Let us not mince words. The plot of Dune: Part Two is so arcane, so shamelessly ridiculous, that to describe it is to risk discrediting the project. A messianic figure roams a planet teeming with psychotropic dust. Drowned worms excrete a magic potion. Christopher Walken is emperor of the galaxy. By rights, both the new picture and Dune, its 2021 prequel, ought to be among the stupidest moviemaking ventures ever conceived. That the films are instead masterpieces is nothing short of a cinematic miracle. See them back to back, on an enormous screen if possible, and settle in for one of the great fantasy epics of our time.
Like its prequel and source novel, Dune: Part Two takes place on the planet Arrakis, where a pair of noble families have lately struggled for dominance. In the 2021 film, the savage House Harkonnen struck the ruling Atreides clan, murdered its patriarch, and stranded its survivors in a vast desert. As the new movie opens, heir Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) and his mother, Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), have joined the nomadic Fremen people and must master their ways before plotting revenge.
From this narrative soil comes a small forest of seedlings. Having caught the eye of a Fremen girl (Euphoria’s Zendaya), Paul must prove himself worthy of her affection. So, too, must he navigate his new companions’ religious obsessions, chief among them the belief that Paul is a long-awaited savior. If the Dune pictures’ visual progenitors are Lawrence of Arabia and the Mad Max movies, their closest thematic relative may well be The Last Temptation of Christ. Wracked with visions of a holy war fought in his name, Paul understands his destiny in purely secular terms. Though he doesn’t quite want the “normal” life imagined by Scorsese’s Jesus, neither does he wish to assume the spiritual leadership of a restive, uncivilized, and fanatical tribe.
How, given our material age, does such crudely pietistic material work on screen? Any answer has to begin with director Denis Villeneuve, who now takes his place as the most consistently excellent world-builder currently going. As in previous films, not only Dune but Blade Runner 2049 and the surrealist Enemy, Villeneuve presents his universes’ quirks as faits accomplis rather than opportunities for exposition. Searching for Atreides holdouts, Harkonnen troops fairly soar up mountains, powered by technology that is its own visual explanation. Fremen elders extract water from enemy corpses with hardly a word. Villeneuve’s world feels, in short, like a place whose existence predates our interest. It has its own rough-hewn reality. The rationalist may squirm at the movie’s mythologizing, but he will find it difficult to roll his eyes.
This is not to say that the film offers audiences nothing practical, nor that it is so self-contained that allegorical possibilities fail to arise. It is tempting, lingering among the Fremen, to picture oneself with Afghani Mujahideen, fending off Harkonnen Soviets (or, less comfortably, Americans). Other viewers, notably those at the Gospel Coalition, have framed the movie as a “post-Christian artifact” that condemns religion by portraying it as a tool of social control. I am not opposed to these “readings” any more than I reject those who think the Scooby-Doo gang were draft dodgers. But the film doesn’t need them. Villeneuve’s enterprise has its own dramatic consistency and rigor. It is not merely a canvas on which contemporary anxieties can be painted.
Sustaining this narrative vision is a casting regimen that, as in the 2021 prequel, has produced near-perfect results. As the movie’s protagonist, Chalamet captures both Paul’s dawning maturity and the ferocity with which he learns to deal with his foes. Zendaya does beautiful work as Chani, the Fremen girl who loves and distrusts our hero in equal measure. Stealing the show, however, is an unrecognizable Austin Butler (Elvis) as House Harkonnen’s ruler-in-waiting. Shorn of even his eyebrows, Butler inhabits a character at once brutal and baffling. Look for his introduction, gladiatorial combat filmed in menacing black and white, to be among the most memorable scenes of the year.
Little remarked upon in the early Dune: Part Two coverage has been the movie’s compositional strangeness. Despite its obvious debt to “hero’s journey” and “dark messiah” archetypes, the picture resists the predictable beats that define, say, the latest Star Wars film. In part, this is a consequence of the story’s fullness. In addition to the plot points mentioned above, we get Jessica’s cult of witches, a talking fetus, and galactic politics par excellence. (Florence Pugh does a convincing turn as the emperor’s calculating daughter.) Yet the epic formlessness on display is more than a concession to narrative necessity. A mood piece as much as a chronicle of intercosmic events, Dune: Part Two pauses, breathes, lingers, then races ahead in bursts. It doesn’t so much spin a yarn as stake off a (literal) sandbox for Villeneuve to play in.
Is the resulting production boring? Some critics have said so despite the generally glowing reviews that have attended the film’s release. My own take is that the opposite is true. So precise is its director’s visual aesthetic that the movie demands and rewards one’s full attention. “You’ll see the beauty and the horror,” Jessica tells Paul after drinking a mind-expanding elixir. Like all the best fantasy sagas, Villeneuve’s creation contains both.
A question for film historians will be why the French Canadian’s adaptations of Frank Herbert’s classic have succeeded so mightily while David Lynch’s 1984 version failed. Both men are cinematic visionaries. Both clearly love Herbert’s book. The difference is that Lynch’s style is too peculiar even for Dune — too “personal,” to borrow the late David Foster Wallace’s diagnosis of the filmmaker. In Villeneuve, conversely, we have an artist whose expansiveness so matches the material that dissonance hardly feels possible. Here is the perfect marriage of idea and execution. My advice to the moviegoer: Enjoy it.
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Graham Hillard is a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer and editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.
