We barely remember it now, but the release of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune was very much a product of the post-COVID era of cinema releases. It came out in 2021 amid something of a variant surge and was even one of the movies that year which Warner Brothers opted to release day and date on HBO Max. There had of course been some other big movies released before then to some extent but most of them had been sequels in ongoing successful franchises, this was more of a test if a new franchise could be launched and have people show up, and it was a pretty risky one as the serious tone and dense world building of Frank Herbert’s “Dune” was not going to be the easiest of sells even under the best of circumstances. The eventual results were kind of mixed; it made about a hundred million at the domestic box office, which probably would have been a failure under other circumstances but the digital release combined with the virus made that feel like one of the rosier box office results of the year and it did substantially better overseas which was probably what put them over the finish line in terms of getting a much needed sequel greenlit. In the long term though, the movie feels like a much bigger success, firstly because it won six Oscars and secondly because its fanbase clearly grew over time and its shaky launch has been obscured. Now is the time to reap those benefits with a sequel, Dune: Part Two and in some ways the franchise is back to “save theaters” once again because it’s become one of the first really hotly anticipated blockbusters in a while after a bunch of strike delays and underperformers.
One of the big… not complaints exactly, but one of the things that held me back from completely declaring the first Dune as a triumph is that it essentially ended mid-story, that it felt more like the first two and a half hours of a five hour movie which stopped at an intermission. Nothing wrong with that, but it made me want to wait to see how things panned out before I called it a triumph. Sure enough this second movie actually pretty much picks up immediately after the first one left off. Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), Chani (Zendaya), and Stilgar (Javier Bardem) arrive at a Fremen camp which is already abuzz with the fact that Paul seems to fit various messianic prophesies that have existed within their culture, perhaps planted by the Bene Gesserit. Stilgar and Chani come to represent opposing views on this topic with Stilgar acting as a John the Baptist to Paul’s ascendency while Chani is a non-believer whose skeptical of the prophesy itself and Paul’s role in it… though she does not push her away from Paul himself and a romance quickly stirs between the two of them, in part because Paul himself denies his own role as a messiah and claims to just want to be a soldier in the resistance against House Harkonnen. In turn the Harkonnen’s become increasingly frustrated with their own inability to keep the spice flowing in the face of Freman resistance. After the aging Galactic Emperor (Christopher Walken) and his daughter Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh) instruct them to get their house in order, Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård) decides to replace Glossu Rabban Harkonnen (Dave Bautista) with his other nephew Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen (Austin Butler) who escalates the war setting up a fateful duel between all involved.
If I had a problem with the 2021 Dune it’s that it in many ways felt like half of a movie, which was of course because it was an adaptation of half of a book. It had this slightly odd structure that ended in this odd place that felt more like the place you’d put an intermission into a much longer movie than where you’d want a stand-alone movie to end. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it does mean that if that sequel can’t deliver it can kind of taint both movies by extension and it makes me want to hold back from fully embracing the original. So there’s a lot at stake with this sequel, and in many ways I wanted it to feel like a direct continuation and in a lot of ways it does. All the original cast is back plus some nice new additions and the various settings and effects pick up where they left off. That having been said more about the movie felt different than I expected. This is kind of baked into the story from Frank Herbert’s novel but where the first movie was based on courtly intrigue this movie is more concerned with guerilla warfare and generally has more of a focus on action and romance, though certainly not exclusively. In general that first movie felt a bit more like “Game of Thrones” while this has a bit more Avatar to it, though that’s perhaps exaggerating the differences.
Another thing that seems to shift here is the pace of the story. I’m actually not sure how long this is supposed to be set over. The Rebecca Ferguson character ended the last movie pregnant with the second child of the Oscar Isaac character and she’s still pregnant at the end of this movie (a change from the book) which would seem to suggest that all of this happens over the course of less than nine months unless this gestation is extended by sci-fi magic but it sure seems like a whole lot is happening in those less than nine months, including an entire protracted guerrilla campaign that I’m pretty sure occurred over the course of several years in the book. Even without that bit of weirdness this movie still kind of feels like it moves a little fast compared to what happened in the first movie. I remember catching up with the David Lynch version of Dune shortly after seeing the 2021 movie and being a little shocked that almost everything in that movie was also present in Dune: Part One and that the “new” material was cramped into something like a half hour at the end. At the time I assumed that was because they just wildly condensed the second half of the book, and they did, but watching this it kind of makes a little more sense why they did, it feels like things just kind of move along faster in the story after the fall of Arrakeen. I’m not sure if the two movies are going to entirely fit together as one when played back to back… but I may be overstating this more than a bit, they certainly do blend visually and that might be what really matters.
The other major change from the source material here is the ending, which seems to have been altered a bit partly to undercut the messianic “white savior” aspects of the Paul Atreides character (which will be explored further in Dune: Messiah” if that gets made). This also kind of leaves things on more of a cliffhanger than some of the other Dune adaptations both in terms of the war and in terms of Paul’s relationship with Chani which makes this feel more firmly like the middle chapter of a trilogy rather than the second part of a dyad and that come as a bit of a surprise to some people. On one hand I get the decision making behind this, on the other hand… I mean, my big problem with the first movie is that it felt like the first half of a larger movie and which this one ends a big more definitively I still kind of haven’t gotten my closure and feel like the whole project is still something of a work in progress. Outside of that there’s a whole lot to like here and if I’ve leaned more into the negative here it’s because most of what works here is just kind of a continuation of everything that worked with that first movie. Honestly I think that first movie was a bit more to my liking just because it was more of a “vibe” than this one was but over time I think they’ll blend together enough that the distinction will matter less. So I’m kind of back to where I was before: saying that if Villeneuve can stick this landing he’ll have really accomplished something.
**** out of Five
The Movie Vampire 