Dune: Part Two

The following contains mild spoilers for Dune: Part One. Given this is a direct continuation of the story, avoiding them would be all but impossible.

I’ve spent the last few weekends re-immersing myself in the cinematic world of Dune. I was fortunate enough to catch a fortieth anniversary screening of David Lynch’s baffling 1984 attempt to cover the entire 1965 novel in just over two hours. I also was able to re-watch Dune: Part One in IMAX, which improved upon the already enjoyable experience I had 2.5 years ago on a standard screen. The contrast between the two heightened my excitement for Part Two. Lynch got tremendously distracted highlighting the strangeness of the world and the characters, wasting time on meaningless and confusing visuals (even if they were impressive for the time) at the expense of story. Director Denis Villeneuve¹ used the long leash he was given to craft a world which feels alien without comment (emphasized by the impeccable Hans Zimmer score), and one in which intricate political maneuvering feels so natural as to fade into the background of the epic court melodrama playing out on Arrakis. Despite remembering almost nothing from reading the first book over twenty years ago, I had no problem following the forces at play.

Everything about that first Villeneuve movie was incredible…except for the characters. Something about them just came across as somewhat cold and detached. Even on a second viewing, I can’t say whether it’s the acting or the writing or the grand scale of the story causing their specifics to melt into the background. We spend so much time with many characters who are to die in the Harkonnen raid on Arrakeen, that even those who stand-out are soon gone. The most interesting ones tend to read as greater symbols rather than people: Stilgar (Javier Bardem) for the Fremen, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) for the Bene Gesserit, Rabban Harkonnen (Dave Bautista) as…well, the Harkonnen. All of them and more are larger than life characters, archetypes, thus washing away their individuality.

My hope for this installment was that we had enough groundwork to allow the characters to really flourish, a hope bolstered by the final trailer, which seemed to imply that the relationship between Paul (Timothée Chalamet) and Chani (Zendaya) would be central to the story. And it certainly is, but the movie continues the trend of being more interested in the events and the groups those events impact than the individuals on the ground.

Really, it’s almost unhelpful to think of the two films as anything other than one continuous story. Unsurprisingly, Part Two picks up right where Part One left off, and immediately begins referencing events that just happened to the characters but may be years behind the audience. I wonder what the impact of that was on the viewing experience for those who hadn’t had a chance to catch up: while not leaning too heavily on them, the movie doesn’t really ease you back in, either. One wishes the sequel had been filmed back-to-back with the first movie, enabling closer release dates, as had been done by The Lord of the Rings or The Matrix sequels. Or that more theaters would do what used to be common and presented a double feature, allowing audiences to make a night of it.

That being said, much of the early part of the film feels like learning to walk again anyways. Paul and Jessica are embedded with the Fremen now, learning how to survive in exchange for teaming up to realize the destruction of their mutual enemy, the Harkonnen. We do periodically cut to the slowing turning plots of the Baron Vladamir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård), the Emperor Shaddam Corino IV (Christopher Walken), and the Bene Gesserit. But this film is more action focused than the first. Whereas the first part arranged the pieces, ending with a huge release of tension in the form of a tremendous amount of violence, the action is quite frequent from the beginning here. Attacking spice harvesters makes for dramatic scenes, as these are tremendous and heavily guarded machines. Of course, it begets more violence as the Harkonnen are goaded into greedily and aggressively protecting their wealth generation.

Villeneuve uses his solid foundation as an excuse to lean more into the weird side of the story. Previously, it was largely relegated to the production design or the sound design or the edges of the plot. But here, the deep lore is brought to the front: the Water of Life, the Kwisatz Haderach, Paul’s unborn sister rendered similar to the Space Child from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and more. Villeneuve was very smart to hold these pieces back until now, reducing the complexity of threading mystical elements through the plot which wouldn’t matter until much later. For example, despite the emperor looming large over the events of the first movie, the man himself doesn’t actually matter until much later, so why force the audience to keep it all in their head?

Therein lies the key to so successfully adapting an “unadaptable” book. Respecting the spirit of the story and feeling bound to present it exactly as the author did are two tremendously different things. In almost every case, you’re going to get far more mileage out of the former. See Oppenheimer and The Zone of Interest and Killers of the Flower Moon and How To Blow Up A Pipeline, to name just a few from last year. You’ve got to cut to the core of the story, extract its lifeblood, and reconstruct the narrative around it. Cinema is a different storytelling medium than literature, and so of course the way to effectively weave a compelling narrative is going to differ. Only by embracing that fact, and by exploring to the greatest extent the different set of tools available to you will you succeed.

Here again, Villeneuve excels. In Part One, he demonstrated extreme restraint with regards to the sandworms. One of the most famous parts of the novel, a symbol of and god to the Fremen, and we don’t really see one, really get a sense of their size and terror until the final 20 minutes or so. Now that they’re available, he uses them to great effect while sticking to the events of the book. Instead of agents of uncontrolled destruction, they become weapons at the hands of the Fremen, made even more terrifying when guided by human hands into a coordinated force.

But for all this, as mentioned before, I cannot help but feel a distance from the events. Yes, they’re well controlled so as to tell a very coherent story on a truly epic scale, full of weird details and universe-spanning mysticism and forces we cannot understand but nonetheless feel their internal logic. Yet I still feel no closer to Paul, to Chani. Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen (Austin Butler) is a compellingly watchable character, Alia Atreides (Anya-Taylor Joy) is a fascinating presence, and Princess Irulan Corrino (Florence Pugh) is caught in the middle of everything. They all read as chess pieces in a story far bigger than all of them, making connection or emotion difficult. As we move towards the climax, you’d like to have some sense of how these figures feel about what’s happening, about what they have to do. Do they believe what they’re saying? Do they feel bound by honor? Do they understand what’s truly being asked of them, and what it will mean for the universe? Some of these are hinted at, but many are left a mystery. I’m not asking for voice-over, which was David Lynch’s disastrous solution. But by building the relationships and internal lives more completely, we’d be better positioned to feel the weight of the dramatic conflict, at least.

None of this is to take away from the achievement this movie represents. As the dazzling images flitted across my eyes, I wondered how Villeneuve pulled it off. Dune is an insane story, full of ridiculous concepts and this strange blend of far future sci-fi and human evolution and mysticism. It has a deep and complex lore, full of invented terms and hierarchies befitting of the most revered of high fantasy. So many characters and relationships and motives and backstories, it would have been easy for it to devolve into a hideous soup (again, see the David Lynch adaptation).

But what sets both parts of Dune from so many of the blockbusters of the past ten years is a dedication to taking the story seriously. I don’t mean “dark” or “gritty” (I’m looking at you, Snyder). Rather, it’s not winking at the audience, has no insert characters intended to highlight that we’re watching a movie, and nothing intended to make the experience fun. Instead, there’s a dedication to making it feel epic. Both movies open with a line before any production logos appear, spoken in a guttural, alien (machine?) language, translated to some simple axiom of the world we’re about to experience. Visuals are towering or sprawling, often both at once. Voices are hushed or bellowing, there’s precious little in between. Dialog is poetry, and uttered without a trace of irony. Its operatic nature is impossible to deny, from its first voice-over to the last wisp of the score.

I strongly expect we’ll see Villeneuve and company again around this time next year, picking up another batch of little gold men for their technical achievements. And that may not even be the last time: Villeneuve has expressed a strong desire to make a third film, and we should be so lucky. He certainly left himself an opening (at the cost of this ending’s satisfaction, in my opinion, but that’s all I’ll say to stay spoiler-free). No matter where he goes next, the longer someone of Villeneuve’s passion and skill and artistry is able to thrive in Hollywood, the less concerned I am for the state of the industry.