warrior’: Timothée Chalamet as Paul Atreides
in Dune: Part Two. Photograph: Niko Tavernise/Warner Brothers
If there’s another blockbuster this year that matches the visual impact of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two, I’ll eat my desert boots. The second Dune instalment is jaw-on-the-floor spectacular. It elegantly weaves together top-tier special effects and arresting cinematography; it layers muscle, sinew and savagery on to the bones of Part One. It’s an inhospitable, brutal kind of beauty that Villeneuve has created – there’s not enough lip balm in the universe to make a visit to the sandblasted wilderness planet of Arrakis look appealing. But this epic action picture, which follows the journey of Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) from a cheeky whippersnapper who’s a bit handy with a sword, to a feared warrior, to the prophesied leader of the Fremen tribe of Arrakis, is realised with a retina-searing intensity.
So how is it that Villeneuve has been able to succeed – and make no mistake, Dune: Part Two is an emphatic success – in adapting a book that was long considered to be unfilmable? The breadth and scope of Dune, Frank Herbert’s 1965 far-future saga of interstellar feudal conflict, proved a daunting prospect to previous prospective film-makers. The generous budget available to Villeneuve’s pictures certainly helps – the lack of funds was the factor that sank Alejandro Jodorowsky’s proposed 14-hour film adaptation of the book in the early 1970s. And studio support is another – while Warner Brothers hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory recently, as anyone who has been following the Coyote vs Acme debacle will know, it has at least given Villeneuve the space and freedom to achieve his creative vision (compare this with David Lynch’s less happy experience with his version of Dune, originally intended to run at three hours, then unceremoniously hacked down by nearly 40 minutes). But a crucial element in Villeneuve’s approach, a creative ethos that gels particularly effectively with the material, is his firm commitment to showing rather than telling.
