When the nearly three-hour-long Dune (2021) ended with Zendaya’s character, Chani, turning to the camera and saying, “This is only the beginning” I nearly burst out laughing. Dune played like a gorgeously bland prologue, like a three-hour ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) YouTube video for lawncare perverts about the meticulous maintenance of an NFL football field before the big game (I might actually watch that). While I’m being a little harsh for effect, Dune: Part Two, in its epic grandiosity and tragic inevitability, is in every way bigger and better than its predecessor. Chani was right.
Dune: Part Two is also nearly three hours long (2h, 46m) but it could have been twice as long for all I care. It picks up shortly after Chani’s words. Young Paul Atreides (Chalamet) and his mother, Jessica (Ferguson), are traveling with the Fremen across the dunes of the planet Arrakis, the last survivors of House Atreides. Among the Fremen—the indigenous people of Arrakis—Paul is reluctantly gathering a following of fanatics who believe him to be the prophesied Lisan al Gaib, a hero who will lead the Fremen out of galactic oppression and restore their arid desert planet.
Meanwhile, political machinations within House Harkonnen allow the ascendency of their most sociopathic yet brilliant heir, Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen (a menacing Austin Butler), all while the cult of female mystics, the Bene Gesserit, pull strings from every angle, as Charlotte Rampling’s character Reverend Mother Mohiam aptly says, “There are no sides.”
All of this resolves one of my main criticisms of Dune; here stuff actually happens. If Dune: Part Two suffers in any way, it’s that so much is happening you wonder how it will resolve in time, yet somehow it does, and without feeling rushed or disjointed. The weight of the large-scale politics are conveyed and felt just as deeply as Paul’s internal struggle against fulfilling his powerful destiny, one he knows will lead to billions of deaths. (Make no mistake, Dune is the prequels, not Star Wars; Paul is Anakin, not Luke.) Chani’s concern over Paul’s ascension is perhaps felt deepest of all. She is all of us, as we have watched nearly every person who’s ever come to power fall prey to its corrupting nature.
All of this is told through some of the most striking, beautiful, and haunting shots in recent memory. Director of photography Greig Fraser has outdone himself, and for the first time made me not miss Roger Deakins behind Villeneuve’s camera. The awesome scale of the sand worms is finally worthy of their grandeur, and the dark vision of the Harkonnen’s black and white brutalism is nothing short of disturbing.
It’s odd that the two trailers before Dune: Part Two both had the word “empire” in their subtitles (Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire), because at its heart, Dune: Part Two is about empires, the crushing cruelty of empires, typified by the hulking, gargantuan spice harvesters stripping Arrakis of all its resources. I wonder what could be happening right now that would seem to warrant the idea of empires, their rise and fall, permeating the current collective unconscious? There are overt shades of America’s “discovery,” British colonialism, Nazi Germany, Vietnam, Afghanistan and the as-yet-to-have-happened latest Gazan crisis in the subtext of Dune: Part Two, all wrapped up in an exciting and aesthetic action fantasy film, one that also might prove to be an essential text of our time.
