Anyone who craves BIG WORM ACTION will get tons of it in Dune: Part Two (now streaming on Max, in addition to VOD services like Amazon Prime Video), offering plenty of excitement in 2021. Dune mostly gave us too much of Timothee Chalamet looking sleepy. My problem with the first film is that everything is set up and not much else, a cold space opera set on a very hot desert planet. But director Denis Villeneuve’s eye for stunning, inventive visuals is very much in motion the second time around, as the battle for all the flavor of Arrakis heats up and the temperature matches the tone of a gripping epic.
DUNE: PART TWO: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The essence: KETCHUP TIME: As you will remember at the end of the first Dune, the evil Harkonnen destroyed the Atreides spice mining fortress on Arrakis. They didn’t declare war or anything, just a dastardly sneak attack that sent our protagonist Paul Atreides (Chalamet) and his pregnant mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), fleeing to the Fremen after everyone else was killed. . If all these names and places seem like an impenetrable wall of sci-fi narrative, well, you should have paid more attention to the avalanche of ridiculous proper names in the first film. I’ll help a little: everyone wants spice, because it’s the key to power and wealth in the galaxy; You need big machines to separate it from the Arrakis sand, but you have to be quick so the giant sandworms don’t rumble and swallow you whole.
The Fremen are desert people who live in underground fortresses on Arrakis. The Harkonnens are hairless Nazis led by Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard), a putrid lump of fat who looks half-human, half-Jabba the Hutt. Lady Jessica is a member of the Bene Gesserit religious order, which believes that Paul, who has visions of the future (or maybe they are just dreams), is the Chosen One. The Fremen take in Paul and Lady Jessica, and are torn between believing him to be their savior and being suspicious of his motives. Stilgar (Javier Bardem), one of the Fremen leaders, actually drinks the fundamentalist Kool-Aid and interprets Paul’s every twitch and scratch as a sign that he’s the religious It Boy around here. Fremen warrior Chani (Zendaya) is skeptical, but she ignores the warning signs because, with one look into Paul’s sad eyes, she can’t help but melt into a puddle of hormones.
Well, I think we’re almost up to date. Lady Jessica is forced, by threat of death, to become the new Reverend Mother of the Fremen Bene Gesserit sect, leaving the lovely Becky Fergs smeared with tattoos all over her face. Paul convinces the Fremen that he is not here to take charge, he just wants to fight the Harkonnen alongside them. He learns the ways from him and, along with Chani, with whom he now shares a shop, hubba hubba, leads ambushes that cripple the Harkonnens’ spice mining operation, much to the frustration of the idiot baron. nephew, Rabban Beast (Dave Bautista). Note to fascist dictators: if you calm down for once in the face of nepotism, you may actually achieve your dastardly plans.
I haven’t even gotten to the new characters yet. As Rabban is licking the imbecile Blarney Stone, the Baron replaces him with his other nephew, Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler), an ultra-psychopath who has killed more people than he has eaten slices of pizza. We also meet Emperor Shaddam IV (exclamation point for Christopher Walken!), who we learn ordered the Harkonnens to massacre the Atreides; his daughter, Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh), isn’t much more than a third-act plot piece at this point, but she wears some pretty extravagant hats. We also see the return of Paul’s old mentor, warrior Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin), notable because he knows where the nuclear weapons are. And the Bene Gesserit leader, Reverend Mother Mohiam (Charlotte Rampling), remains an amoral influencer and power broker, hissing behind her ridiculously high veil. So is she confident that Paul is the savior, or simply a fraud? NO SPICY SPOILERS.
What movies will it remind you of?: Modern megahits are not as ambitious as Villeneuve’s Dune very often – the easy comparison is Mad Max: Fury Road, and now you will be forced to reflect on whether you are a person who likes cars or worms. (That’s not a difficult choice in this case; it is for the car lover!)
Performance worth seeing: Between Dune, Mission Impossible and her memorable role as a villain in Doctor Sleep, Becky Fergs may be the new queen of high genre films. You have to appreciate its intensity. The same goes for Butler, who asserts himself and brings evil charisma to the delightfully despicable Feyd-Rautha.
Memorable dialogue: “Abomination!– Mother Mohiam’s exhortation when her religious magic trick comes to a complete close.
Sex and skin: Nothing beyond a brief post-coital hug for Paul and Chani, unless you interpret all the worm-riding and hand-in-the-box scenes as visual hints.
Our opinion: Villeneuve gives us much more to appreciate in his second Dune missive: Heart-pounding action sequences ranging from worm riding (which is part water skiing, part rodeo) to tense knife fights and large-scale battles, and a deep ending that combines all of the above. The script is a solid distillation of Frank Herbert’s writing into something comprehensible, no small task, one that doesn’t make us feel like we’re carrying a burden of momentum-crushing exposition. The struggles for political power are complex without being brutalizing, and the story of Paul, a man who could believe his own nonsense, is compelling for its ethical ambiguity.
And yet, Dune: Part Two it doesn’t strive for the greatness we might expect from Villeneuve. The film is between the sharp Blade Runner 2049 – so far the director’s masterpiece – and the resonant emotion it cultivated in Arrival. This time she gets stronger, more memorable performances from Chalamet and Zendaya, but her love story falls far behind the plot’s machinations and her relatively potent statements about the evils of colonialism and religious fundamentalism. Villeneuve forces us to invest our intellect in subtext and prompts us to raise our fists in response to violent conflict, but the emotional heart of the story beats only in the distance, drowned out by spectacle. Of course, we’re absolutely here and ready for that spectacle, and the film delivers, its sonic thematic depth raising the stakes of the conflict. And considering the tense history of DuneOn the path from book to screen, very kind is a totally realistic expectation that Villeneuve lives up to.
Our call: Villeneuve may accept a somewhat unlikely W for a difficult adaptation. Dune: Part Two makes the first film better in retrospect, and the eventual third, Dune: Messiah, absolutely welcome. TRANSMIT IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic living in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
