The battle scenes in Dune: Part 2 are as dull as Dune: Part 1. This repetition is curiously monotonous. Director Denis Villeneuve seems mesmerized by the half-lit extraterrestrial Arrakis, the desert planet that looks like a land without sun. Has Villeneuve never seen the radiant vistas of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia? It’s as if Villeneuve perversely intended an unappealing action movie — the opposite of Luc Besson’s dazzling Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. Instead, Dune seems like some simulation of the Middle East in the year 10191 — an endless movie that is, coincidentally, a $190 million meditation on endless wars. What else explains the popularity of this dreary enterprise?
Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) scans the infinite sand dunes and laughably tells his sweetheart, freedom-fighter Chani (Zendaya) “It’s breathtaking!” This prelude to their big kiss is meant to hook Part 1 into Part 2, but there’s no compelling romance, mission, or fascination that connects these characters to the dark, drab homeland. Anyone drawn to Dune: Part 2 fulfills a freakish commercial obligation, like doing cinematic detention.
Millennial film culture has lost its aesthetic bearings. Dune: Part 2 follows sci-fi, graphic-novel, video-game formulas but neglects visual pleasure. And the power-struggle theme (the House Atreides fighting the House Harkonnen) is represented by bizarre, unappealing set pieces: Paul harnesses a giant sandworm, shown in vague, distant, misjudged proportions. His conflict with the decadent Harkonnen scion Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler doing Darth Maul) tips into unfathomable debauchery.
Villeneuve’s attempt at moral extremes (Paul the messiah versus his diabolical adversary) suddenly shifts to black and white. Feyd-Rautha’s introduction is a relief from the brown monotone, but this Manichean mode feels borrowed and trite: The Harknonnen masses evoke Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi formations in Triumph of the Will (or worse, Ridley Scott’s Gladiator), while Feyd-Rautha, as an ivory-white depilated freak, recalls Mapplethorpe’s infamous contrasting shaved heads.Villeneuve’s mix of bald males and women covered in burkas during this midpoint sequence of arena sadism is startling yet inexpressive.
Villeneuve’s sci-fi fantasy makes sense only as a Millennial nightmare. Its brown-on-brown battle scenes tease a generation ignorant of war and politics and that is no longer encouraged to believe in the Messiah (certainly not petulant Chalamet).
Dune 2’s worst aspect, after its visual monotony, is its muddled relevancy; it evokes our Iraq War hangover and, unfortunately, post–October 7 Gaza–Israel dread. Its combat scenes of pointlessly bombed mountain ranges trivialize post-traumatic stress from Afghanistan to no point, as does the rhetoric from psychic females (Charlotte Rampling’s Reverend Mother, Florence Pugh’s Irulan, Rebecca Ferguson’s Jessica, Léa Seydoux’s Lady Margot) who prattle buzzwords “holy war” and “Southern fundamentalists.”
It’s all fatuous, like Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films — with Christopher Walken aping the Christopher Lee/Ian McKellen sages while Paul’s tribal authority and Chani’s underground resistance fighter are more vapid than Frankie and Annette in a ’60s beach-party movie. These bland lovebirds foretell the diminishment of the West; we’re all Bedouin now but without Lawrence of Arabia’s narrative and political clarity.
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Villeneuve gives Dune: Part 2 the Muslim inflection that was so remarkable in his breakthrough movie Incendies (2010), where the effect of Middle East conflict on a North American family had the impact of Greek tragedy. Since then, he has become a Hollywood hack, dealing in sci-fi and action genres that lack the profundity of his earlier, morally ambitious films. Incendies was emotionally rich, his Dune movies are arid.
Nothing in Villeneuve’s Dune series is as good as Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon, which revives mythic understanding of both mankind’s history and fate. Rebel Moon shares the pop-culture wit of David Lynch’s 1984 Dune adaptation, but instead of surrealism, Snyder brought kinetic, erotic excitement that elevated the sci-fi genre. Its imagery is daring, immediate, and reverberant, Dune: Part 2 is the anti–Rebel Moon. Moviegoers who settle for Villeneuve’s monotonous formula surrender to film culture’s decline.