Review: "Dune: Part Two" is an epic of Biblical scale and Old-Testament horror
"Big" doesn't even begin to describe it
Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two is one of the biggest movies I have ever seen. In scope, in scale, in ambition; in the enormity of its images, in the amount of story it tells, in the number of bodies on screen; in the sheer volume and impact of its sound design and music, and in the number of ideas on its mind; in the way the entire production exponentially escalates like a freight train gaining speed towards the mouth of Hell. It may be the ‘biggest’ big-budget Hollywood production since The Return of the King, and almost certainly the most ambitious and accomplished adaptation of a seemingly ‘unfilmable’ novel since Peter Jackson took up the task of translating Tolkien.
None of this adequately conveys the size of Dune: Part Two, though – the sense that we are not just watching epic fantasy, but something far bigger, the images conjured by a fire-and-brimstone Preacher bringing the words of God down from the mountain. I thought to myself, as Paul Muad’Dib’s army of sandworms came crashing through the surface of the earth to consume the Messiah’s enemies, that this is what it would look and feel like if a filmmaker were given $200 million and took an honest stab at adapting the Old Testament. It’s not just the scale of the images – though that’s certainly a part of it – but the way awe and horror are so fundamentally intermingled once the film is moving full-tilt. The entire film is a slowly ratcheting acceleration of celestial inevitability, of destruction and rage and bloodletting on a totemic scale, and my stomach kept working itself in tighter and tighter nots as the net this story casts out pulls tighter around its world. Every step Paul takes leads us closer to terrible things, and we sit simultaneously in frightened humility and prurient excitation waiting for the worst to happen. When the full jihad of the Fremen comes to fruition, when these apocalyptic forces Paul wraps his hands around are fully unleashed, we are overwhelmed by awe and anxiety, by wonder and dread, by ecstasy and torment, each side of the coin intrinsically linked. I cannot immediately think of a clear cinematic analogue for what Villeneuve taps into here. It is religious, mythological – if there is a Tolkien comparison to be made, it is not to Lord of the Rings, but to The Silmarillion, where whole worlds are made and unmade and individual emotions pour forth as light and fire igniting creation.
It also fully pays off on part of Denis Villeneuve’s approach from Dune: Part One – which I wrote about yesterday in a re-assessment of the film – which is that he is less interested in individual characters than in the world they inhabit. There is this dreadful feeling of inevitability to everything that happens, not because there are no meaningful choices are moments of real contingency, but because the intersection of vast political structures and the smallness of human nature funnel these people towards outcome their free will can only work so hard against. Paul tries to claw against them a little bit in Part One, but by the end of that film, he’s already made the most important choice; from the very start of Part Two, he’s in the funnel, and the only question is how hard he’ll fight back on his way down. I continued to think Timotheé Chalamet was the one weak link of this production through much of Part Two, right up until the moment Paul chooses to stop resisting and embrace his role as a terrible conquering Messiah, and then it all clicks into the place; the way he suddenly lets all this rage and ego burst forth, unrecognizable except for the immediate sense this is the self he’s been holding back all this time, justifies every creative choice made by Chalamet and Villeneuve in this and the previous film, where Paul is a sort of ‘present absence’ at the heart of the narrative because he is not committed to playing the part the story has set for him. What is so terrifying about when he embraces it is how much he likes the performance, how much he revels in finally accepting power.
After all, Frank Herbert’s Dune is to colonial white savior narratives what Alan Moore’s Watchmen is to superhero comics: if it’s adapted right, it should make the viewer slightly queasy thinking about every story in this vein they’ve ever been fed, and how deeply, profoundly wrong-headed all of them are. What impresses me most about Villeneuve’s script (co-written with John Spaihts) is that it doesn’t just nail that aspect fully, but that it focuses so thoroughly on the systemic nature of what Paul is embroiled in, how he is a part of a power structure that has spent countless generations not only exploiting the darker-skinned people he has been sent to rule, but planting the seeds for their apparent liberation to just become further damnation and servitude. The tragedy of Paul Muad’Dib is that he sees this system in its totality, he understands and is properly afraid of it, and in the end chooses to vigorously uphold it. He unleashes so much sound and fury, and it feels big and mythic and epochal, but it is in the end just one white man dethroning another white man, both of whose power is foundationally built in systemic oppression of colonized peoples. The lie of religion, as this film sees it, is to frame such upheaval and violence as divine, ordained, and redemptive, when in fact it is just a changing of the guards. The world is shaken, and no one has been saved.
As with the first film, Dune: Part Two is an unassailably immaculate production. Every department lead is one of the very best at what they do – Greig Fraser on cinematography, Joe Walker on editing, Jacqueline West on costumes, Patrice Vermette on production design, Hans Zimmer on score, etc. – and every one of them is at the absolute top of the game; considering most of them (along with the teams doing sound design and VFX) already won Oscars for Part One, it’s astonishing how every piece of craft seems to have leveled up even further this time around. There isn’t a single shot where I thought about the special effects, because it is all so completely fluid and invisible, every location, prop, set, and costume so lived-in and real and tactile. The images are big and iconographic and frequently jaw-dropping, as are the soundscapes, where Zimmer’s eclectic instrumentation and the thundering noises of the world comingle into something intimidatingly vast. If the first film felt slightly too straightforward at times for such weird, hallucinatory source material, this one delivers on that front in spades, leaning right into the weirdest aspects of the book, of omniscient fetuses and black-and-white planets and worm milking rituals and a hero living in multiple timelines simultaneously.
The cast is, even moreso than Part One, stacked top to bottom with legends, every one of them pitching heaters left and right. Javier Bardem, only glimpsed briefly in the first film, steals the show this time around, as he does in most films he’s ever appeared in; he is the film’s greatest source of humor, and therefore humanity, and therefore heartbreak when these qualities make him the most emphatic cheerleader of Muad’Dib’s rise to Godhood. Austin Butler took me just as much aback here as he did in 2022’s Elvis; he is such a committed performer, building his characters from the inside out through voice and physicality, his timbre here an off-putting mix of his Presley voice and a pitch-perfect Stellan Skarsgård impression. Rebecca Ferguson deserves mention too; she always does, but her work may be easy to take for granted here, as she plays a woman essentially experiencing ego death as a part of the fulfillment of her arrogant ambition. How she plays those notes is absolutely bone-chilling.
Like the previous film, I don’t think Part Two is ‘perfect,’ though I don’t need it to be. There is some structural oddity here as well, with the film telling one story for its first hour and then sort of ‘re-starting’ with our extended introduction to Butler’s character for the next phase of the action. I think there’s probably a more effective shape for these two 2.5-hour movies as three 100-minute parts (combining the last 45 minutes of Part One with the first hour or so of Part Two as the middle chapter), but I honestly don’t care to harp on it all that much, especially since the way Villeneuve executes Part Two’s ending makes it extremely clear he isn’t done yet and views the planned third film, adapting Dune Messiah, as the true resolution to this cinematic endeavor. And that is immediately one of my most anticipated movies upon the horizon, because this initial duology already puts Villeneuve’s Dune on the shelf near, if not quite next to, some of the greatest and most ambitious cinematic epics, like Jackson’s Lord of the Rings or Abel Gance’s Napoleon or Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace. It is not necessarily the equal of those extraordinarily high bars, but it genuinely aims to reach that far; in 2024, with the business of cinema crumbling to the greed and stagnation of the ‘content mill’ ideology, that is a miracle in and of itself.
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