A common complaint I’ve heard about Dune: Part Two is that it is too similar to the first Dune, Denis Villeneuve’s audacious gamble to adapt just half of Frank Herbert’s beloved sci-fi tome and hope for another greenlight from Warner Bros. This is correct. Part Two, like its predecessor, is arcane, surprisingly weird, oddly structured and deeply uninterested in pandering. This is actually a compliment, because though I have seen Part Two six times and still do not totally understand the Bene Gesserit, the film, like its predecessor, is a strange creature in modern cinema: a true blockbuster – a cinematic behemoth that makes millions, generates memes and cements the ever-vanishing movie star – that harnesses the full power of the art form.
That is no small feat – this is a movie with many moving parts and much potential for off-putting density. (An honest reader of the book will tell you: Herbert frequently gets in his own way. The rich source material itself is no guarantee of quality storytelling.) If Part One was a thrilling immersion into a rare universe that felt genuinely alien and remote from our times, Part Two is the spaceship hurtling at full speed – and that spaceship, gloriously designed and rendered in sleek silver, landing on a planet in one of Villeneuve’s signature shots of great, arresting contrasts in scale.
