Dune 2: My Review
Dune: Part 2 has single-handedly rescued the movie theater industry, at least for now, with its successful worldwide release. Director Denis Villeneuve has done the seemingly impossible in creating a Dune franchise people actually like. I’ve just taken my son to see it and so here are my thoughts on the whole shebang (note: inevitable spoilers!). Yes…another listicle…
1. The source material…the books that is…is a pretty awkward starting place. I read some of the novels maybe 30 years ago so, in fairness, my memory is hazy, but I found the first novel to be interesting but clunky. The basic premise is absurd. Emperor doesn’t like the Atreides family who live on Planet A. Rather than just attack them and be done with it, he moves them to Planet B then attacks them (via the villainous Harkonnen family who used to rule Planet B but…oh, never mind, let’s just get the movie going).
2. As I remember, the subsequent novels get progressively incomprehensible. I stopped at Children of Dune which I found to be as dull as authentic, home-made English mashed potatoes (“Butter is for the Froggies!”).
3. The whole colonization angle has been the quasi-religious obsession of the bougie intelligentsia, with little self-awareness2. I never found this angle convincing. The Fremen appear to be largely influenced by Arabic culture, and the Arabs were certainly a historically successful group of slave-trading colonizers. That’s not a shot at Arabs…most human cultural groups were historically awful in how they treated other human beings. I’m just saying the whole issue is more complicated than the binary good/bad guy arguments college humanities departments peddle to unsuspecting undergraduates. Granted, maybe the argument is that Fremen are more like Bedouin specifically, but alas.
4. The 1984 movie was awful. The end.
5. Villeneuve is a wizard, proving that this difficult source material could be made into an enjoyable movie.
6. The recent Dune 1/2 benefited from an ensemble cast.
7. Rebecca Ferguson and Jason Momoa ran away with the first film. Ferguson kind of receded in Dune 2. The more her character descended into witchiness, the less interesting her character became. That allowed others to shine.
8. Standout performances in Dune 2 belong to Zendaya, who is really the emotional soul of this movie, and Austin Butler in the role of arch-bad guy Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen.
9. Speaking of bad guys, I love that Dune keeps the Harkonnen unequivocally evil. Back in the 1990s, adding moral nuance to both protagonists and antagonists (“Maybe we’re not as good as we think we are?”) was fresh and interesting. Now it’s an overused, neurotic trope, so it’s nice to have some straight bad guys. Granted, Dune has its own moral ambiguity, but I’ll give that a pass for now.
10. That said, Dune 2 probably overdoes it a tad with the random murders of terrified Harkonnen assistants. We get it; they’re naughty.
11. What is Christopher Walken 170 years old by this point? Dude has to be an undead mummy, but he brings a lot of authenticity to the role of the Emperor, probably one of the more difficult roles in the film.
12. I refuse to believe that humans from thousands of years in the future could invent a hovering robot death needle filled with poison, yet because Radio Shack is out of business, couldn’t outfit it with a decent camera. I know, I know…something something hoverfields disrupt communications…something something…it was just a bit too obvious as plot devices go.
13. I liked that Dune 2 spent so much time with the Freman resistance. That got short shrift in the 1984 movie. I seem to remember some scene from the book where a Freman kamikazed a stolen Thopter into some kind of troop transport, but that didn’t make it into either movie (or maybe I’m just inventing a memory at this point).
14. The ornithopters are a dubious technical design, but still manage to be super-cool. Sure, I know they can theoretically work, but they seem impractical compared to a standard helicopter design. But they’re cool, so who cares?
15. Man, what 40 years of improvement in special effects can do for a movie…
16. One of the more disappointing elements of all the Dune variations is that the battles that begin and end the first book feel too one-sided to generate tension. This version was definitely the best, but still can’t quite overcome that issue to make the battles thrilling.
17. Thank god Villeneuve got rid of the goofy “Weirding Module” sound weapon from the 1984 movie. I was so embarrassed for everyone in that movie who had to act out using that thing with a straight face.
18. I’m pretty excited to see where Villeneuve is going to take Chani’s arc, since it appears to be a divergence from the books (and the fawning version in the 1984 movie).
19. Dune 2 does have its stumbles, such as the weird sequence in which Anya Taylor-Joy briefly appears as an adult version of Paul Atreides embryonic but fully aware and telepathic sister (just see the movie, it’s hard to explain). Her breathy profession of love seems more romantic than sisterly but then again, the whole Dune series is pretty weird.
20. The narrative flow of Dune 2 is a lot better than the rushed second half of the 1984 movie. One might be left wondering what Sting had to do with anything in the 1984 movie other than presaling the Police’s last album together. Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen’s role in Dune 2 makes a lot more sense.
21. Overall, it’s a good film. Go see it.
Sipping popcorn from a straw is one of the least weird things about the Dune universe.
Hey, at least I know what I did when I used the term “bougie intelligentsia”.