Film review: Dune: Part 2, keeps story going with no loss of momentum

Article content

I’ll open my review of Dune: Part 2 on the same note I began my critique of the first Dune, 28 months, half a pandemic and one Hollywood strike ago: I want more.

More of Timothée Chalamet’s brooding warrior-prince Paul Atreides, last of a noble household. More of Josh Brolin’s troubadour/weapons master turned smuggler Gurney Halleck. More Javier Bardem as Stilgar, a desert leader torn between pragmatism and idolatry as he tutors Paul in the ways of his people, even as he falls under the spell of young man’s messianic mysticism. More of Zendaya’s Chani, matching her betrothed in strength and passion.

Article content

Article content

And I want it all from director and co-writer Denis Villeneuve, who delivered a stunning, stirring part one and does not disappoint one iota in this second chapter. (He eschews the term “sequel,” and who am I to argue?)

It may sound strange to speak of a $100-million-plus studio property as having a personal touch, but only Villeneuve could have made this Dune. Others have tried, including Alejandro Jodorowsky, Ridley Scott and Peter Berg; all found the task beyond them. David Lynch’s Dune, the only one to reach fruition, arrived at best truncated and half-formed.

Take Villeneuve’s continued fascination with modes of communication, on full display in the 2016 alien first contact story Arrival, and to a lesser but vital extent in Blade Runner 2049, with Ryan Gosling’s “cells interlinked” mantra.

Dune is mostly in English for the benefit of viewers, but it includes snatches of the Fremen tongue spoken on the desert planet Arrakis; the more guttural dialect of the power-hungry house of Harkonnen; at least one non-verbal sign language; The Voice, a kind of hypnotic cadence that demands obeyance; and whatever language crashes over the film’s opening seconds, sounding like a death-metal bassist doing battle with a Harley Davidson. “Power over spice is power over all,” it intones. In case you’d forgotten.

Article content

In a recent chat with journalists, Villeneuve revealed that he’d sent his actors to Fremen language school, and employed a dialect coach on set to ensure consistency of accents. “It sounds like a real language because it is one,” he said.

Villeneuve also has a way of reinventing science-fiction tropes so cemented in our minds that you didn’t think they could be done any other way. In the first Dune, he jettisoned pew-pew lasers in favour of a new take on the 19th-century Martian heat rays of H.G. Wells.

This time out we get an early scene of sort-of jetpacks, as a group of Harkonnen soldiers half-climb, half-float up a cliff face — before being brutally taken down by am ambushing Fremen force. Oh, and my favourite, fireworks blossoming in the sky like plasmic soap bubbles. We’ve had the same basic firework design here on Earth, in fiction and reality, since at least the 1680s. Villeneuve has found a way to make them burst anew.

Dune: Part 2 picks up directly where Dune left off. Paul’s family has been betrayed and splintered by the power-hungry Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellen Skarsgard), whose retinue includes Beast Rabban (Dave Bautista) and Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler), a real psychopath, motivated by “desire and humiliation” as one character notes, and a kissing cousin to Joaquin Phoenix’s Emperor Commodus from Gladiator.

Article content

There’s also an actual Emperor of the galaxy, played by Christopher Walken, and his daughter, Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh). They help set the scene in the opening of the film, and will prove pivotal before it wraps up two and three quarter hours later. (A long time, yet somehow also not long enough; did I mention how badly I want Part Three?)

Much of the action takes place on Arrakis — delightfully, someone will call the planet Dune before the film is over — as Paul joins the indigenous Fremen tribes in ousting the Harkonnen, whose power is matched only by their overconfidence. “Our resources are limited,” Paul says at one point. “Fear is all we have.” It might just be enough, especially as he’s helped by his mother (Rebecca Ferguson), a member of a religious order that’s been quietly pulling political strings for centuries.

Bardem’s character, barely there in the first film, plays a larger role in this one as he tries to convince his people that Paul is the messiah they’ve been waiting for. Sometimes he resorts to tautological reasoning. “The mahdi is too humble to say he is the mahdi,” he declares at one point of Paul’s alleged divinity, a real deified if you do, deified if you don’t moment.

Article content

Zendaya’s character is more suspicious of this zealotry, but even she can see that Paul — or Muad’Dib as he starts to call himself, taking the name of a tiny, sturdy desert mouse — is both a skilled tactician and a natural (if not necessarily supernatural) leader. It doesn’t hurt that he manages to ride one of the giant sand worms of Arrakis, the SeaDoos of the desert. Though for his part, Paul is stricken with visions of the future, and a holy war he will inadvertently spark and then prove unable to quench.

There are many moving parts in Dune: Part 2, but Villeneuve, who absorbed the novels of Frank Herbert as a teenager and has been ruminating on them ever since, proves more than equal to the task of bringing this story to the screen.

There are even moments of sly humour in the film. When Stilgar is explaining to Paul how to survive in the desert, he warns the younger man to beware of the centipedes.

The big ones are harmless, he tells his protege/prophet. It’s the little ones you have to fear. But as he says this, he holds his hands out at a distance that suggests the “little” centipedes are bigger than you’d think. That’s Dune for you; more than you’d expect. And I’m already expecting Part 3.

Dune: Part 2 opens March 1 in theatres.

5 stars out of 5

Article content