Dune Part Two Review

1/5. Derivative. I saw a movie just like this one two and a half years ago.

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Sometimes I worry I’m too funny. Really, though, Dune Part Two is a follow-up to one of the best sci-fi films in recent memory, and it largely lives up to the hype. Some spoilers below.

Story? Sure, it’s got story. Paul Atreides (Timotheé Chalomet) is living with the local populace of Arrakis, finding his place and working toward revenge on the Harknonnens. His mother’s secret society has been seeding rumors of a society for centuries, and Paul is right on the cusp of becoming a cult/crusade leader… at the cost of uncountable lives.

Grim, right? Tell that to Javier Bardem, who’s testing his SNL chops in the first hour of the film as a comic mastermind. And in the first hour, it’s a lot of fun seeing the Paul adapt to life with the Fremen, even as their raids rack up a body count. But the film isn’t exactly hung-ho about Paul’s war on his enemies. Just like the original novel, the films deconstruct the white-savior myth of an outsider uniting, leading, and elevating a local POC populace. Chani (Zendaya) in particular pushes back against Paul’s growing legend, and her entire generation seem fed up with the idea of outsiders coming in to fix their society. Zendaya does a great job of grounding the human stakes of the film when prophecy and politics rear their heads, and she quickly becomes the most sympathetic character in the film.

I could ramble, so let’s move to rapid-fire. Combat looks even better than the first film. Chalomet gets to let loose a little more in this film (one of my favorite scenes in the original is a breakdown in which he verbally lashes out at Rebecca Feguson’s Jessica; that Paul is a lot closer to the surface in the back half of Part Two). Director Denis Villeneuve continues to push the visuals to new and interesting places, first in hallucinations, then on the alien Harknonnen home world, one of the highlights of the film.

There are cons, too. Villeneuve admitted in a recent interview that he doesn’t find dialogue as interesting as the visual experience, and that shows in a few scenes that just don’t quite flow (particularly close to the end, which was disappointing). There’s also some very fair criticism on how the Fremen, stand-ins for historically colonized people, yield so quickly to Paul and Rebecca’s plots. Chani and one of her close friends are noted exceptions, and the book and film do try to reckon with cults of personality and the pressure that colonizers exert over time, but especially in a time of heightened religious tension in our own world, I understand if some audiences wish the Fremen got to wrestle with the same inner conflicts that the film lavishes on Paul.

Those concerns aside, I loved watching this on the big screen, and I think this series is rapidly becoming one of my family’s go-to film experiences in the same way that Lord of the Rings did in childhood. It’s an adaptation precisely crafted with love. 4.5 Shai Halud out of 5.