‘Dune: Part Two’ Is Bigger, Bolder — and Yes, Even Better — Than Part One

So, where were we? Oh, right.

House Atreides, the noble family that oversaw the rule of the spice-rich planet Arrakis, is no more. Its patriarch, Duke Leto, is dead. His heir Paul Atreides, and the young man’s mother Lady Jessica, are both presumed to have been killed as well. House Harkonnen, led by the corpulent and cybernetically enhanced Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, will once again take control of Arrakis and mine its deserts for its prized — and extremely hallucinogenic — resource. Unbeknownst to the Baron, his hulking nephew Beast Rabban (who governs the planet), and the galactic Emperor himself, Paul and Jessica have survived attempts on their life. They have been taken in by the Fremen, the Bedouin-like tribe who call those shifting sands home. He’s also discovered that Chani, the literal woman of his dreams — he’s been having these crazy, apocalyptic visions — is real. Paul and his mom accompany the Fremen as they prepare a campaign of guerilla warfare against the Harkonnens. Some even believe Paul may be the messiah mentioned in their prophecies. “This is only the beginning,” Chani says. She has no idea how right she is.

For some, these names may ring bells way, way back in your memory banks; mention that they’re characters played by Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Oscar Isaac, and a who’s-who of equally recognizable actors, and you’ll see the lights go on in their eyes. For others, the heroes and villains, mentors and monsters that populate Frank Herbert’s 1965 cult novel are old friends, their exploits etched into readers’ brains like gospel. One of the great things about Dune, Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 partial adaptation of that original book, was that you could take in its story and swoon over its imagery regardless of where you fell on the scale. It’s a classic hero’s-journey tale of — to paraphrase author/film professor Howard Suber — a kid rescued from his fate and put on the path toward his destiny. And it was the sort of faithful yet bold, properly bonkers realization of the novel for the screen that fans had been dying to see, the perfect melding of artist and material.

Villeneuve’s movie also wore its ambitions on its sleeve, or rather, its title card: This was very much Part One, clocking in close to three hours yet stopping roughly halfway through the book. Whether or not he’d get to finish what he started was up in the air until his corporate patrons were convinced there was indeed an audience ready for sandworms, mystical sororities (big up the Bene Gesserit!) and a hesitant Muad’Dib.

Thank your respective gods that Villeneuve got the greenlight for another chapter. His Dune: Part Two isn’t just a continuation of a saga. The French-Canadian filmmaker has delivered an expansion and a deepening of the world built off of Herbert’s prose, a YA romance blown up to Biblical-epic proportions, a Shakespearean tragedy about power and corruption, and a visually sumptuous second act that makes its impressive, immersive predecessor look like a mere proof-of-concept. Villeneuve has outdone himself. More importantly, he’s done justice to the scope and scale and sheer weirdness of a stoner-lit touchstone’s back half without, pun intended, sanding away its edges. It’s unapologetically geeky. It’s twice as unapologetically cinematic.

After a brief preamble that introduces us to Christopher Walken‘s reptilian Emperor and his moody daughter Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh), we’re right back in the desert, watching Paul (Chalamet) and his Fremen cohorts attack a Harkonnen platoon. The young man has somewhat adapted to the ways of his indigenous hosts, yet he’s still an outworlder. Fighting alongside Chani (Zendaya), however, you can sense their bond. Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) is on her way to becoming a Bene Gesserit high priestess; she’s also pregnant with Paul’s sister, who carries on telepathic conversations with Mom while in utero. The Fremen leader Stilgar (Javier Bardem, once again spicing up his dialogue with slices of Spanish ham) has taken the young man under his wing, and is starting to show signs that he believes this former aristocrat may be The One. Over in Arrakeen, the planet’s Giger-esque capital city — the ghost of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s abandoned adaptation haunts the set design here — Beast Rabban (Dave Bautista) is demanding to know why his soldiers are being attacked. His uncle (Stellan Skarsgård) throws down an ultimatum. Love and war is in the air. He who controls the spice, etc.

It’s in this extended, Lawrence-of-Arrakis opening section of Dune: Part Two that you get the stakes laid out for both Paul and the fight for the planet, with Villeneuve once again proving that he can meld a visionary’s eye with a big-tentpole filmmaker’s instinct for spectacle. He understands how science fiction threads a needle between the familiar and the otherworldly, adding in oddball touches that suggest galaxies far, far away while grounding the human drama with gravitas and girding it with adrenaline. The gent also knows how to compose for a giant screen, filling set pieces with unexpected grace notes amidst the sound and fury. Watching Paul and Chani take on attack ships with the equivalent of a rocket launcher while ducking behind a harvest machine’s steel legs makes you feel as if you’re in the hands of someone who understands how to choreograph action. When you gasp as these freedom fighters sprint horizontally as an exploding vessel falls vertically behind them with perfect shock-and-awe timing, you realize that you’re watching a genuine cineaste at work. And he can make a static shot of a figure staring out at a vast landscape seem as exhilarating and beguiling as a cast-of-thousands firefight. Even his non-moving pictures thrum.

But this act is also where you see Paul Atreides come into his own, and by extension, the actor who plays him. Part Two is where you see a boy having grown into a man, who then evolves into a reluctant — and eventually not-so-reluctant — savior. There’s a sense that Chalamet has not just stepped into the role but stepped up his game to play Paul 2.0, even if his coy courtship of Zendaya’s character occasionally veers into heartthrob’s-gonna-heartthrob territory. It helps immensely that her role is much more prominent, and that she’s an equal when it comes to taking down enemy combatants and holding your attention. You get a lot more Zendaya for your buck here.

Yet Chalamet is the one who has to bear the weight of Paul’s fear of power, his unwillingness to take up the mantle of Muad’Dib and the slow cracking of his moral compass on his slim shoulders. It was possible to wonder whether the young master Atreides’ palpable sense of reticence in Part One was part of the character or was wafting off the film’s star like a fume. There’s no such meta-confusion this time around. Chalamet finally seems to have matured into someone ready to question whether he’s fit to be a leader — to messiah or not to messiah, that is the question — even as righteously leads the masses into battle. When Paul finally succeeds in hooking on to a giant speeding sandworm, the victory feels twofold.

Which is necessary, because that’s when Dune: Part Two decides to trot out its villain di tutti villains. Dune fanatics may recall, fondly or otherwise, Sting’s portrayal of the dreaded Feyd Rautha as a sinewy male model in a winged codpiece in David Lynch’s 1984 version. The performance can be summed up in this single image, which was great for kickstarting the puberty of Reagan-era tweens but not so hot when it came to suggesting an unhinged killer. It’s safe to say that Austin Butler‘s take on the terror of Giedi Prime is anything but camp. Hairless, bulky and blessed with a world-class maniacal grin, this Rautha is 100-percent psychotic. The fact that Villenueve films him like a marble statue come to life, courtesy of a monochromatic gladitorial fight scene, only makes him that much more sinister. No supporting player is safe from his blade. No scenery is safe from his blackened jaws. It’s enough to make you forget he once played a 20th century icon.

By the time these two adversaries finally meet in front of all the main characters still left standing, hoping their knives chip and shatter, we’ve seen a lot: Léa Seydoux shows up as a seductive priestess, Anya Taylor-Joy drops by for a blink-and-miss cameo, the return of Josh Brolin as a cantankerous mentor, a sun that looks like a bat-signal, troops attacked by not one but three Freudian-as-fuck sandworms with armies astride their backs. And still, you feel as if the storytelling wave is just beginning to crest. We leave as we came in, knowing more is one the way, yet punch-drunk from the love triangles and the battles that will lead to even bigger fracas among fractured, warring houses. It’s not a spoiler to say that the stage is set for a third movie. Until then, however, Villeneuve and his cast leave you high on the spice of a science fiction sequel that seems bigger, bolder and somehow better than what came before it.

From Rolling Stone US.