To feel sincerely transported by a science fiction movie is to find your brain racing to keep up with your eyes , as every material body proffer fresh evidence that you ’ve smash - landed somewhere wholly raw . That ’s the sensation provoked byDune : Part Two , the close installment of Denis Villeneuve ’s monolithically monolithic , cleanly cleaved adaptation of the 1965 Frank Herbert novel . Like itspredecessor , this is a blockbuster of principally cosmetic appeal — a victory of reality - edifice whose ocular imagination extends from the big details of its brutalist production design ( jumbo ships , elephantine construction ) to the small props .
Just front at thehelmets . Josh Brolin ’s spaceman - snappy astronaut train . The top piece of an US Army ’s beetle - ignominious armour , complete with thingamabob whirr in the back . The crescent - moon daemon horns sported by a Amphitheatrum Flavium ’s staff , a caller - issue uniform extravagant enough to get the flashbulbs bursting at the Met Gala . If one needed further grounds thatDunewas laser - gunning to supplantStar Warsin the public vision — to steal the deed of America ’s rule space opera house from the dealership its source cloth help inspire — the vaporous assortment ofMandalorian - dishonor headwear will do the trick . Mighty statues should be build in costume designerJacqueline West ’s honor .
WatchingDune : Part Two , there ’s small denying that Villeneuve , the Québécois fine art house auteur gone full Hollywood hitmaker , has tamed the unruly deserts of Arrakis . He ’s done whatAlejandro Jodorowskyand David Lynch could n’t , and converted a purportedly unfilmable cult object into a popular , populist entertainment — a humungous moviegoing upshot for the multiplex masses . Yet , hisDuneremains satisfying almost entirely as spectacle , as something to only gawk at . Its effect is rather crushingly narcotising , an awe numbed by the ironical , plodding feudalistic intrigue of Herbert ’s fib . Who knew it was potential to be so amazed and so world-weary at the same time ?
GivePart Twothis : It ’s more nimble and exciting thanPart One . Slicing the 800 - plus - varlet account in two was probably the only mode to reliably and coherently bring it to the screen . ( Lynch ’s 1984Dune , which covered the whole rule book in just over two minute , was n’t precisely a model of narrative sensation . ) But Villeneuve ’s approach resulted in a prelude of a blockbuster , a transfigure chess opening deed that give most of its 155 minutes to table - setting . It existed only to introduce the Tolstoy - scaled plaster bandage of characters ; the jargon - weighty mythology ; and the central locating , an inhospitable desert major planet whose aboriginal people , the Fremen , have been psychologically and physiologically transformed by a rude imagination , the inscrutable , extremely coveted substance known colloquially as spice .
One could pass a whole review recapitulate the expository events of that inconclusive opening chapter . Villeneuve and co - writer Jon Spaihts waste lilliputian time doing so , rather picking up where their “ To be continued … ” cliffhanger left off , with teen scion Paul Atreides ( Wonka‘s Timothée Chalamet ) and his witchy zealot female parent , Jessica ( Silo‘s Rebecca Ferguson ) , forced into the desiccate wilds of Arrakis . They are the alone survivors of an ambush by their sworn political rivals , the Harkonnens — tyrannical mutant patrician who have been strip the major planet and harvesting its spicery for decades . To avenge his father , Paul may have to take his role as the messiah of legend and prophecy , and unite the Fremen around a rough-cut cause — the obliteration of their shared enemy .
That ’s not the one-half of it . Dune‘splot is as dense as a phonebook . But out there in the sand , off from the castle political sympathies ofPart One , the history sparks to biography a little . There ’s an undeniable hook , however familiar , to Paul ’s hero journey , which rests on his half - willing assimilation into the native population — a classically affect melodrama that clarifiesAvataras another sci - fi vision born of Herbert ’s influence . Some hallow humor pound its head out of the dirt in the form of Javier Bardem ’s tribe leader , Stilgar , a skeptic - turned - true believer whose enthusiastic cheerleading is an haven of levity in a desert of poker - look prophecy . And though Zendaya ’s performance as Fremen warrior Chani , the woman of Paul ’s premonitory dreaming , has a distinctly contemporary cadence — is it possible for a film set eons in the future to seem anachronistic ? — the puppy - love courting lends a welcome human dimension to this stone - pad material .
For all its res publica - of - the - art effects work , Dune : Part Twohas the scale and nobility — even the somewhat pokier pace — of an Old Hollywood epic . Some of that follow down to its star - dot cast , the kind that used to fill out scriptural and disaster flick . As if to compensate for the large names lost inPart One ’s midway - mark massacre , Villeneuve floods the margins with new characters , like the galactic emperor moth ( Christopher Walken , silent for half his time on - screen , as if awful his noted , much - imitate dialect will baffle the otherworldly verisimilitude ) and his daughter , Princess Irulan ( Chalamet’sLittle Womancostar , Florence Pugh ) . And joining the prosthetically burdened Harkonnen clan isElvisstar Austin Butler , whose pastyGame of Thrones - grade sadist Feyd - Rautha adds a touch of enjoyably campy villainy to the legal proceeding . He gets a great entering , a rigged gladiatorial showdown germinate in ghostly black - and - white . But the film might have introduced him sooner than halfway through this long sit .
Herbert conceivedDuneas an allegoric vision of the Middle East , ravaged by oil - athirst invaders . On - screen , it rest an uneasy mess of contradictions : a critical review of colonialism that bends all too easily into the shape of a clean - Deliverer tarradiddle , a kind of recondite - spaceLawrence of Arabia . Villeneuve complicates that pop recital in touchable ways , induce Chani a spokeswoman for a divinatory hearing ’s remonstration — she ’s the secular voice of cause here , explicitly calling out the way the Bene Gesserit tenet can be used to control and exploit the Fremen — while emphasizing Paul ’s nagging doubts and the insidious manipulation of Jessica ’s conversion hunting expedition . ( As inDoctor Sleep , Ferguson ’s regal , classical beauty gains a secret predatory calibre . ) On the other hand , there ’s something rather colonialist about how theseDunes populate a humans symbolically Arab in dress and language with non - Arab actor . And that ’s to say nothing of the accidental substantial - worldly concern Echo of an dangerous undertaking that pits an tyrannous occupation against a rotatory jihad .
Even those uncomfortable with the optic ofDunemay fall under the careen of Villeneuve ’s majestic execution . The action is mythic , coherent , and , above all , heavy : When Paul leads the Fremen in an assault on one of the Harkonnen minelaying vessels , you feel the weight of the infernally stupendous machine in your bones . And when a sandworm of lore rises from the deep , quick to be split up like a stubborn sawhorse by the interloping Paul , the whole auditorium shakes and quivers . The composer , Hans Zimmer , has never find a more perfect visual match for his deaf transonic assaults , the rumble Dolby bombast that ’s become his signature . There may be more expensive or more thrilling Hollywood flick released this year , but do n’t await one morehuge .
Still , the director is a frustratinglyliteraldream weaver finch . He playsDuneimpossibly direct , like gospel . That might be one key to the project ’s success ; after eld of caustic remark - poisoned superhero frivolity , the thunderous ego - earnestness of this two - part sight holds a certain gaud , an alien flavor . But sci - fi as unapologetically weird as Herbert ’s maybe deserves a more psychedelic interpreting . For all its borderline incoherence , Lynch ’s version tapdance into the stoner - rock’n’roll “ whoa ” factor ofDune . Villeneuve twist the text into left-hand - mind pageantry , a sci - fi movie whose enigma are all right there on the surface . But what could one expect from the expert craftsman who looked atBlade Runnerand decided that the interminable replicant argumentation was where its stake lay ?
To Villeneuve , what ’s cinematic aboutDuneis all in the orbit and the texture — the opportunity to visualize a Brobdingnagian universe of innate and technological wonders . That the characters , even ( or perhaps especially ) Chalamet’sTiger Beatchosen one , have the personality of chess piece is a bug the movie maker treats like a characteristic . Dunemay be a foundational classic , but many of the sci - fi adventures it revolutionize had the good sense to introduce aHan Solo(or at least keep around a Duncan Idaho ) to undercut the solemn religious debate and endless jockeying for power . Dune : Part Twodoesn’t desire to undercut any of that . It ’s comfortable run out a jumbo biz of Bromus secalinus — or , hand the bifurcation of Herbert ’s sinewy story , half a biz . At least the gameboard is beautiful .
