Timothée Chalamet is a messiah, a heartthrob and possibly a little unhinged in the breathtaking sequel to the sci-fi hit.
In the wake of the superhero boom, it takes a lot to persuade me to see a big-budget epic in which the protagonist strolls away from explosions. But I read Frank Herbert's sci-fi classic Dune at a tender age and saw the David Lynch version on its 1984 release, so I couldn't stay away from the 2021 adaptation of the novel's first half by Québécois director Denis Villeneuve — or its sequel. Anyway, Dune: Part One ended on a cliff-hanger, so here we are.
Part Two enjoyed the largest weekend box-office opening of 2024 so far, making the chances for a third film look promising.
The deal
Previously on Dune: It's the far future, but people still duel with swords. Everybody wants to control the planet Arrakis, source of the psychotropic substance called spice, which makes interstellar travel possible. The emperor (Christopher Walken) orders the Atreides family to take charge of the planet, only to double-cross them in concert with their enemy, the loathsome Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård). With the head of the family dead, teenage heir Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and his mom, Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), escape into the desert and find refuge with the Indigenous Fremen.
In the second film, our protagonists learn to survive in a hostile landscape inhabited by mammoth, hungry sandworms. Leader Stilgar (Javier Bardem) believes in a prophecy that Paul will lead the Fremen to paradise, not knowing that said prophecy was seeded on Arrakis by the Bene Gesserit, the esoteric religious (and somewhat superpowered) order to which Jessica belongs. Stilgar strong-arms Jessica into drinking a brain-opening substance called the "water of life" and becoming the tribe's spiritual leader. Young warrior Chani (Zendaya) doesn't trust the outsiders who have always exploited her world, but Paul wins her over with boyish charm and humility.
Paul and the Fremen engage in guerrilla warfare against the ruling Harkonnens, causing shake-ups off-planet, where the emperor, the baron, the Bene Gesserit and others play high-stakes games of court politics. Everything is headed toward a showdown. But will Paul really lead the Fremen to paradise or only use them to start a bloody galactic revenge crusade?
Will you like it?
As sword-wielding epics go, Dune is less like Star Wars than "Game of Thrones." There are bad guys — the Harkonnens are almost comically evil, portrayed here with liberal use of Nazi imagery — but there aren't many good guys. Or good girls, for that matter. Everybody who isn't bloodthirstily fighting is ruthlessly scheming, from the Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother (Charlotte Rampling) to the emperor's demure daughter (Florence Pugh). Even Paul, our supposed hero, struggles with a will to power that pushes him inexorably toward violent ends.
While the screenplay by Villeneuve and Jon Spaihts takes great pains to lay out Paul's internal conflict, his character never comes fully to life on-screen. He's weighed down by enormous symbolic baggage, making this a thankless role to play. Herbert's stiff dialogue defeated Kyle MacLachlan in 1984, and Chalamet doesn't have much better luck with it. He comes off as more callow than committed to the role's solemnity, as if he might be tempted to break character and start giggling (and you can't always blame him).
The film's real center of gravity is its spectacle, the craft with which Villeneuve and his crew depict Herbert's stupendously complex worlds. The desert landscape of Arrakis has a delicacy and viscerality that recall the days of George Lucas' Tatooine. In aerial shots, it has a sculpted beauty; up close, the sand flying in our faces feels convincing. The sequence in which Paul first rides a sandworm is harrowing and exhilarating; regardless of how much CGI went into it, the stunt looks genuinely hard. The scene is dreamlike and fantastical, but it doesn't have the frustrating weightlessness of so many superhero films.
The dream becomes a nightmare in equally visually thrilling scenes set on Giedi Prime, the Harkonnen homeworld. We meet the sociopathic counterpart to Paul, Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler), in a gladiatorial arena straight out of Spartacus. The whole world is captured in an eerie, airless black and white that suggests an '80s music video circle of hell, where people wear a lot of vinyl and chains — and kill for fun.
With alternatives like these, it's not hard to sympathize with the Fremen, even as they transform from scrappy survivors into fanatics. By the film's climax, both Paul and Jessica have been infected with galaxy brain — a phenomenon Herbert seems to have foreseen — and the audience may be worn out. A strategic change to the book's ending, however, promises juicy conflict to come.
Dune is a heady brew, but its overweening ambition and weirdness are antidotes to the four-quadrant calculation of so many modern blockbusters. I'll be back for more.
If you like this, try...
Dune: Part One (2021; Max): Part Two doesn't spend much time catching up viewers, so a rewatch is recommended.
Dune (1984; Max, rentable): Lynch's compressed adaptation of the novel is lacking in many ways. But its steampunk-meets-punk-rock aesthetic clearly influenced Villeneuve's version, and as I watched Part Two, I found myself remembering moments in the earlier film that deserve to be called iconic. You can't beat Sting as Feyd-Rautha.
Arrival (2016; Paramount+, Peacock, Showtime, rentable): I'm a fan of Prisoners, Enemy, Sicario and Blade Runner 2049, but this moody, thoughtful adaptation of a Ted Chiang story about extraterrestrial communication is still my favorite Villeneuve movie.
The original print version of this article was headlined "Dune: Part Two 3"
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Bio:
Margot Harrison is the Associate Editor at Seven Days; she coordinates literary and film coverage. In 2005, she won the John D. Donoghue award for arts criticism from the Vermont Press Association.
From 2014-2020, Seven Days allowed readers to comment on all stories posted on our website. While we've appreciated the suggestions and insights, right now Seven Days is prioritizing our core mission — producing high-quality, responsible local journalism — over moderating online debates between readers.