The spice of life
Dune: Part Two is as much the payment of a debt as it is a movie. In 2021, director Denis Villeneuve and his co-writers Eric Roth and Jon Spaihts presented us with an adaptation of Frank Herbert's genre-defining 1965 science fiction novel Dune - which I guess we now ought to formally start calling Dune: Part One, which is after all what it said onscreen - that very recklessly told only half of a story without having any guarantee that they were ever going to finish it. Seeds were planted and neither harvested nor even allowed to germinate; visual motifs were set up with no payoff; characters were introduced in a big showy way and then afforded exactly zero influence on the plot; and while I would say that the exact, specific place that Villeneuve, Roth, and Spaihts selected to stop their narrative gave the thing an overall shape, coming as it did right after the resolution of a substantial part of the conflict, it's much closer to the crescendo that leads into the intermission of a play or opera than to any sort of natural point of satisfaction. Basically, in making Dune, Villeneuve and co. were promising something that they were in no position to promise, and so it's a relief that the universe has decided to be kind for a change, and bring us to this point: where we have not so much Dune: The Sequel, as The Rest of Dune, a followup that spends more time adapting less of the book (166 minutes, and I don't think I'd mind it being shorter), and feels in pretty much every way like the two productions were separated by a long weekend, rather than three years* (Roth didn't show up to co-write this one, which I would not be at all inclined to call a bad sign).
Which isn't to say that Dune: Part Two lacks any identity of its own. Most notably, the two films have broadly separate arcs: Part One (if you want to carve it down to the absolute essentials, removing basically everything that makes it a movie), is the story of how Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), a sensitive young nobleman), loses everything and is forced into exile by his enemies. It's a story of "things get bad, things get worse, things get apocaylptic, and then right at the very end something finally goes well, and he finds the bottom. Part Two isn't exactly the mirror or the inverse, but it is the opposite: now that he's at bottom, Paul rebuilds, and rises back up to even more prominence than he he lost in the first place. Again, that's carving out everything that actually makes Dune Dune, but it helps to demonstrate the overall shape of the thing.
In terms of all the things that do make Dune what it is, though, that's where Part One and Part Two feel like perfectly aligned pieces of one grand-scale production that was never meant to be watched in two distinct parts separated by years, and at least in my household will now never be watched that way again. If I were to point to one of the few very substantially differences in the experience of watching the two films, it would be that Part Two generally offers less in the way of extraordinary production design and establishing a host of new locations to wander through along with the actors (in which respect it's notable that just about the only significant crew heads who didn't come back from the first movie are the art directors and set decorators). To be fair, this does have an extremely straightforward justification in the story, which is that much more of Dune: Part Two takes place in the open desert, or in empty desert caves (the latter were presumably purpose-built sets, but not, like, fancy sets). To continue being fair, Dune: Part One already took care of world-building, so Part Two can just take place in that world; building it a second time would be redundant.
Instead, Part Two mostly gets to focus on its political story, which has fewer kinks than the first two but more factions, so it still takes some attentive work to follow along, and it can actually devote some time to character-based storytelling, which was largely absent from the first movie. This mostly comes in one of two flavors: watching how Paul's mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) begins to switch out of "just try to survive" mode, and begins to use her genetically inbred training at manipulating populations and guiding politics to enter "take control of this planet as a safe haven for myself and my family" mode, hardening herself and growing comfortable amoral in her ongoing political calculations; or watching Paul fall in love with Chani (Zendaya), a member of the particular tribe of Fremen (the first humans to make a home on this unyielding desert planet) he is hiding with, and one of the only people in that entire race who sees through Jessica's plotting to recognise that Paul is not in any way the promised messiah that the rest of her people worship. I'm inclined to say that one of these strands is much better than the others, in that Ferguson is very definitely giving the film's best performance (which she did last time, as well), while Chalamet and Zendaya are giving two of the worst, maybe even specifically the two worst (which they also did last time; Chalamet is improved, at least, with material that gives him a bit more to do). This is different than saying that Part Two is the "character movie" compared to Part One as the "exposition movie" ,or any such thing; it's still mostly about other things and as such is largely actor-proof, and even its sense of who its characters are mostly serves to draw attention to its Tolstoian idea about how individual people really don't matter very much to the course of history, which unfolds as it wants to despite our attempts to guide it. In a sense, that's the "theme" of Part Two: human futility on a grand scale. By the time it's over, almost no people have gotten what they "wanted", more people have lost something than gained something, and the whole thing is a bit sour-tasting and unfulfilled - not in exactly the same way that Part One ended on an unresolved sequel hook (though this film is very eager to make sure we are all excited for Dune: Part Three, or Dune Messiah, whichever way they decide to title it), more in a sense that we were expecting grand triumph and it feels very flat and atonal to have gotten it.
Most this comes from the book, or is at least an extremely defensible interpretation of it, though I will say of Part Two that it's a little less beholden to the source material than the first movie. Very little - other than largely re-imagining Chani as the Official Voice of Doubt in Paul's Divinity, the biggest changes are going to have much more of an impact on the story of the third movie than they do on this story, to be honest - but there's still a sense that things have been cleaned up (resulting in the loss of two major characters), made more overt, tweaked to work better in a movie where we have access to character's actions moreso than to their thoughts. As was true in Part One, Villeneuve is clearly making his priority a legible popcorn movie version of Dune, one where as long as you're paying attention, you're not likely to get lost, and so once again all of the massive backstory and lore are chucked out. I regret this more here than in the first movie, in that this is the part of the book where Herbert started to ramp up the psychedelic elements (and would continue ramping them up through the rest of the six-book series), and Villeneuve's vision is much too literal for psychedelia. It says something, and it's not tremendously flattering, that the awful 2000 made-for-TV miniseries Frank Herbert's Dune was more willing to go for actual mindfuckery and psychedelic imagery in the sequence where Jessica drinks a mind-altering poison than this feature film is. On the other hand, I think there's a very real argument to be made that the choice was never between Villeneuve's sensible and pragmatically straightforward approach and a more bonkers, visionary approach; the choice was, I suspect, between Villeneuve's approach and no worthwhile big-budget film version of Dune at all. After all, Alejandro Jodorowsky's unfathomably ambitious art film adapation turned out to be literally impossible to make, and when David Lynch directed his Dune in 1984, the fact it was dreamy and strange doesn't compensate for the fact that it also incoherent, silly, and frankly pretty bad.
So it was this or nothing, maybe, and thank God we got this - Dune: Part Two is an extremely wonderful time at the movies, though I know I maybe should have gotten to that part earlier. Disregarding my lack of interest in the romantic plot, the additional space given to characterisations pays off splendidly: Javier Bardem's performance is almost as good as Ferguson's, playing the truest believer in Paul's status as the vindication of prophecy as a wonderfully human expression of enthusiastic faith, a warm-hearted man so overjoyed by the fact that he has front-row seats to the culmination of history that he's willing to make compromises with his good sense to keep that culmination going. He's able to make the character funny without cheapening his integrity, even as we know the whole time that he's being misled. It's quite a lovely thing. Other stand-out work: Austin Butler's portrayal of a blood-hungry space psychopath brings real menace to a role that has, in both of its previous screen incarnations, come across as strictly camp, and he's doing a good enough job at playing the inverse of Chalamet's performance that it makes Chalamet seem much better in their scenes together. Given a lot more to do than in the first movie, Stellan Skarsgård is great at restoring some mean, greedy humanity to the role of Baron Harkonnen, leader of the bad guys, where previously seemed a bit too much like an impenetrable force of cosmic evil. Given not nearly enough to do, Léa Seydoux is fantastic at evoking the mysticism and uncanniness that the book imparts to the fabricated religious politics of this universe, which the films have otherwise somewhat muted in their discomfort with anything that's not straightforwardly physical.
But as before, the human element isn't where Dune: Part Two shines brightest. It was the production design last time; this time, I think I'd be faster to credit Greig Fraser's superb cinematography, which gets to operate in more registers, including a delightful indulgence in sunsets that leads to a final confrontation that gets all of the major living characters in a room together for a scene of burnt orange and silhouettes that gets to the primordial movie-movie mythic quality of something like the original Star Wars films. But even that isn't the most satisfyingly "Big" visual conceit in the movie; somewhere in its middle third, the film visits a planet where the evil people live, and in a complete rejection of anything do with real physics in favor of that which is awesome to look at, the sunlight on this planet leeches the color out of things (we can tell it's the sunlight, because when character pass from sunlight to artificial light, they regain some of their color. So it basically ends up making huge crowds of people look like Roman marble statues come to hellish life - a pretty on-the-nose visual metaphor for this film that's all about imperial politics, but one that is so ungodly cool-looking that I would rather embrace how obvious it is (besides, popcorn movies get to be obvious, it's part of the fun).
And even as much as I think the film looks lovely, where it really comes into its own as a hugely satisfying Hollywood sci-fi epic is in the action-adventure material, which is also backloaded, so the very long film seems to keep getting bigger and richer as it goes along. The film's sense of scale and combat is splendid; there's a long battle sequence near-ish the end that manages the rare feat of making giant CGI creatures feel bigger than it is possible to conceive of, rather than making them feel props on a model set, and even that isn't the best action sequence; in keeping with the low-fi, post-technology spirit of the books, the two best setpieces, I think, are both hand-to-hand battle sequences using swords and knives. And both of them blessed by the incredible, otherworldly lighting I've already mentioned, but of course that's the point: in a good movie, everything works together, and Dune: Part Two, with its predecessor, feels as holistic in its construction and its craftsmanship as any equivalently big-budget spectacular in a very long time.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
*The quickly-emerging conventional wisdom is that Dune: Part Two is significantly better than Part One, and I find this opinion genuinely confounding - the two films feel almost identical to me in terms of basically every qualitative measure I can come up with. If I marginally prefer Part One, and I do, it's in large part because I also think the first half of the novel is more interesting than second.
Which isn't to say that Dune: Part Two lacks any identity of its own. Most notably, the two films have broadly separate arcs: Part One (if you want to carve it down to the absolute essentials, removing basically everything that makes it a movie), is the story of how Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), a sensitive young nobleman), loses everything and is forced into exile by his enemies. It's a story of "things get bad, things get worse, things get apocaylptic, and then right at the very end something finally goes well, and he finds the bottom. Part Two isn't exactly the mirror or the inverse, but it is the opposite: now that he's at bottom, Paul rebuilds, and rises back up to even more prominence than he he lost in the first place. Again, that's carving out everything that actually makes Dune Dune, but it helps to demonstrate the overall shape of the thing.
In terms of all the things that do make Dune what it is, though, that's where Part One and Part Two feel like perfectly aligned pieces of one grand-scale production that was never meant to be watched in two distinct parts separated by years, and at least in my household will now never be watched that way again. If I were to point to one of the few very substantially differences in the experience of watching the two films, it would be that Part Two generally offers less in the way of extraordinary production design and establishing a host of new locations to wander through along with the actors (in which respect it's notable that just about the only significant crew heads who didn't come back from the first movie are the art directors and set decorators). To be fair, this does have an extremely straightforward justification in the story, which is that much more of Dune: Part Two takes place in the open desert, or in empty desert caves (the latter were presumably purpose-built sets, but not, like, fancy sets). To continue being fair, Dune: Part One already took care of world-building, so Part Two can just take place in that world; building it a second time would be redundant.
Instead, Part Two mostly gets to focus on its political story, which has fewer kinks than the first two but more factions, so it still takes some attentive work to follow along, and it can actually devote some time to character-based storytelling, which was largely absent from the first movie. This mostly comes in one of two flavors: watching how Paul's mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) begins to switch out of "just try to survive" mode, and begins to use her genetically inbred training at manipulating populations and guiding politics to enter "take control of this planet as a safe haven for myself and my family" mode, hardening herself and growing comfortable amoral in her ongoing political calculations; or watching Paul fall in love with Chani (Zendaya), a member of the particular tribe of Fremen (the first humans to make a home on this unyielding desert planet) he is hiding with, and one of the only people in that entire race who sees through Jessica's plotting to recognise that Paul is not in any way the promised messiah that the rest of her people worship. I'm inclined to say that one of these strands is much better than the others, in that Ferguson is very definitely giving the film's best performance (which she did last time, as well), while Chalamet and Zendaya are giving two of the worst, maybe even specifically the two worst (which they also did last time; Chalamet is improved, at least, with material that gives him a bit more to do). This is different than saying that Part Two is the "character movie" compared to Part One as the "exposition movie" ,or any such thing; it's still mostly about other things and as such is largely actor-proof, and even its sense of who its characters are mostly serves to draw attention to its Tolstoian idea about how individual people really don't matter very much to the course of history, which unfolds as it wants to despite our attempts to guide it. In a sense, that's the "theme" of Part Two: human futility on a grand scale. By the time it's over, almost no people have gotten what they "wanted", more people have lost something than gained something, and the whole thing is a bit sour-tasting and unfulfilled - not in exactly the same way that Part One ended on an unresolved sequel hook (though this film is very eager to make sure we are all excited for Dune: Part Three, or Dune Messiah, whichever way they decide to title it), more in a sense that we were expecting grand triumph and it feels very flat and atonal to have gotten it.
Most this comes from the book, or is at least an extremely defensible interpretation of it, though I will say of Part Two that it's a little less beholden to the source material than the first movie. Very little - other than largely re-imagining Chani as the Official Voice of Doubt in Paul's Divinity, the biggest changes are going to have much more of an impact on the story of the third movie than they do on this story, to be honest - but there's still a sense that things have been cleaned up (resulting in the loss of two major characters), made more overt, tweaked to work better in a movie where we have access to character's actions moreso than to their thoughts. As was true in Part One, Villeneuve is clearly making his priority a legible popcorn movie version of Dune, one where as long as you're paying attention, you're not likely to get lost, and so once again all of the massive backstory and lore are chucked out. I regret this more here than in the first movie, in that this is the part of the book where Herbert started to ramp up the psychedelic elements (and would continue ramping them up through the rest of the six-book series), and Villeneuve's vision is much too literal for psychedelia. It says something, and it's not tremendously flattering, that the awful 2000 made-for-TV miniseries Frank Herbert's Dune was more willing to go for actual mindfuckery and psychedelic imagery in the sequence where Jessica drinks a mind-altering poison than this feature film is. On the other hand, I think there's a very real argument to be made that the choice was never between Villeneuve's sensible and pragmatically straightforward approach and a more bonkers, visionary approach; the choice was, I suspect, between Villeneuve's approach and no worthwhile big-budget film version of Dune at all. After all, Alejandro Jodorowsky's unfathomably ambitious art film adapation turned out to be literally impossible to make, and when David Lynch directed his Dune in 1984, the fact it was dreamy and strange doesn't compensate for the fact that it also incoherent, silly, and frankly pretty bad.
So it was this or nothing, maybe, and thank God we got this - Dune: Part Two is an extremely wonderful time at the movies, though I know I maybe should have gotten to that part earlier. Disregarding my lack of interest in the romantic plot, the additional space given to characterisations pays off splendidly: Javier Bardem's performance is almost as good as Ferguson's, playing the truest believer in Paul's status as the vindication of prophecy as a wonderfully human expression of enthusiastic faith, a warm-hearted man so overjoyed by the fact that he has front-row seats to the culmination of history that he's willing to make compromises with his good sense to keep that culmination going. He's able to make the character funny without cheapening his integrity, even as we know the whole time that he's being misled. It's quite a lovely thing. Other stand-out work: Austin Butler's portrayal of a blood-hungry space psychopath brings real menace to a role that has, in both of its previous screen incarnations, come across as strictly camp, and he's doing a good enough job at playing the inverse of Chalamet's performance that it makes Chalamet seem much better in their scenes together. Given a lot more to do than in the first movie, Stellan Skarsgård is great at restoring some mean, greedy humanity to the role of Baron Harkonnen, leader of the bad guys, where previously seemed a bit too much like an impenetrable force of cosmic evil. Given not nearly enough to do, Léa Seydoux is fantastic at evoking the mysticism and uncanniness that the book imparts to the fabricated religious politics of this universe, which the films have otherwise somewhat muted in their discomfort with anything that's not straightforwardly physical.
But as before, the human element isn't where Dune: Part Two shines brightest. It was the production design last time; this time, I think I'd be faster to credit Greig Fraser's superb cinematography, which gets to operate in more registers, including a delightful indulgence in sunsets that leads to a final confrontation that gets all of the major living characters in a room together for a scene of burnt orange and silhouettes that gets to the primordial movie-movie mythic quality of something like the original Star Wars films. But even that isn't the most satisfyingly "Big" visual conceit in the movie; somewhere in its middle third, the film visits a planet where the evil people live, and in a complete rejection of anything do with real physics in favor of that which is awesome to look at, the sunlight on this planet leeches the color out of things (we can tell it's the sunlight, because when character pass from sunlight to artificial light, they regain some of their color. So it basically ends up making huge crowds of people look like Roman marble statues come to hellish life - a pretty on-the-nose visual metaphor for this film that's all about imperial politics, but one that is so ungodly cool-looking that I would rather embrace how obvious it is (besides, popcorn movies get to be obvious, it's part of the fun).
And even as much as I think the film looks lovely, where it really comes into its own as a hugely satisfying Hollywood sci-fi epic is in the action-adventure material, which is also backloaded, so the very long film seems to keep getting bigger and richer as it goes along. The film's sense of scale and combat is splendid; there's a long battle sequence near-ish the end that manages the rare feat of making giant CGI creatures feel bigger than it is possible to conceive of, rather than making them feel props on a model set, and even that isn't the best action sequence; in keeping with the low-fi, post-technology spirit of the books, the two best setpieces, I think, are both hand-to-hand battle sequences using swords and knives. And both of them blessed by the incredible, otherworldly lighting I've already mentioned, but of course that's the point: in a good movie, everything works together, and Dune: Part Two, with its predecessor, feels as holistic in its construction and its craftsmanship as any equivalently big-budget spectacular in a very long time.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
*The quickly-emerging conventional wisdom is that Dune: Part Two is significantly better than Part One, and I find this opinion genuinely confounding - the two films feel almost identical to me in terms of basically every qualitative measure I can come up with. If I marginally prefer Part One, and I do, it's in large part because I also think the first half of the novel is more interesting than second.
