Dune Part Two

Warning: This is not as spoiler-free as my reviews normally are. This is an adaptation of a book that is as old as me. You’ve had a LONG time to read it and get to grips with the story. I largely keep to the elements that we’ve seen in the trailers, but there are some changes made in the adaptation process that changed how the film worked at critical points for me, making it not work. Although I tried, I found I couldn’t write this review without coming back to them, so you have been warned.

Dune Part Two starts with a huge challenge but a lot of goodwill, at least here. Just like in the book, the first chunk, the first film, is a huge amount of world building, the second chunk brings that to fruition. Fortunately it faces up to the challenge and largely overcomes it.

There are a chunk of big plot arcs, pretty diverse plot arcs too, that have to be kept in air and then nicely resolved. We’re used to seeing that in streaming series, but we’ve fallen out of the habit of seeing it done well in films, which, if we’re lucky, do A and B plots, but big budget movies mostly do A plot only.

Carrying on from the first film we already have the politics of the Emperor, Harkonnens and Atreides, the rise of Paul as the Kwisatz Haderach, the Fremen and the prophecies the Bene Gesserit planted of Lisan al-Gaib. This film adds a couple of more arcs into that. I’m at an advantage of knowing the story of course, but I think it moved around and made all of story elements clear enough that you could follow them, unless you were wilfully ignoring them, and get a sense of them.

Unlike the first film we also have a lot of action scenes. That’s fairly true to the book, but if you’re used to a more typical modern sci-fi film, this is much closer to that than the first film was. Of course that seems to have tempted some people to leave their brains at the door and conclude Paul is a white saviour and Dune is pro-colonialism. I think they missed all the “I don’t want to do this, it’s going to be really bad” parts, along with every scene where Paul railed against the Bene Gesserit for planting the legends that Jessica wants him to step into. Yes, he has some elements of the trope, but just enough to enable him to subvert it. Perhaps because I know what comes next I don’t look at this as a glorious victory. I look at Paul saying “take them to paradise” as the tragedy it’s meant to be. I think we’ve had enough to understand that but modern cinema tells us that’s a heroic, joyful end, and it’s only if you’ve followed the film's story that you understand what it costs Paul to say that. That said, I think I could have done with another vision of how bad the Fremen Crusade (61Bn deaths is pretty bad) is going to be just before, or even as, he says the line so it played to everyone with that reminder of the cost of his words.

I have enjoyed every adaptation of Dune I’ve seen in different ways. There are always changes, and in earlier versions they were quite major. Here they’re smaller. In some ways that makes them more annoying. I can forgive, in the first film, cutting the whole dinner scene for example. I still resent the changes to the duel with Chamis at the end of part one. Some I understand, but some apparently very small bits have a huge impact. In this film, Jessica stays pregnant with Alia through part two, which is quite a big change to the timeline (not for the better in my opinion) and robs us of a huge showdown at the end. Paul and Chani not having their first child also has ramifications that are wide-reaching, but once you have a shortened timeline, that part doesn’t make sense. I will come back to this below.

You can probably tell, if I’m moaning about things like that, that I largely enjoyed this film. It looks just as good as the first one, although having seen it once, the impact feels a bit less - we’re used to how Dune looks, Geidi Prime has been spoiled in the trailers. Muad'Dib does summon a big one, and the film made me feel not only the impact of that on the watching Fedaykin, the dangers, but also the physicality of riding a worm. I believed the love story between Chani and Paul, more importantly I thought Zendaya handled everything she was asked to do, and that’s a lot of heavy lifting on all fronts, here. Chani, Jessica and Irulan all have increased roles (arguably not Irulan, she writes all the epigrams for the start of each chapter in the book, but she’s not as active as we see here) so it’s not such a sausage-fest, but it’s hard to see that as anything other than good. (Herbert wrote the original in the early 60’s, having as many important female characters as he did was pretty radical and they’re all important. Villeneuve has made their parts a bit bigger, not totally reworked them like Peter Jackson did.)

A little sour note though. Chani has a really good part in the first half of the film. In the second half she turns into a bit of a whiny bitch. It’s clearly the writing. She’s lost the fight and just gives up and moans? The book had a different role for Chani, a different trigger for Muad'Dib becoming the Mahdi, and so a very different set of reactions from her, even in her smaller role. I liked the initial changes to her character but once she’d lost her fight she lost her voice. If she’d lost her son, which is Paul’s trigger in the book, they could have turned her into a grieving mother rather than a whiny bitch. Not good, but better than what we got. It also would have made Paul’s decision to walk the path of the Mahdi both have more emotional impact and make more sense. He’s been so against it for so long why does this one setback we have in the film cause such a huge shift?

If someone was crazy enough to give me the money to make this, instead of Villenauve (bad mistake), I’d have kept the longer timeframe, kept young Alia and Leto II. But I can live with the changes in this adaptation, even though I don’t think the knock on events from that shortened timeframe were the best choices.

There are people who argue that casting Christopher Walken as Shadam IV was a mistake. I’m not sure I agree. Yes, it’s mostly Walken, a different actor would have brought something different, sure. But, although it’s somewhat different in the book (spice prolongs life, and he’s mid-70’s but appears about 30), I believed him as an older emperor losing his grip on power, propped up by his daughter. Since the first time I saw her, I’ve always known Florence Pugh was amazing, but in my review of Last Night in Soho I commented I didn’t think it was fair to give Thomasin McKenzie, the young actor that played Ellie, so many one-on-one scenes with Diane Rigg. I know Florence Pugh is older, but she handled her scenes with Christopher Walken and Charlotte Rampling with aplomb as well as some seriously charged big group scenes.

I can’t tell you if you can watch this without seeing the first part. I would say no, there’s so much background. On the other hand, it’s totally so different that if you just don’t care about all that, you can watch “ooh, boom, ooh, pretty scenery” and while that’s a totally different film, it might be a satisfying one.

This film is just as beautiful and sounds as eerie as the first. It is definitely much more of an action movie than the first one. After some time thinking about it, I think that was always coming; a reasonable chunk of the story is the guerrilla war against the Harkonnens and we have that here, which gives us lots of things going boom. We have Feyd and the duels, we’ve seen them in the trailers. But action movies have a structure where the hero overcomes challenges and set-backs, then prevails. Paul loses by winning… and cinema can’t cope with that. Villeneuve tries his hardest to make it clear, and it was there for me, but another nail in the coffin wouldn’t have hurt, even for me. Certainly a proposition of cinema goers didn’t get it.

I enjoyed this. But I knew what to expect. Although parts were missing, the overall structure was retained and good.

Bechdel Test: Pass. There are quite a few named women characters who talk to each other. A number of those conversations are about Muad'Dib, Feyd or the Emperor, but there are conversations about politics, power and the like as well, enough for an easy pass.

Ko Test: Pass. Zendaya is the heavy lifter here, but not the only one.

Russo Test: Fail. Don’t be silly, it’s a sci-fi blockbuster, of course they’re not queer!