Review: Dune Part Two

Director:  Denis Villeneuve

Stars:  Austin Nichols, Zendaya, Timothée Chalamet

Roaring into cinemas after a slight delay thanks to the strikes last year, Dune Part Two is the continuation of Denis Villeneuve’s impressively scaled, technically laudable and emotionally inert adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi tome. Picking up exactly where we left off, the Canadian director impresses most with his consistency; providing yet another 2 and a half hours of groaningly self-serious fantasy drama wiped clean of passion or personality.

Except… that’s not exactly true. There is personality to Villeneuve’s vision. How could there not be? He’s the kind of filmmaker that gets the term “visionary” applied to him whenever new projects are announced. All filmmakers bring a certain sensibility to their craft. It is how auteur theory came into being. Villeneuve’s Dune movies are certainly no exception, and Part Two looks every bit the Bedouin Ikea catalogue one might imagine it to be.

It starts out pretty great. Paul (Timothée Chalamet) and his Bene Gesserit mother Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) are in hiding with the Fremen following the Harkonnen massacre of the Atreides interest on Arrakis. Desert-living freedom fighters, the Fremen have been stoked with rumours of a coming prophet for centuries, and their goofy leader Stilgar (Javier Bardem) is absolutely ready to believe Paul is their fabled Chosen One. Less convinced is Chani (Zendaya), the young woman from Paul’s dreams who takes up the task of training the off-worlder as their inevitable bond grows.

These sequences pass for the most energetic and personable in either movie, and Villeneuve treats us to an enjoyably crafted arc between the two, with splashes of hard sci-fi action thrown in. The film is never more enjoyable than a sequence in which Paul and Chani are out together trying to sabotage a spice mining facility while a Harkonnen copter whirrs overhead trying to sniper them out of the shadows. Villeneuve beds down in these surroundings, temporarily backgrounding the wider galactic politics, and Dune Part Two feels lithe and absorbing for it, even considering some spuriously pro-life nonsense happening in the background with Lady Jessica chattering back and forth with her unborn foetus. For an hour or so the story has a new-found momentum that betters the pace we’ve encountered thus far.

Then Villeneuve takes us away from Arrakis and said momentum gets lost in a sandstorm. A monochrome excursion for some gladiatorial combat on Harkonnen home world Giedi Prime introduces us to Austin Nichols’ psychopath war boy Feyd-Rautha – Paul’s inevitable adversary in the fight to come – and the briefest of appearances from Léa Seydoux. While its hilarious that Villeneuve managed to come up with an environment even more visually barren than a desert planet, this section too is impressive and enjoyable. So pompously grave as to veer toward camp. But the leisurely detour hobbles the pacing in a way that proves fatal. Any suggestion of accumulation in the first hour is lost, and Dune Part Two proceeds to drone on and on and on, delaying the confrontation between houses that it has been gearing up for the better part of four hours.

With this resplendent a cast, a few of the narrative choices hurt the picture. Sidelining Lady Jessica for two hours is almost criminal when its Rebecca Ferguson you’ve got in the part. She is profoundly missed. It seems as though the movie will be buoyed by the return of Josh Brolin’s gruffly loyal and wryly charismatic Gurney Halleck… but once he’s back in the mix he does little more than stand dutifully behind Paul. Thanks to their literal distance from the story, new faces Christopher Walken and Florence Pugh as the Emperor and his daughter respectfully have comically little to do but stand on the sidelines until they’re asked to kneel.

Interestingly, the best character decision is the one that breaks from the source material. In Herbert’s book, Chani is little more than a subservient babymaker for Paul. But here she is a powerfully defiant presence, repeatedly calling bullshit on his strategically deployed messiah routine. Chalamet, for his part, steps up to the plate and finds his voice. Where previously Paul wandered through the story reacting to (or fleeing from) events, Part Two charts a growing premeditation in him, and we get to witness (slowly of course) how he starts to drift inexorably toward the power hungry. One of the film’s most memorable scenes sees him beseeching Chani that he only wants to be equal to her. This moment is dramatically betrayed come the end when all are called to kneel. It’s one of the few payoffs that delivers.

For all the sweep and bombast of the action finale, Villeneuve now has his eye on Dune Messiah. So, as with part one, even the film’s numerous climaxes feel compromised and curtailed of resolution. Once again it feels most keenly like watching two-and-a-half episodes of Games of Thrones. Mid-season, this time. For all the movie’s resplendent effects work and grand vistas, there’s little real catharsis come the end, and even less emotion. Less steeped in style than stifled by it, Villeneuve’s vision lacks the requisite heart and rawness for us to feel much of anything. Zendaya becomes the movie’s MVP because she manages to ask something of us. Ferguson would have been but she’s simply not there.

The meat of this series is in its musings on zealotism, fanaticism and the corruptibility of man, rendered here – perhaps rightly – as ponderous topics. The philosophy and politics of Dune only deepens with ensuing books, suggesting that the way forward for Villeneuve and these characters will only get more grimly reflective of our capacity to create misery… even at the ass-end of space. Until that time there’ll be plenty here to keep the FilmBros salivating for Villeneuve like Stilgar whenever Paul does anything, but on this evidence he’s not the messiah, he’s just a very serious boy.