W hen Dune: Part One (finally) came out in October 2021, it had a lot to live up to. Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi epic takes place in a far-future, planet-spanning human civilization in which rival dynastic families vie for control of a grand empire — and especially for control of the spice melange. A substance found only on the desert planet Arrakis, it, among other things, enables interstellar travel in the Dune universe. Dune centers on House Atreides, and its scion Paul, who are lured into taking over the spice franchise on Arrakis as part of a trap laid by their enemies, the Harkonnens.
In Dune, Herbert created more than just a fascinating and fully realized universe. He also filled it with complex and mature themes about the workings of fate, destiny, and power, and the dangers of false messiahs. Prior adaptations have failed to capture its grandeur, especially when forcibly compressed. So it was understandable that director Denis Villeneuve (Arrival, Blade Runner 2049) divided his attempt at Dune in two. Though the first part featured gorgeous visuals, a stacked cast, and more-than-adequate faithfulness to the source text, its contrived denouement was unsatisfactory. “When, after this climax, I got a credits sequence, what I really wanted was an intermission,” I wrote then.
Well, after three years of that intermission we call life (including another delay), Dune: Part Two has arrived. And a shorter intermission would have indeed been welcome. Villeneuve has given us another immersive and awe-inducing sci-fi spectacle — albeit with certain imperfections that, while hardly discrediting, may keep it from transcendent greatness.
Dune: Part Two picks up where its predecessor left off. Paul (Timothée Chalamet) and his mother, Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), having survived the Harkonnen plot, have fled into the desert of Arrakis and taken refuge among its natives, the Fremen. They have taken advantage of prophetic anticipations seeded on the planet by other members of the Bene Gesserit, the enigmatic and powerful religious order guiding the universe’s destiny, to which Jessica belongs.
Whereas the main drama of the first part was the onrushing doom of House Atreides, and whether Paul could escape it, part two redoubles the focus on Paul’s ultimate destiny, what the book calls his “terrible purpose.” He fears that he is fated to become a messianic figure to the Fremen, and that with their fighting prowess and knowledge of the desert at his disposal, he will not just survive, but inspire an intergalactic conquest — despite its ample sampling of Arabic and Islamic motifs, the movie calls a “holy war” what the book does not hesitate to call a “jihad” — in which billions will die in his name.
As Paul’s mystique grows from, at best, a controversial proposition among the Fremen (and at worst a joke) to a bona fide religion, the Harkonnens — grotesque Baron (Stellan Skarsgård), petulant Raban (Dave Bautista), and cruel-yet-charismatic Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler — no relation) — struggle to tame the Lawrence of Arabia–style campaign of sabotage Paul leads. They ultimately serve the Emperor, a figure only hinted at in part one, now played as a scheming-yet-nervous ruler by Christopher Walken — whose daughter Irulan (Florence Pugh) observes with interest from afar as the legend of Paul (known to the Fremen as “Muad’Dib”) grows.
It is a lot to handle. And the film does so with great skill. Its visuals are once again stunning. Desert vistas take on a spare beauty. CGI and practical effects blend so thoroughly that even the most reality-defying wonders on screen appear not just credible but gasp-inducing and spine-tingling. (Another great Hans Zimmer score helps.) Just about every scene, action and non, is staged with care, without frenetic resort to excessive cutting and perspective-shifting. Its choices are deliberate, and no more so than when some of the book’s most famous scenes get translated to screen seemingly straight out of a careful reader’s vivid imagination. And for all that, the film is also capable of great subtlety (consider one sequence in which a group of warriors walk into a haze to meet their foes in combat) and even intimacy. Dune: Part Two has made many worthy entries to the all-time pantheon of sci-fi iconography.
The script, by Villeneuve and Jonathan Spaihts (who also handled screenwriting on Part One), guides the proceedings well enough. At times, the story can seem to lack direction between its moments of great power, but those moments are great enough to forgive this flaw.
A more serious potential defect arises from the degree to which Dune: Part Two assumes and even takes for granted book-level familiarity with what it depicts (which was true of Part One as well). Many of the story’s details are only hinted at, which would surely disadvantage the non-reader. The important themes of the book still do shine through, though sometimes with an unnecessarily elusive subtlety, as with the truly catastrophic nature of the course Paul sought to avoid but eventually accepted, in light of which the Harkonnens become not so much evil as practically incidental.
Another problem with this assumed familiarity, however, arises when the movie compromises that with which one is expected to be familiar. For the most part, its deviations from the text are acceptable. But one is more questionable. The main way Dune: Part Two demonstrates what Paul had to become to accept his fate is through Chani (Zendaya), the Fremen woman with whom he falls in love. In a noticeable departure from the book (especially in their contrasting endings), Chani is the primary skeptic of Paul’s transformation into the Fremen’s messiah. What Herbert shows largely through Paul’s inner thoughts, Villeneuve externalizes in Chani, undercutting their union for the apparent sake of increasing the agency of her character. The intent of this change is understandable even if its execution is dubious — and perhaps yet another tease.
Despite these faults, Dune: Part Two stands as a marvel of modern sci-fi filmmaking, and mostly makes good on the tease of Part One. Taken as a whole, Villeneuve’s Dune is a master class in world-building and is an engaging spectacle — proof that big-budget blockbusters don’t have to be dumb to be crowd-pleasers. Let its imperfections drive viewers back to the book itself. And let’s get more movies like this — perhaps a lot like this? — in theaters immediately.