"Dune, Part 2": review

L to R: Chani (Zendaya), Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), and Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen (Austin Butler)

[WARNING: spoilers.]

I've been waking up very early in the morning to do my staircase workouts, and I decided to go see "Dune, Part 2" today before I went to work (I normally get to work around lunchtime and stay late). My favorite cinema is the Lotte World Tower Cinema, which has evolved over time. It used to be that you could arrive at the multiplex, go to a counter, and get a movie ticket from a human being. These days, though, and partly thanks to COVID, human interactions have been minimized, so to get a ticket (and assuming you don't reserve online), you go up to a touch screen and work your way through several menus—select your film and showtime, select your seat, select your payment method, say yea/nay to different options. Your ticket isn't even a paper ticket: in my case, the ticket arrived via my Kakao messenger app on my cell phone. It didn't even have a QR code, but the ticket flashed a warning saying that a screen capture of the ticket would not be acceptable when entering the theater. I went for the 9:00 a.m. showing of "Dune, Part 2," arriving a bit after 8 a.m., getting my ticket, then heading way, way upstairs via escalator to Theater #21, a "superplex" with a muscular sound system, a huge screen, and for me, a plush lounge chair with lots of space around me. This particular multiplex apparently has what is currently the world's biggest movie screen, but #21 wasn't that theater. It was close, though. My ticket set me back W20,000 for the plush experience; regular movie tickets at this cinema normally cost around W12,000, I think. In the US, the average these days is around $20 from what I hear. So much for the $4.50 tickets of my youth, and even Korea is becoming prohibitively expensive. Why even go to movies anymore? I had, in fact, thought about waiting a few months to watch "Dune" at home on streaming video, but all the reviewers I'd seen online said I needed to see this on the big screen.

If you're old enough, you may remember the director David Lean, who filmed "Lawrence of Arabia." Director Denis Villeneuve's 2024 "Dune, Part 2" will strongly remind you of that older film, with this story taking place mostly in the desert. "Part 2" picks up pretty much where the first movie left off: in medias res, with Paul (Timothée Chalamet) and his mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) having joined a Fremen tribe led by Stilgar (Javier Bardem), who is already predisposed to see Paul as a messiah-figure, the fabled Lisan al-Gaib, or Voice from the Outer World. Also in the tribe is Chani (Zendaya), who eventually becomes Paul's lover. Chani is, however, fiercely loyal to her people, and she is deeply skeptical of the Bene Gesserit prophecy, which makes her, despite her love for Paul, doubt that Paul is some sort of foretold leader. The movie toys with the idea that the Bene Gesserit prophecy is either merely a fabrication by the female order to protect any of its members who end up marooned in a foreign society or an actual prophecy that Paul is, fact, instantiating.

Paul goes through trials to prove himself to the Fremen as he learns their ways. He gets better at their native language, and Chani schools him on how the Southern Fremen are more fundamentalist and religious while the Northern Fremen are more skeptical. Jessica is accepted into the tribe as a new Reverend Mother, and she does her manipulative best to convince the doubters that Paul is indeed the Lisan al-Gaib. Jessica is pregnant, and part of the price of her acceptance into the tribe is that she must replace the current aged Reverend Mother, which means undergoing the Water of Life ceremony. The most prominent life form on the desert planet Arrakis, also known as Dune, is the sandworm, often called a Maker or referred to by its religious name, Shai Hulud, a name that, according to author Frank Herbert, "designates the earth deity of Fremen hearth superstitions." Water of Life is extracted by drowning a young sandworm ("Little Maker") which, upon its death, excretes a blue liquid that, when ingested by women, has a deeply psychotropic effect evoking visions, generational race memories, and even images of possible futures. Historically, men cannot drink the Water of Life without going mad and dying, but a Reverend Mother has learned the biofeedback discipline of chemically changing the poison inside her into something safe that the rest of the tribe can consume. Jessica undergoes the ritual, but because she is pregnant, her fetus, daughter Alia, becomes a Reverend Mother herself, imbued with the memories and emotions of all of Arrakis's previous Reverend Mothers. And from that point forth, Alia can communicate telepathically with her mother, speaking with the voice of an adult (Anya Taylor-Joy, visual cameo). Alia can also communicate with Paul in whispered, ghostly exchanges. Paul, for his part, eventually risks drinking some of the Water of Life as a way of opening his mind to future possibilities and insights about the past—a power attributed to the Kwisatz Haderach, a potent male being who is supposed to be the all-seeing culmination of the Bene Gesserit breeding project, the nexus of all possibilities.

Several plot lines happen at once during the film: (1) Paul inserts himself deeper into Fremen society as he deals with the potentially horrible implications of becoming first a Fedaykin (elite fighter), then a leader; (2) Emperor Shaddam IV (Christopher Walken) and his daughter Irulan (Florence Pugh) plot on what to do about the rebellious Fremen, even as they reckon with the idea that Paul Atreides might still be alive; (3) Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård) and his nephews Glossu "Beast" Rabban (Dave Bautista) and Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler) struggle to manage spice production on Arrakis (since taking it back from the Atreides in the first movie); the Fremen continue to wage a guerrilla war against the Harkonnens with Paul's help, and when Paul runs into his old fighting master Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin), Gurney tells Paul he knows where the "family atomics" are located, giving Paul the option of utterly obliterating all spice production, thus bringing the galaxy, and the galactic empire, to a grinding halt (spice is used by Guild Navigators for interstellar travel). Meanwhile, (4) the order of the Bene Gesserit continues its galaxy-wide manipulation of human history as Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam (Charlotte Rampling) and her student Lady Margot Fenring (Léa Seydoux) see how pliable Feyd-Rautha is.

It's a ton of castle intrigue, but director Villeneuve does his best to smooth out the narrative and keep the specialized terminology to a minimum. The movie follows the major beats of Frank Herbert's 1965 novel while also including some major, major departures. First and foremost is how Villeneuve deals with Chani. In the book, she was stoic and fiercely loyal to Paul, but in the movie, her love seems conditional, depending mostly on whether Paul is seduced by the Bene Gesserit prophecy that was supposedly never meant to apply to anyone real. The Water of Life ceremony for Jessica is portrayed fairly accurately, but the movie skips over the sharing of the transmuted water afterward. And here's a major spoiler: in the novel, Alia is born and becomes a creepy child who, despite a childish lisp, speaks like an adult. Alia ends up killing Baron Harkonnen, but in the movie, Alia isn't born, thus obviating the need to use uncanny-valley CGI to depict an adult in a toddler's body.  She's shown as a fetus for most of the film, and Paul has a brief glimpse of the adult Alia (played by Anya Taylor-Joy). Since she's not born in this version of the story, it's up to Paul himself to kill the Baron. Another departure from the book is that we never see Paul teaching the Fremen a superior form of hand-to-hand combat. In the book, we learn that Paul trained in martial arts under the watchful eye of Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa, not in this movie) and Gurney Halleck, but he also trained in Bene Gesserit combat under his mother, herself a stalwart fighter capable of easily besting Stilgar, leader of his Fremen tribe and in theory the best Fremen fighter. The movie also doesn't show how long Stilgar labored under the prospect of his own death by Paul's hand: leadership succession among the Fremen is decided by combat, and from a long way off, Stilgar knew (in the book) that he and Paul would eventually have to fight. In the movie, the whole thing is rather sudden: at a war council, when Paul declares himself the leader (per his Fremen name Muad'Dib, the kangaroo mouse, master of the desert and "he who points the way"), Stilgar rises, ready to accept death by Paul's hand because he knows he can never beat Paul. In both the book and the movie, Paul breaks with Fremen tradition by refusing to fight Stilgar, his loyal friend and ally, saying that it's unwise to destroy your weapon right before you go to war. The movie also magnifies the dissent among the Fremen as they reckon with the prophecy and whether Paul is the true incarnation of the Lisan al-Gaib. The movie's division of the Fremen into northern and southern sects isn't canonical at all, but it does work narratively for the movie. Another rather confusing mini-subplot shows Harkonnen forces monitoring Arrakis from afar (presumably from their home planet of Giedi Prime), but in the book, one of Arrakis's advantages is that it's made a deal with the wider empire not to have any satellites except for a few that monitor weather. There's also the matter of Lady Fenring who, in the book, is married to Count Hasimir Fenring, a personal friend of the emperor and a failed version of the Kwisatz Haderach ("Shortening of the Way"), the messiah-figure that Paul may be. In Herbert's novel, Paul sees Count Fenring at a gathering and pities him when he realizes who and what the count is: a genetic dead end but a kindred spirit. Count Fenring is, alas, not in the movie. I also wish the movie had done more with Paul's sad realization that Stilgar had gone from being a friend to being a worshiper. The movie has one throw-away line about how people now treat Paul as if he were a holy man whereas the book deals with this problem in some depth. Lastly, there's the mistreatment of Gurney Halleck in Villeneuve's production: in the book, Gurney is a seasoned warrior who is more than a match for any Fremen. He was one of Paul's fighting masters, but in the movie, he's made out to be clumsy and bumbling when it comes to living in the desert. Chani looks at him trying to set up his tent and pronounces him "hopeless." The Gurney of my imagination would impress the Fremen with his own brand of martial wisdom, given that he's a disciplined veteran of warfighting in many different planetary climates.

There were also some confusing moments in the movie that had nothing to do with departures from the novel. Why was Paul sent out into the desert for a test of his navigational skills, but the test's conclusion is never shown? (Or did I miss that part?) Why would Feyd-Rautha be given the Bene Gesserit pain-box test by Lady Fenring? (The answer may be that he was being groomed to play a larger role in galactic affairs.) Why does Princess Irulan call Feyd-Rautha a "psychopath" while other Sisters call him a "sociopath"?

There were some outright disappointments, too. Minor quibbles first: the story has way too many out-of-focus images that slowly resolve into focus. There's also too much slow-motion walking as a way to convey significance, and too many shots of crowds cheering Paul while Chani pouts. And as for the larger problems: Gurney Halleck gets a chance to face off against Glossu Rabban, who had enslaved Halleck years ago; their fight is fairly anticlimactic. (In the book, Rabban dies "off camera.") The cinematic killing of Vladimir Harkonnen is even more anticlimactic: already lying crippled on the steps before the emperor's throne at the end of the movie, he gets stuck like a slaughtered pig. The movie ends with Paul about to marry Princess Irulan as a way to secure dominance over the empire after he forces Emperor Shaddam to submit to him, and Chani is left fuming as she watches the politics unfold, but the novel ends with Jessica reassuring Chani that Paul loves only her, that she will be Paul's concubine, and that he will treat Irulan with nothing but coldness—no love, no loyalty, no intimacy of any kind. Leave her to her books and her writing. The book concludes with Jessica telling Chani that, even though she and Chani never married their dukes, they would be remembered as wives. In the movie, Chani can't take the sight of Paul moving along the path of bloody jihad and taking Irulan's hand, so she goes out to the desert, and the movie's final scene shows her sadly/angrily calling a worm to ride away from the field of battle. (The emperor had been goaded to Arrakis when Paul sent him a formal threat about control of the spice, and once the emperor was on the ground, Paul led a massive, multi-sandworm assault against the emperor's camp in the middle of a "great-grandmother of a storm.") I was also disappointed to see that more wasn't done with Jessica's Water of Life ritual: in the novel, as the old Fremen Reverend Mother was dying, she and Jessica were telepathically linked, and much was exchanged between them, including the old Reverend Mother's shock at discovering Jessica was pregnant—a fact that was at least partially dealt with in the movie.

There were plenty of good moments, though. Perhaps the most exhilarating was Paul's sandworm ride, which I couldn't help comparing to David Lynch's awkward 1984 version. The sandworm effects were amazing, making you feel as if you were part of this milestone moment, and with my theater's pounding stereo sound, every scrape and rumble as Paul leaped onto the charging sandworm vibrated into my chest. Paul's speech at the war council was also a great moment: it's the moment Paul decided to take the reins of his own destiny and wear the mantle of the Lisan al-Gaib. Paul's quiet moments with Chani, before their falling-out, were tender and occasionally humorous, and while I wasn't that happy with how the movie treated Alia, I liked how it was made clear that Alia, despite being in the womb, had an intense love for her brother Paul. (It really is too bad we never got to see her become Saint Alia of the Knife.) The final knife fight between Paul and Feyd-Rautha is also memorably choreographed—fast and gritty, with very little flourish.

Other aspects of the film deserve mention. The sprawling cinematography, with those panoramic desert shots, is just as good in this movie as it was in the previous one. Giedi Prime, we're told, orbits a "black sun," whatever that means, but it gave Villeneuve the chance to use infrared cameras to film scenes located on that world in a weirdly glossy black and white. Hans Zimmer's music was once again fairly impressive; it might have been even deeper and more heartfelt this time around. (Trivia: Zimmer and Villeneuve both grew up having read and loved Dune the novel, so when both discovered that Dune had been a long-time passion project of theirs, each told the other: "Don't fuck this up.") I also think it was a good narrative choice to split the story into two movies. Even though the novel itself is not really that long, it's an extremely dense narrative with some intense world-building. Terms and concepts come at you fast. With two movies, there's room to unpack the narrative and tell a worthwhile story. David Lynch's mistake was to try to cram a whole novel into a single film, which made everything a mess. I compare Villeneuve's film with my experience of "The Fellowship of the Ring": the first time I saw "Fellowship," I wasn't that gripped by it because the various character names and place names came at me in a blizzard of unfamiliarity: I hadn't read the books in years. One scene toward the end had Aragorn shouting, "The Horn of Gondor!" as Boromir blew on it to summon aid. I remember shrugging and asking myself, What is the Horn of Gondor to me? But over the course of the next two movies, many of the names and places got repeated, and by that point, I had developed a familiarity with the main characters that allowed me to care more for them, for their motivations, and for their ultimate fates. So, yes: expanding a story over more than one movie can be a good thing. (We won't talk about how the Hobbit films over-expanded their story, which is the opposite narrative problem.)

Then, of course, there's the acting. I saw a lot of...not hate, precisely, but not-exactly-positive reactions to Zendaya as Chani. I thought Zendaya handled her much-expanded role quite well. Chani is arguably the most conflicted character in this version of the story, which relies on her to be a kind of audience surrogate as we watch Paul Atreides's rise to power and her reaction to it. Paul maneuvers this way and that way to escape what he sees as a terrible fate, but in the end, after avoiding going south among the hyper-religious branch of the Fremen, he gives in and attends the war council in the southern hemisphere, thus starting him down the road to galactic jihad. The first milestone on that road is taking the hand of Princess Irulan in marriage, and all along the way, we see the various emotions playing across Chani's face as she comes to realize what's actually happening. So I'm not a Zendaya-hater: I thought she handled her role quite well. Timothée Chalamet was also fine as the put-upon maybe-messiah; Rebecca Ferguson, with whom I'm in love, was awesome as the manipulative Reverend Mother who uses her Voice powers to make doubters do her bidding. Javier Bardem's Stilgar stood out not only for his humorous line delivery but for his convincing portrayal of a grizzled veteran of the desert who is also susceptible to the power of prophecy. (His character says "As it was written!" a lot.) Stellan Skarsgård as the morbidly obese Baron Harkonnen doesn't get as much screen time as in the first movie, but he's imposing in every scene he's in. Some people were nonplussed by Austin Butler who, visually, looked remarkably fearsome and deadly as Feyd-Rautha, but who modeled his voice after Skarsgård's—scratchy, slightly accented, and with a foreign tempo—perhaps as a way of showing the uncle-nephew relationship. Dave Bautista's Glossu Rabban turned out to be more interesting than anticipated: Rabban is played as generally stupid, but it turns out he's also something of a coward—not a facet of his character that's mentioned in the novel. And I've already mentioned Josh Brolin's Gurney Halleck. Brolin does the best he can with a character who, in my opinion, gets short shrift. Other minor characters are ably played: Christopher Walken has been critiqued for being too Walken-y in this film, but I thought his delivery was fine. Florence Pugh as Irulan doesn't get much screen time, but we see enough of her to learn that Irulan is smart, literate, and perceptive. Charlotte Rampling, as Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, is as authoritative as any Catholic nun from my experience, right up until the moment Paul violently uses the Voice to silence her. Léa Seydoux as Bene Gesserit Lady Fenring surpasses her natural shortcomings (I've never really thought of her as all that beautiful) to be a convincing seductress of Feyd-Rautha and the bearer of his bloodline.

"Dune, Part 2" is well filmed, well acted, and good as a narrative. It ends in a way that leaves open the possibility of a third movie, which I've heard Villeneuve will do (based on Dune Messiah) as a conclusion to the story of Paul Atreides, but only after he's had a chance to work on a few other films first. (I'm excited that he's taking on Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama.) I'm not sure I'm behind all of the divergences from Frank Herbert's original novel, but if you leave the novel out of it, the story itself makes coherent sense. I've heard some nutballs try to accuse the movie of being some sort of white-savior narrative in the same vein as "Avatar," but only people who have never read Dune and have no understanding of the story and of Herbert's moral message—don't trust messiahs, prophets, and charismatic figures—would ever say such a thing. If anything, both Dune and "Dune" are exactly the opposite of a white-savior narrative as Paul is about to lead his warriors on a jihad that will end in the deaths of billions across the galaxy. More interesting to me is how the movie's metaphysical side deals with the question of a subtly woven prophecy—crafted by a manipulative religious order—that seems actually to be coming true. What does this say about fate, freedom, and the self-fulfilling nature of some pronouncements about the future? Denis Villeneuve is a Big Thoughts kind of director, and whatever the movie's faults, it's muscular enough to withstand the weight of cosmic philosophical and moral questions about prophecies, messiahs, fate, freedom, and the whole shebang.