'Dune Part 2' Review: The Good, The Bad And The Spicey
Denis Villeneuve's 'Dune Part 2' is a cinematic feast for the senses, but left me a little cold.
I felt a kind of hollowness when I finished Dune.
Oddly enough, I’m speaking about my experience with both the novel by Frank Herbert and Dune Part 2 from director Denis Villeneuve. Perhaps that means that it was a faithful adaptation of the beloved science-fiction classic.
I have mixed feelings. Spoilers follow. Let’s start with . . .
The Good
The film is absolutely gorgeous. It’s one that you really must see on the biggest, best screen you can find, preferably in a theater with really great sound. The seats were shaking at some points. There is so much spectacle here, it’s a little overwhelming at times. And it’s all so well-crafted. Other than the lack of sweat—still odd for such a hot planet—Arrakis feels real and we see much more of it this time around.
The brief, horrific scenes of the Harkonnen home planet of Giedi Prime are some of the best in the film. The arena fight with Feyd-Rautha (played by an albino-ized version of Austin Butler doing his level best to imitate Stellan Skarsgard’s gravelly Baron Harkonnen) was almost entirely devoid of color, creating the most uncanny sense of dread. Apparently this was shot with infrared cameras. Cinematographer Greig Fraser does some truly incredible work here. It’s quite striking.
The film’s aesthetic is superb and distinct and feels more fleshed out than the first film—from the Bene Gesserit in their veils to the masked bodyguards in the arena with Feyd-Rautha. Costume and set design goes above and beyond, giving us a fully realized, wholly unique and immersive sense of place throughout the film, whether in the deserts of Arrakis or the green gardens of the Padishah Emperor.
We’re also introduced to the princess Irulan (Florence Pugh) and her fabulous headdresses.
It’s also nice to see a darker, more ruthless Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) fully embracing her Bene Gesserit calling—and in doing so, putting her son in grave danger—and an expanded role for Chani (Zendaya) though her character is altered rather wildly from the book in ways we’ll get to later.
Javier Bardem as Stilgar wins big in the comic relief department. Paul’s reluctance to accept that he’s the chosen one is met with different reactions from different Fremen sects. The fundamentalists believe he is the Mahdi, while more moderate / less fanatical Fremen mistrust him. When Paul claims he’s not the Mahdi, Stilgar tells his fellow believers (I’m paraphrasing) “See, he is too humble to admit that he’s the Mahdi. That’s more proof that he is!” It’s a long, mostly very serious movie so it’s nice to get these moments of levity.
By and large, many of the events from the book were told faithfully and some changes made sense and maybe some that didn’t make as much sense will once we get Part 3 (Dune Messiah). As far as a movie goes—purely on its own merits, not as an adaptation—it’s quite a powerful experience. As an adaptation, it is perhaps as good as we could expect but there are some changes that I did not like and do not understand. So onward, then, to . . .
The Mixed
Chani is given an expanded role but also one that is oddly combative with Paul as he gets to know the Fremen, becoming first Muad’dib before fully embracing his role as the prophesied Lisan al Gaib / Mahdi—or the Kwisatz Haderach in Bene Gesserit lore. That female-led order of mind-controlling witches has been planting the seeds of this prophecy for hundreds of years and has spent countless generations attempting to breed the Kwisatz Haderach into existence, finally succeeding with Paul (thanks to Jessica disobeying the order to give birth to a girl).
In any case, Chani is very upset by Paul’s transformation in the film and storms out when he is given Princess Irulan’s hand in marriage—something that book Chani wouldn’t be bothered by in the slightest. I suppose I don’t care that much but it was weird, and handled a bit awkwardly just in terms of really being able to understand what was bothering her so much when she’d also tell Paul she would always be there for him. Just one of the many little details that left me scratching my head. The movie sticks to so many of the book’s major plot points, but then veers away from others. And one of the things I’d hoped it would change the most, it left almost perfectly intact. More on that in a minute.
Some characters are missing, like the fascinating and dangerous Count Fenring—though his wife, Margot (Léa Seydoux) seduces Feyd-Rautha in order to become secretly impregnated with his child. (The more I think about the Bene Gesserit the more I see how much they influenced not just the Jedi in Star Wars but also the Aes Sedai in The Wheel of Time and even the sorceresses in The Witcher books, though Herbert’s order is the most ominous and terrifying of them all).
I’m also not entirely sure I love the lack of a time-jump. Paul appears to spend several months with the Fremen here before rising up to lead them (less than nine given Alia’s Kubrickian fetal status). When they board the Imperial ships to wage jihad—er, “holy war”—on the Great Houses, it seems a little strange—like why not just control the spice and work on remaking your planet into a paradise?
Paul and Chani have no child, and therefore do not lose young Leto II to the Imperial Sardaukar. He spends less time recovering from the Water of Life by several weeks. This rushed approach to the timeline feels off to me. More time among the Fremen—teaching them the “weirding ways” and learning their secrets as well—would make his role as their leader more believable. For such a long movie, it happens awfully fast. And while they do attempt to address the whole “white savior” trope, maybe they should have just left it alone. The results are half-baked at best.
I’m still a little conflicted about Alia remaining in Jessica’s womb throughout the film, though it worked well enough for the most part and avoided the trickiness of dealing with a very young child actor to play a very difficult role. Still, Paul killing Baron Harkonnen instead of Alia with the gom jabbar just doesn’t have the same effect, though I liked his zinger: “You die like an animal.”
I’m also conflicted about Paul’s character to some degree. We see so little of his Mentat training (and no Mentats at all since Thufir Hawat is MIA) and his prescience is really only one dream on repeat. I think we should have seen more of how the spice was affecting him, what made him truly special and so forth. Only once—at the end—when he uses the Bene Gesserit Voice on the Reverend Mother do we see how his powers have really come into their own.
I have to say I’m also a little torn on Hans Zimmer’s score. While it’s more than capable—the sound design and music both create a sense of rumbling intensity throughout the film—it’s also somewhat unmemorable. Nobody will be humming the Dune theme song in 20 years. That’s not really a big deal, but there were no moments where the music really moved me, and perhaps that’s less about the music and more about the script. I was not really moved by any of it, despite plenty of great performances and all its epic scale. I was not convinced on an emotional level. There is a revenge story here, but it fell flat in many ways. And that hollowness I was talking about at the top—mostly that’s the feeling I left the theater with. This was a jaw-dropping, awe-inspiring, weirdly emotionally empty film.
But then again, the same can be said of the book, which is weird and layered and much more story-driven than character-driven. Which brings us to . . .
The Spicey
My biggest problem with Herbert’s novel is the ending. It’s very abrupt. A lot of the big action stuff—a massive war between the Fremen and the Harkonnen and Imperial forces—happens off-screen. It all sort of wraps up in a hurry, and I never really felt like Duke Leto was properly avenged even though the good guys win and the bad guys lose. It just never quite worked for me and I thought maybe here, in cinematic form, that would be different.
But the big battle at the end also feels rushed. The good guys make such quick work out of the Harkonnen forces and these supposedly super, duper elite Sardaukar, it’s almost laughable. It feels incredibly anticlimactic, and I suppose that’s just exactly how the book feels. Maybe that would have been a good part of the book to change and expand on!
The vast and powerful House Harkonnen and the elite Imperial army descend in warships to quell Paul’s Fremen uprising—a rebellion led by an inexperienced teenager and a people that are fanatical fighters but technologically inferior and outgunned. That sounds like it’ll be a pretty tough fight!
“Actually it’ll be super easy, barely an inconvenience.”
I will say, the final duel between Feyd-Rautha and Paul was great, though I’m not entirely sure I like the former being treated as a more honorable fighter this time around. Or, rather, I’m not sure the film knows what it’s doing with the character. He almost seems . . . irrelevant?
Feyd-Rautha is a vicious, psychopathic killer. He tries to poison Paul in the book—very big Hamlet vibes, no doubt—but is bested in the end. Here he says “Well fought, Atreides” just like he says to the Atreides POW he kills in the arena earlier in the film. Are we to think that Feyd-Rautha, keeper of cannibalistic consorts, is also honorable? Maybe he’s just misunderstood! It’s weird that they give him that complexity when the Harkonnens are treated in every other way like the most outlandish, mustache-twirling villains imaginable.
I love how they portray Baron Harkonnen and the Harkonnen people in general, but the sheer number of times some underling has his or her throat slit or their head bashed in for whatever trivial reason (or no reason at all) starts to make them feel like cartoon villains rather than a complicated and ambitious ancient House. Think Game Of Thrones if every villain was just Ramsay Snow all the time. And the lack of any sort of relationship between Feyd-Rautha and Paul makes their final confrontation feel impersonal. Like the rest of the ending, it just sort of happens.
Casting-wise, I plan to write an entire separate post about one of my biggest complaints about both films: There are too many famous people and I think the films would have benefited from lesser known actors. I almost laughed when Paul has his vision of an older Alia and she’s played by Anya Taylor-Joy in the briefest of cameos (and hey, we just saw her in the trailer for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga before the movie started and that looks very bad, and oh also we saw Butler in a trailer for The Bikeriders which looks quite good—when you cast this many famous people you’re bound to see a celebrity or two in the trailers).
But the one casting choice I want to focus on here, for now, is that of Christopher Walken as Emperor Shaddam IV. I love Walken (most recently in Severance). He’s great in so many things. But he is absolutely the wrong person for this role. Walken is a national treasure and even his small roles—in Annie Hall or Pulp Fiction or True Romance and the list goes on—he nails every time. He isn’t bad here, either, he’s just the wrong casting choice for Dune. I haven’t felt this strongly about a casting SNAFU since Nicole Kidman’s role in The Northman (speaking of Hamlet-adjacent movies with Anya Taylor-Joy and a Skarsgard).
I can only assume that the big reveal about the spice melange and the Navigators and Spacing Guild was left out so it could come up in the third film, which seems all but certain now, but I found it extremely jarring since that’s kind of one of the most important parts in the entire book, revealing why Arrakis and its chief export are so crucial to the entire power tripod of Empire, Great Houses of the Landsraad and the Spacing Guild. Very strange. I was fully expecting to see a Navigator by the film’s end. I was not expecting the Fremen to all hop on ships right away and fly off to war without a moment’s hesitation.
Finally, 2 hours and 46 minutes is too long, especially since this is the second in what will (I believe) be a trilogy. I’m sorry. I know I say this all the time, but very few films justify these long run-times. There were many great scenes in Dune Part 2, but a lot could have been cut. It’s not a very long book and here we have two whole movies to tell it in. Brevity is the soul of wit.
Verdict
Overall, while it’s not perfect this really was about as good an adaptation as you could ever hope for when it comes to Dune, which has foiled more than one attempt in the past. Villeneuve continues to be one of the more engaging directors in modern cinema and he and his entire team did an admirable job bringing this space opera (spice opera?) to the big screen.
I can’t shake the mixed feelings, however, or that sense that it all ended very abruptly, but I do very much recommend you go see it in theaters. It amps up all the visuals and epic scale from the first film. It’s truly a sight to behold. You could watch the whole thing without dialogue and it would still be worthwhile just for the spectacle alone. It’s better than Part 1 in many ways—visually, though as captivating in terms of story—and my criticisms are hardly dealbreakers. The only thing I’d really add?
More cowbell.
Here’s my video review: