Dune: Part 2 review – The Brainy Blockbuster we deserve
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Writers: Denis Villeneuve & Jon Spaihts
Stars: Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Josh Brolin & Austin Butler
Running Time: 166 minutes
Please note there may be spoilers below.
Dune: Part 2 is movie built from confidence. In the first post-title card scene, an audacious crouching, wandering camera reintroduces us to Dune’s heroes in the midst of a delicate moment. The frame glides between the hand signs and movements of the remaining members of House Atreides and their Fremen comrades, capturing the feeling of danger from sand-level. Here we feel part of the group, so close are we to the people fighting this escalating space war. It’s a reminder of Denis Villeneuve’s success. He’s not one to shy away from grounding his films in the slow reality of his characters, even in the face of large scale world building and a growing budget
For readers of Frank Herbert’s allegorical space opera, you’ll already know adapting the second half of Dune for cinema is an intimidating undertaking. Filled with dense lore, religious allegory, extended exposition, and a surprisingly swift ending, it’s a good read but you wouldn’t be wrong to label it humourless. Herbert’s interest remained in rewriting the Jesus mythology at the expense of making hero Paul Atreides a little unrelatable. Being ‘the chosen one’ isn’t exactly the best way to connect your character to ordinary people. And yet for all of the serious themes at play, Villeneuve is able to introduce some much needed humanness into a story that’s at risk of loosing it.
This starts with Stilgar (Javier Bardem), a character you’d be surprised to know is probably one of the funniest so far this year. Yet most importantly this humour never comes at the expense of depth. The loudest laugh I heard in the theatre this year was Stilgar’s moment of pure Monty Python inspired absurdity, and to think such a moment comes from Dune: Part 2! It’s an unexpected joy. Paul Atreides denies himself to be the messiah, therefore he is the messiah! It’s one of many confident surprises Dune: Part 2 has in store for us.
As a story of guerilla warfare, of natives vs colonists, technology vs faith, the grand themes of this world offer us a nutritious backdrop for drama. Our colonists, the Harkonnens are provided much more screen time here to build their effective animosity. The gluttonous Baron Harkonnen remains in power but weakens in the face of native efficiency, a man disconnected from the world he’s desperate to control. The long awaited appearance of his young nephew Feyd-Rautha proves Austin Butler is the chameleon he titillated he was in Elvis (2022), here seething and hissing with malevolent instinct and black teeth. We’re treated to an excursion on the Harkonnen home planet, Giedi Prime, whose black sun strips the crowded cityscapes of all colour. It’s a dizzying delight to watch cinematography match the world-building as a tracking shot of Baron Harkonnen from inside to outside replaces any colour with a harsh silverised monochrome. All the choices, all the aesthetics a reminder of how deft Villeneuve’s decision making continues to be at every level of storytelling
After his seminal work on The Batman (2022) and The Creator (2023), Greig Fraser’s photography is incredible, filled with pastel oranges and the harsh light leaks of midday sun. Like in The Batman, he can either embrace a dirty frame by filling scenes with the dust of a brutal environment or compose an image so clear it’s difficult to tell where the special affects begin. The effect is an unusually seamless visual treat where you’re able to genuinely forget what you’re watching isn’t there. So often do we pick out the clumsy illusion of Hollywood-fare that here it’s so wonderful to enjoy a film that creates fantasy without breaking the immersion.
The only weak link remains one baked into the source material. Paul Atreides remains a distant and opaque hero, whose escalating God-like emotions are tricky material to address visually. He’s not the most relatable character, but the role is undoubtedly Timothée Chalamet’s best yet. Aggressive, uncompromising, he breaks free of the shackles of his sensitive boyishness to tear down the limitations of others and push the Fremen towards battle. And what a battle it proceeds to be, a fearless third act of large scale armies, sandworms, and atomic weapons (to remind us Dune was a novel conceived in the late 1950s). But as the movie scales up its size, the greatest relief is Villeneuve is keenly aware his great drama is really inside the Imperial Tent, where the Shakespearean power struggle heats up. When looking towards Star Wars, the space opera Dune directly inspired, Disney could learn an awful lot from Dune’s tasteful restraint.
This restraint also creates a sense of maturity about the property, that this is a film made by adults for adult. For all the bombast and bluster, we remain in the hands of intelligent filmmakers to choose intimate drama over the lowest common denominator of excitement. The result is a deep, fun, allegory of power and fuel, and thankfully in a world full of infantilising entertainment, Dune: Part 2 remains delightfully grownup.