By Alexander Joenks | Film | March 3, 2024 |
By Alexander Joenks | Film | March 3, 2024 |
Dune: Part Two is a triumphant and visionary science fiction film. It builds on what worked in the first film, and firmly establishes that it has been constructed out of not only an affection for the source material, but also a profound understanding of the tragedy at the heart of Herbert’s work. This is a story in which a boy becomes a hero and wins. It is a story of why that story is a tragedy.
It paints gorgeous visuals in motion, not just of sci-fi combat and explosions, but of a world away from ours in all the small details. The rattling suck of air through tubes in the sand, the dance of walking without rhythm across dunes, the gaping maw of a black-toothed enemy, the skittering glitter of spice blown across the land, the crystal clarity of hidden waters, the smooth tumble of sand through fingers. There’s a mesmerizing fullness to the imagery, of it being glimpses of a real world that resonates with texture and smell and taste rather than just the hollow glitz of sci-fi visuals.
And it embraces the sheer weirdness of the world. Not as acid trippy as the Lynch movie, but still reveling in the bizarreness. For instance, when ink bubble fireworks burst like a celebrating squid above a stadium of alabaster hordes stomping and swaying like an albino Nazi rally. Balloons drop metal monsters the size of apartment buildings into the desert, sand worms erupt like Cthulhu’s fingers out of oceans of sand.
Even with the weirdness on display, it feels more grounded as the characters are more fully realized than in the first film. Chani in particular is given a lot more character, more complexity, than is present in the novel in which she tends to be a motivator and plot device, but not necessarily a person. That’s true of many of the characters, to be true. Herbert, for all his brilliance, was also a product of his times in science fiction and he wrote in a period where characters were secondary to plots. Villeneuve deserves great credit for teasing out the emotion of characters without compromising the ideas, of making their passions and dreams as important as their moves on the chessboard of power.
It’s teasing out that emotion that leads to the greatest success of the movie: capturing the sadness at the heart of the story. It calls back at times to Paul’s conversation with his father in the first film, in which he expresses such doubts about wanting anything to do with power. At a first viewing, it read as the cliché of the reluctant hero. Yes, yes, you just want a simple life, but we know you’ll rise to be a hero because that’s what the story says should happen.
But what makes this story so powerful, what so many have seen between the lines over the decades in Herbert’s novels, is that the hero’s journey is not glory, it’s a trap. But it’s not so nave as to simply argue that heroes are bad, or that fighting evil makes you evil. No, it argues the sadness that victory always destroys what you are fighting to save. The only way to defeat an empire is to be an empire, the only way to save the Fremen way of life is to unleash them. “Lead them to paradise,” Chalamet says at the moment of triumph and to the shouts of elation with such infinite sadness.
But with all that said, the film feels rushed even at nearly three hours of run time. There is no real passage of time, and despite cataloging a whirlwind of events, a mere six months or so pass. We can’t pretend otherwise because of the biological clock that starts early in the movie. Book readers will know that it’s timing forced by deciding that Alia will not be in this film, which is probably a good editorial decision, but traps the story in a constrained timeline.
As with the first film, I cannot for the life of me understand how someone who hasn’t read the book can follow half of what’s going on. Not just in terms of easter eggs, or hidden longer term meanings of events, but on a basic level of understanding the basics of what is going on from moment to moment. The best I can say to someone who enjoyed the first movie but has not read the book is to trust that the plot does make sense if you look up the answers after the fact. And also to tell you to read the damned book already.
Go see Dune: Part Two on a giant screen. It’s why we make science fiction movies.