Grandeur. Like the sacred Spice that enriches the vast sands of desert planet Arrakis – the primary setting for Frank Herbert’s seminal, Shakespearian-tinged sci-fi source material – it permeates everything about Dune: Part Two. In both scale and ideas, Denis Villeneuve’s suitably ambitious second instalment serves up cinematic grandiose in abundance, delivering a satisfyingly measured and thematically dense saga that reaches Middle-Earthian levels.
In many ways, Villeneuve’s film suffers from being overly epic. Following the rise of Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and his mother Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), both exiled after the massacre of the family dynasty in Part One, this is a film that might simply offer too much to fully digest on a single viewing. Simmering with quasi-religious iconography, rife political allegory and monumental action set pieces, Dune: Part Two is a colossal balancing act that, despite a near-three hour run time, in place feels rushed and often foregoes meaningful character development in favour of spectacle.
But this is an adaptation that also understands the shrewd subversion at the heart of Herbert’s text. Dune is a story that cleverly uses a white saviour narrative arc to eschew the notion of heroism, highlighting instead the malleability of prophecy and the dangers of lore when manipulated and ultimately weaponised for political gain. As Paul and Jessica – part of a clan of space-witches known as the Bene Gesserit – are slowly accepted by the Fremen, the blue-eyed Arrakis natives with a deep spiritual connection to the desert, Villeneuve and co-writer Jon Spaihts foreground a weighty dilemma: is the last of the Atreides bloodline actually the Lisan al-Gaib, the long-awaited messiah destined to free the Fremen from oppression, or simply a means of usurping total control?
Against the blasts of Hans Zimmer’s appropriately booming score, it’s this question that reverberates most menacingly in Part Two, even as the more cookie-cutter genre offerings – Stellan Skarsgård’s scheming Baron Harkonnen and Dave Bautista’s snarling Glossu Rabban – occupy more familiar villain territory. Of all the baddies though, it is Austin Butler’s Feyd-Rautha, the Baron’s sociopathic heir introduced in a memorable monochrome gladiator scene, who steals much of the show. His brutality compliments his uncanny appearance, with Butler duly chewing up every bit of scenery he can get his ink-stained teeth on.
By contrast, the rest of the newbies, while impressive in name, are less so in performance. As the Padishah Emperor, Christopher Walken is used sparingly and with disappointing restraint, while Florence Pugh is wasted in a role that appears to serve largely as a means of explaining the plot. But while sometimes uneven and perhaps guilty of trying to cram too much in to its final third, Villeneuve’s sequel is,for the most part, a remarkable feat of storytelling.
Immersive and thought-provoking, sweeping and intimate, Dune: Part Two is Cinema with a capital C. And, as the film ending more than hints at, we might not have seen the last of this world just yet.
Dir: Denis Villeneuve (12A, 165 mins)
Dune: Part Two is in cinemas from Fri 1 Mar
words GEORGE NASH