Dune: Part Two (2024)
Paul Atreides unites with the Fremen in this second half of the sci-fi classic
Paul and Chani see their growing love put at risk by the Fremen’s uncertain future
Dune: Part Two (2024)
In theaters
The 2021 movie Dune extracted from the first half of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel the origin story of a savior. Who really wants to be one? That supercharged question haunted the movie.
We saw the young Paul Atreides, after his father’s assassination, called on to lead the noble House of Atreides. But this prince of the realm wasn’t fully ready to rule. Worse, he, his mother and a band of loyal followers were driven into exile.
Dune: Part Two expands their journey, picking up right where the last movie ended. This time the tale is more lavishly embellished. It’s also jam packed with action.
Writer-director Denis Villeneuve and co-writer Jon Spaihts have made the saga both more massive and grittier. The military fire power here actually seems to wound when it hits its targets.
Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987), about Puyi, the boy who became the last emperor of China, had the kind of over-scaled grandeur that Villeneuve summons here.
The two directors have radically different temperaments, but in this movie, unexpectedly, the sincere, rationalist French-Canadian paints with the lush abandon of the Italian sensualist.
No moviegoer has to completely buy into Herbert’s vision of a young savior speaking for the downtrodden. But Villeneuve’s compelling visuals will make you a rabid Paul Atreides follower for the 160-minute run time.
With their kingdom lost, Paul (Timothée Chalamet) and his mother Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) are cast onto the desert planet Arrakis. Atop and under its sandy expanse, and nowhere else in the universe, is a magically powerful substance called “spice”.
Rebecca Ferguson is the powerful Lady Jessica of the Bene Gesserit religious order
Anyone who consumes it is can prolong life, see prophetic visions and undertake interstellar travel.
Paradoxically, Arrakis is also the home of the Fremen, not cloistered philosophers but a fierce tribe of religious nomads forced to adopt a tough military ethic.
They stay on the move to evade their constantly assaulting oppressors, the House of Harkonnen, an evil kingdom from another planet determined to conquer Arrakis, exterminate the Fremen and wrest control of the “spice”.
This clash sounds both harrowing and monumental. It’s both. But let’s pause for a moment to get our bearings. What is this tale’s overriding message?
Brace yourself. Oppressed people want to be freed from their oppressors. You don’t say.
Look, I’m being sarcastic only to point out that this isn’t a new concept. To make it feel fresh, Villeneuve and collaborators erect a thrumming multi-part saga that leans hard into that most familiar trope, the sacred prophecy fulfilled.
To put it spiritually, unto the Fremen a savior will be given. Just as the Bible and the Quran foretell deliverance, Arrakis will achieve its emancipation through the trembling, anointed Paul.
You get the idea. Paul will go through trials to prove to the Fremen that he is indeed the “Mahdi”, the guided one (a suddenly revealed savior figure within Islamic orthodoxy, though not mentioned in the Quran).
The menace the director transmits in these images doesn’t feel far-fetched. This is expressively ornate, brutalist production design, and Villeneuve’s camera frames it with a frightful focus that as far as I know is new to sci-fi on film.
The trick Villeneuve pulls off here is to make the movie look eerily fantastical, yet beautifully – dangerously – imaginable. You almost wish you could get your hands on some of these fearsome weapons, prowl these dark towers.
Christian mysticism figures in the telling, too. Among the Fremen’s boldest fighters is Chani (Zendaya), who will help convince skeptical Fremen that Paul is to be trusted and may lead them to deliverance.
She’s a kind of Mary Magdalene who, if need be, can shoot to kill. She kisses Paul passionately, too.
Oh, another quasi-spiritual phenomenon dwells on Arrakis, the enormous earthworms that glide under the planet’s sweltering sandscape.
These gigantic creatures can be teased to surface, and a rite of passage to Fremen leadership is for a brave warrior to harness and ride one of these twisting, sinuous behemoths across the desert, showing them who’s boss. Paul, of course, needs to pass this test.
The large cast performs with sterling conviction. Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh) opens the narrative, accompanied by her father, Emperor Shaddam (Christopher Walken, a shade too tentative). They want the House of Harkonnen to eliminate Paul and thereby break the Fremen.
When the Harkonnen falter, their overlord Baron Vladimir (Stellan Skarsgard, more hideous and spookier than before), orders his psychotic nephew Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler) to go head-to-head with Paul.
Paul Atreides locked in a perilous armed face-off with the psychotic Feyd-Rautha
The normally congenial Butler here is transformed – with a shaved head, pale white makeup and a serpent’s stare – into an amoral monster. The actor makes this gleeful killer deeply scary, the polar opposite of his warm, tormented Elvis.
Ferguson is even more formidable here than in the prior movie because Lady Jessica has an agenda that supersedes her gifted son’s.
As a member of the all-female Bene Gesserit religious order, she’s dedicated to seeing her sisters in religion triumph over all male dynasties, everywhere. Even Paul has to cede his mother her superior powers.
When Harkonnen armies invade Arrakis, they come with giant machines designed to dig into the sand and bring the precious “spice” to the surface. In battle, a buzzing fleet of military “ornithopters”, darting like giant bees, belches gunfire on a scale that dwarfs any filming of aerial combat I’ve seen.
The Harkonnen’s enormous headquarters is surrounded by tens of thousands of soldiers, and flanked by an array of tanks and weaponry that looks endless.
The architecture of the Harkonnen’s buildings is implacably fascist, intimidating in its massiveness. Villeneuve and his production team are clearly trying not just to thrill us but scare us. This is what crazed tyranny could look like.
And the menace the director transmits in these images doesn’t feel far-fetched. This is expressively ornate, brutalist production design, and Villeneuve’s camera frames it with a frightful focus that as far as I know is new to sci-fi on film. It adds a new kind of awe to epic moviemaking.
The trick Villeneuve pulls off here is to make the movie look eerily fantastical, yet beautifully – dangerously – imaginable. You almost wish you could get your hands on some of these fearsome weapons, prowl these dark towers.
This is a cruel world, but, astoundingly, unaccountably, I kept wanting to see more of it, wondering whether the Fremen could defeat the corrupt military power hellbent on crushing them.
Greig Fraser’s luminous cinematography and Joe Walker’s tight editing make all the characters feel doomed, more cosmically driven than any of them seem to realize. Hans Zimmer’s score hooks and rattles you all the way through. There’s no rest, no respite, anywhere.
Somehow all this is more frightening to behold – more relatable – than past movie epics set in ancient Rome or even as close as the two World Wars. You know you’re on the side of the Fremen, but so dartingly explosive, so surprisingly swift is the action that you’re never sure they’re going to prevail.
And the movie’s cliffhanger ending makes it clear that ultimate justice is seriously in doubt. Villeneuve has said the Herbert novel that follows this one, Dune: Messiah (1969), is on his agenda. But he’ll pause to make the third movie. One reason, he’s said, is to give Chalamet time to age into the role of a slightly older Paul.
That will be worth waiting for. Chalamet takes a step up here as an actor. He gives off a sense of command that he just missed in his bold, raw youthful Henry V in The King (2019).
Chalamet endows the haunted Paul Atreides with the mysterious aura of a savior
The role of Paul is double-edged. He isn’t yet a hero. He’s not even wholly “charismatic”. Some of the Fremen still doubt his calling to lead them. He’s blighted, stuck, with no clear path forward.
How has leading this desert people’s stride toward freedom become his destiny?
As Villeneuve stages Paul’s slow massing of authority, Chalamet layers a likely martyr’s hesitant speech rhythms into his lines. There are even qualms in the way he carries himself, blessed and cursed, cast — or miscast? — in a historic moment.
Arresting as Chalamet is, the performance that mesmerized me the most was Zendaya’s. Her Chani is watchful, questioning, even as she falls in love with Paul.
But when the moment for battle arrives, Chani proclaims to everyone, “I'm fighting for my people, not for him.” For her, suddenly, Paul the “deliverer” may not be the blessing he seems.
Just as Chani remains independent from Paul, Zendaya’s grit stays dead even with Chalamet’s. The actress fills the screen to a degree that even he, growing more adept with every movie, doesn’t quite rise to.
Her face can shift from a spiritual devotion as she gazes upon Paul to a tigress’s snarl when she takes up arms for the Fremen.
I couldn’t get enough of Zendaya, never knowing how she was going to react in the next moment. Would the actress dutifully meet the story’s demands, or instead stake out her own space in the frame, confiding in the audience her vision of Chani?
Zendaya is a star in the making.
There’s an old bit of religious tomfoolery that may even be heretical but can still be intriguing. It suggests the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Quran are all, in effect, one book.
This grand “combined volume” supposedly teaches humanity how to thrive, that is, how to save one’s soul, in a desert. Interestingly, the desert is the actual geographic birthplace for all three sacred texts.
I haven’t read Herbert’s novel, but judging by the two latest movies it’s inspired, I imagine something like that age-old quest for salvation underlies the novelist’s vision and fires up Villeneuve.
In the desert not just the body but the spirit too is parched. For the seeking soul, where lies salvation?
In his second grappling with the high-minded Atreides, the director keeps us guessing, and clearly puts himself on tenterhooks. That third Dune movie has a lot to live up to. Blessed and cursed indeed.