sociopathic young nephew of corpulent Harkonnen in Chief Stellan Skarsgård, exhibits a heretofore unseen range, affecting an uncanny impression of the Swedish actor’s voice. For a guy who got famous playing the King, he makes a pretty good prince.
Dune: Part Two (PG-13, 168 minutes) opens in area theaters today, March 1.