Dune: Part Two – movie review

Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of the book Dune is worth watching not only for its stunning giant-man aesthetics, but also to see how futuristic science fiction about past feudal strife speaks to real wars and conflicts of the present. And in the second part, the politicization of Dune became not just more pronounced, it became total. We can say (even despite the presence of a romantic line) that politics and religion are the only narratives of this epic. Except for the certainty that they are practically the same thing.

Can the Bible be called a political tract? Absolutely. Moreover, it is the most political book ever written. This is exactly the kind of “Bible” that Villeneuve’s film, based on the novel of the same name by Frank Herbert, is also based on. And the young Duke Paul Atreed (Timothée Chalamet), the heir to the unique and very important planet Arrakis, which is known for its “spices,” has ceased to be a melancholy Byronic hero and has become a hegemon in the sequel.

He simultaneously personifies both the prophet Moses, who led his people through the desert for forty years in search of the Promised Land, and Jesus Christ, who appeared as the long-awaited messiah to a suffering people and… it is not clear whether he saved them or destroyed them.

Like Moses, Atrid promises the Fremen natives to return the Green Paradise to the desert planet. Or rather, he doesn’t promise, he keeps silent, but that’s what they expect from him. These delusions of the fanatical wing of the Fremen about the coveted Green Paradise are reminiscent of Furiosa’s hopes to see the Green Place again in the movie Mad Max: Fury Road. Like Jesus, who was caught between the pious myth created by his mother, the Virgin Mary, and the mundane expectations of Mary’s lover Magdalene, Paul Atreed in the second part finds himself between the obsessive preaching of his mother, Lady Jessica, and the mundane expectations of his Aboriginal lover, Chani. She refuses to see him as a messenger of God and wants to be satisfied with Paul as an ordinary man, a capable soldier and a desperate fighter for freedom.

Denis Villeneuve’s greatest achievement is the perfect match between monumental content and monumental form. After all, if the great content were squeezed into an insufficiently large form, we would get something like a pocket Bible. And if the reduced, simplified content were well encased in a beautiful wrapper, we would get something like a children’s Bible with colorful illustrations.

So, yes, the director has achieved perfect harmony, complete agreement between the appearance and the inner content. And yes, we can say with certainty that Dune is a rare case in cinema where the more pretentious, the more serious, the higher the style, the more adequate the rhetoric is perceived. The heavier the load of twists and turns and meanings, the more sublime the final impression. This is provided that the acting is equally high and graceful, and it is here, at least within the main triangle of Chalamet-Zendaya-Austin Butler, complemented by equally slender performances by Florence Pugh, Rebecca Ferguson, and Lea Seydoux.

If the first Dune turned out to be fantastically beautiful, but flat and sterile, that is, devoid of reliefs in characters and impurities in emotions, the second part surfaced with not stormy, but still violent waves, sickle-shaped moving hills in accordance with the sand dunes of the planet Arrakis.

And the main wave (a huge one, the biggest wave that obsessed surfers dream about) was the transformation of the protagonist, who stopped being a lyrical hero and turned into a politician as perfect, as perfect as any line in this movie. Whether good or bad, only time will tell (and the third part, which will be based on the book Dune Messiah), but pro-political to the bone.

Speaking of time. In Dune, it is like pollen in an hourglass: it floats away and returns if you turn the glass flask over. Through dreams, it speaks from the future, which can easily be confused with the past; it reminds us that the spiral of history stretches endlessly in repeating circles, but the spring of existence can stretch and shrink, so the interval between circles cannot be guessed…

If water symbolizes life, then sand and desert represent its absence, or at most its small crumbs that fall through your fingers.

Therefore, Villeneuve’s characters, just like the scenery, look like dehydrated sand figures that crumble and recover inside a closed glass vessel. The figurative blockage of blood vessels and airways as a result of being locked in a deserted, unviable prison is evidenced not only by dry, pale faces, but also by the tightly locked outfits, which sometimes literally cover the mouth and nose with metal bars. And it seems that there is no freedom even in the bright blue eyes of the Fremen, because those eyes do not look like blue lakes, but like an insidious mirage, a deceptive oasis in the middle of a sandy wasteland.