Dune 2 Galactic Boogaloo

dir: Denis Villeneuve

2024

When they announced that Dune Part II was going to be released this year, I was like “oh, yeah, that” having pretty much completely forgotten about the first part.

Don’t get me wrong, or, get me wrong if you really want, I didn’t dislike the first part, in fact I thought it was pretty good / okay. It seemed pretty faithful to the book, and ignored more of the boring bits and felt somehow expansive and fleet at the same time.

I’ll be really honest with you: At the time when it came out we were in the midst of lockdowns, so anything vaguely good was like cool water to someone dying of thirst. All it needed was cool visuals and nice music, and I was ready to praise it to the high heavens and the lowest hells.

It’s not lost on me, or anyone of a certain age, that Dune is sci-fi Lawrence of Arabia. But even knowing that, and having a liking for desert cinematography, that’s not the only charm or the point of watching this flick.

Because of the built in “white saviour” narrative, this flick, very much unlike the great one from the 80s directed by David Lynch, of all people, worries about its main character being a super messiah, instead of accepting it as an inherently good thing (for our heroes).

What ensues is a narrative in which someone will say Paul (Timothee Chalamet) is the prophesied messiah of the Fremen people, and then someone will say either “no he’s not” or “that’s just what they want you to think, so they can control us” and then “is so”, and then “nuh uh”.

It’s exhausting. It transcends it merely being “meta”, in that the screenplay and the makers anticipating audience reactions to white saviour narratives are constantly signposting that they know it’s a white saviour narrative, and so they try to undercut it or emphasise it (by having the whole messiah prophecy idea being one the arch-manipulators, the Bene Gesserit order, have artificially implanted within Fremen culture), in ways that are very repetitive.

It ultimately doesn’t matter. Whatever he is or isn’t, it’s what he can do that matters, and what the Fremen fanatics following him believe, and let’s just say they’re not too discerning.

If this is the flick that has the time (in its nearly 3 hour running time) to develop the relationship between Paul and Chani (Zendaya), who’s a local, they also end up in a tiresome tug-o-war where every time some plot aspect is mentioned, he has to reassure her that he doesn’t believe his own bullshit, and that everything he does is for the good of all her people, and she glares at him implying she’ll slit his throat herself if she finds out he’s lying.

We forget, or at least I forgot that in the first flick they barely interacted. There were so many scenes of Paul imagining Chani, or dreaming about her, that you think they’re already together, but it’s in this flick where they connect.

It’s…I dunno. Zendaya is great and can sell anything, and they’re a very attractive young couple together on screen, but I don’t know that I bought their relationship.

Let’s just say it’s no Kyle McLachlan / Sean Young pairing burning up the silver screen.

I guess I mean that as a joke. I think all the people involved do okay. Javier Bardem as Stilgar is pretty great and pretty convincing as a completely besotted devotee of his people’s bizarre religious beliefs that mean there’s no way for anyone to convince him that Paul is not the prophesised messiah. Even when he himself denies it, Stilgar is all “only the messiah would deny being the messiah”. But because it’s Bardem, it comes across more goofy and amusing than stupid and off-putting in its mindlessness.

The special effects in this are pretty special. They go out of their way to show things happening or operating on a vast scale, and I guess the extra time they took to complete the effects work really paid off. There are battle scenes, but it’s almost like they’re deliberately anti-climactic, as in, while we’re aware of all the elements that need to happen, it’s not prolonged. It’s not hours of it. That way we can get back to people talking. That’s the real important stuff.

This being the strange space opera weird giant worm fantasy thing that it is, there’s lots of scenes of people fighting with knives and swords. You could think “these shmendricks are fighting over who gets to control a galaxy, and they’re doing it with sharp objects?” Well, I guess that makes it a little more personal.

I’ve read the books, but I honestly don’t really remember them that well, so most of my remembrances are really a comparison between this and the flick from the 80s, and, sure, Villeneuve probably does a better job fleshing out elements of the story.

For example, pop musician Sting famously played a character called Feyd-Rautha in the earlier flick, a Harkonnen in a weird winged codpiece who eventually fights Paul in single combat. Apart from having very sticky-uppy hair, and being well oiled, and delivering lines like “I WILL kill HIM” in a very strange, sing-song voice, his job is just to be menacing and then die.

Dune Part II wants to take its time, for you to appreciate the weird culture and planet that produced this version of Feyd-Rautha (played with gusto by Austin Butler). Their planet orbits a black sun, so everything is in black and white on their planet? It means fireworks have to look significantly different when they’re celebrating his birthday. They’re all hairless, but considering how perverted they all look, they are probably not hypoallergenic like sphynx cats.

The cretins on this planet randomly kill people, and no-one seems to mind. In fact, instead of thinking “I could be next” when Feyd-Rautha kills one of the servants floating about, the other servants feel a thrill as if to say “that’s so hot.”

So it’s a planet of sociopaths, is what I’m getting at. Turns out as well that, in a turn up for the books, the evil Bene Gesserits have been manipulating the Harkonnen bloodlines as well, and Feyd-Rautha is an alternative messiah that they’ve been genetically engineering in case Paul doesn’t work out.

And yes they’ll have a knife fight in the end, and it will somehow determine control of the galaxy.

The Princess Irulan role in the 80s film, as far as I recall, played ably by Virginia Madsen, had no actual dialogue in the film. She only spoke in voice over, directly to us, the great confused unwashed in the audience, who were trying to make sense of spice, melange, folding space, emperors and dukes and all sorts of imperial / aristocratic bullshit that doesn’t seem like it should be around when humanity has advanced enough to colonise the stars.

So the great Florence Pugh as the daughter of the emperor (let’s not skate over the fact that the emperor is played by Christopher Walken, who’s in his 80s and still looks as wired weird wonderful as ever), gets to have something more of a role here, as least more than Virginia Madsen got to do. She, too is part of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, and as such is as vulnerable to their manipulations as anyone else.

People, characters think they’re in charge, or that they’re fulfilling a prophecy or a destiny or whatever, but really they are just the pawns of the Bene Gesserit. Charlotte Rampling, who memorably tested Paul Atriedes in the first flick with the pain box, as like the Pope of the Bene Gesserits is really the most powerful person in the galaxy.

I’m not sure what the flick is ultimately saying about secretive gynocracies being in charge as a good thing, or jihad-leading messiahs being their errand boys, but the thing this flick does significantly differently is that you really don’t get the sense that the outcome, Paul leading the Fremen against everyone in order to rule the galaxy, will actually work out well.

The vibe we get at the end, and that Chani clearly sees and ultimately rejects, is that Paul Atriedes with his countless other names, messiah to the fanatics, and ubermensch to the Bene Gesserit, is going to end up being like Daenerys Targaryen at the end of the Game of Thrones series, except that he wants to burn it all on a galactic scale, which is bad. This flick doesn’t hesitate to make someone wanting ultimate power for ultimate power’s sake (and don’t forget revenge, which is great for getting back at people) seem like the awful and doomed thing it obviously must be.

In that while within the story Paul might look like a rebel leading a ragtag team of misfits to overthrow an evil empire, or a British officer using Bedouin tribes to help him bring down the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, we clearly see the rise of someone even potentially worse than the people they’re fighting.

I’m not sure what to make of it all, in my head, but I had three hours to think about it, and a day since watching it, and it leaves me feeling uneasy.

This really does feel, even though it has a definitive ending, like the part two that it is. Part III, well, that will be the money instalment, that’ll really cap off the trilogy when people start turning into worms and clones of clones of clones of characters long dead start appearing.

8 times the ultimate winner is all the cinematography we saw along the way out of 10

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“The visions are clear now. I see possible futures, all at once. Our enemies are all around us, and in so many futures they prevail. But I do see a way, there is a narrow way through.” - Dune Part II