Dune: Part Two (Warner Bros., Legendary Entertainment, Villeneuve Films, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, March 5) I joined the Bears San Diego for their movie night at the Ultra Star Cinemas in Hazard Center (a more desirable location than the Mission Valley 20, not only because the tickets are a lot cheaper but we’re not bludgeoned with ultra-loud commercials for various consumer products and alleged “newscasts” about movies, just a few trailers before the film and then the film itself; also they still sell their tickets in the traditional you-can-sit-anywhere-you-like-that’s-open system instead of reserved seats). The film was Dune: Part Two, directed by Denis Villeneuve based on a script he co-wrote with Jon Spaihts in turn based sorta-kinda on Frank Herbert’s classic 1965 science-fiction/fantasy novel. The Bears had previously done a movie night of the first Villenueve Dune from 2022 (the two were actually shot more or less in sequence but Villeneuve and the producing studios, Warner Bros. and Legendary, held Dune: Part Two back for two years because the actors’ strike made it impossible for the cast members to promote the film publicly). I hadn’t seen it then, however, and instead waited for the DVD to come out so my husband Charles and I could watch it together. Both Charles and I had read Dune in our late teens and I remembered a surprising amount of it, including the Mentats, which for some reason Villeneuve and Spaihts jettisoned from the script. In the backstory of Dune there had been a savage war between humans and the computers they’d built but now sought to control them – a conceit that’s been done before in plays like Karel Capek’s R.U.R. (a 1920’s work that not only pioneered the concept of robots but coined that name for them from the Czech robotnik, meaning “worker”) and since in the Wachowski siblings’ Matrix movies.

Only in Frank Herbert’s Dune universe the humans ultimately vanquished the computers and took back control, and they laid down an Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt not make a machine in the shape of a human mind.” The reason was to ensure that there was never a computer revolt against humanity, and in order to replace computers as aids to space navigation the authorities in the Duniverse (I just had to get that pun in here somewhere!) trained a race of super-powerful humans called Mentats and gave them a drug alternately called “spice” or “melange” so they could take the place of navigation computers and steer the universe’s spacecraft on their interstellar journeys. The absence of the Mentats was my biggest single problem with the Dune movies (at least Villeneuve’s; there were two previous sets of Dune films, a 1984 feature made by David Lynch and a 2000 TV mini-series for the Sci-Fi Channel); without them, we’re told that spice is a crucially important commodity but we have no idea why, and people coming to the movies without having read Herbert’s books (there was a cycle of six novels by Herbert himself – the others were Dune Messiah [1969], Children of Dune [1976], God-Emperor of Dune [1981], Heretics of Dune [1985] and Chapterhouse: Dune [1986], and after Herbert’s death in 1986 Kevin J. Anderson was recruited by Herbert’s son Brian to write additional books in the Duniverse, including prequels and interquels as well as sequels) would probably assume that spice is just another recreational drug.

Frank Herbert’s original Dune had actually posited a moral division between the “good” drug, spice/melange, the good guys use and the “bad” drugs the bad guys use just to get high – a live issue in the 1960’s when Herbert was evolving the Duniverse and readying Dune for publication. The action of Dune centers around the planet Arrakis, which is the only place in the known universe where spice is obtainable and can be mined – according to the Wikipedia page on the novel Dune, Herbert meant spice as a metaphor for petroleum and how our modern life is dependent on this finite resource, though I remember when I read the first two books in the sequence I assumed that the giant sandworms which live under the planet Arrakis’s surface actually produced the spice, sort of like the way whales produce ambergris that is used in manufacturing perfume. Arrakis is a giant desert whose temperatures are so unflaggingly hot that people can go about on its surface only while wearing “stillsuits,” which collect their sweat and other bodily waste and convert it into drinking water (though Villeneuve’s costume designer, Jacqueline West, badly mishandled the stillsuits: they just look like the sorts of headsets TV technicians wear to be able to communicate with each other in a “live” telecast). The universe, or at least this portion of it, is ruled by an Emperor (Christopher Walken) who in the opening strips the spice concession from the Harkonnen family and gives it to the Atreides family instead: Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac), his mistress Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) and their son Paul (Timothée Chalamet). Of course this is all a trap designed to get rid of the Atreideses forever and allow the Harkonnens to take back the spice concession.

The plot kills off Duke Leto and Jessica goes into hiding, while Paul becomes the story’s hero and ends up in mid-desert leading a band of Fremen, the native inhabitants of Arrakis. (Frank Herbert was part-Native American and he was consciously paralleling the Fremen on Native Americans in general; he was also drawing on the Middle East and Islam for the religious/spiritual traditions of the Fremen and some of the other groups.) Unfortunately, Dune: Part Two goes the way of all too many other modern fantasy films and becomes little more than a series of spectacular battles and other action scenes with only the most tenuous plot connections between them. Paul Atreides starts coming off as an avatar of T. E. Lawrence in the classic film Lawrence of Arabia (which was released in 1962, just as Herbert was beginning the Dune project) – a leader who comes from another country to lead an indigenous revolt against an occupying power – and according to the Wikipedia page on the novel Dune, this resemblance is not coincidental. “As a foreigner who adopts the ways of a desert-dwelling people and then leads them in a military capacity, Paul Atreides bears many similarities to the historical T. E. Lawrence,” the page states. “His 1962 biopic Lawrence of Arabia has also been identified as a potential influence.” There’s a particularly strong parallel, especially in the Villeneuve films, between Lawrence’s relationship with his local comrades (the parts played in the David Lean film by Anthony Quinn and Omar Sharif) and Paul’s with his, Stilgar (Javier Bardem) and Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin), as well as Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa), who got killed off at the end of Dune: Part One.

One thing that I’d been concerned about when I heard how Villenueve had cast both parts of Dune was I was worried whether Timothée Chalamet and his nemesis, Austin Butler as the evil Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, would be butch enough to play their roles. That’s one thing I needn’t have worried about: both were first-rate and completely convincing in their battle to the death at the end of the film. (I also liked the irony that in this version Feyd-Rautha was played by an actor who had become a star playing a rock star in Baz Luhrmann’s film Elvis; in the 1984 David Lynch version he was played by a real rock star, Sting.) But I was upset at the way Villeneuve and Spaihts changed the ending (and most of the Bears San Diego members who saw it with me were upset, too); in the book Paul agrees to a dynastic marriage with the emperor’s daughter, Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh), but assures his Fremen girlfriend Chani (Zendaya) that his heart belongs to her and her alone, and the final scene of the book is Lady Jessica, Paul’s mother, assuring Chani that even though she was never legally married to Paul’s father, “history will call us wives.” In the movie Paul rather cruelly dumps Chani for Irulan and the power she represents. Though I haven’t read any of the Dune books since I read the first two in 1972 for a class on science fiction I was taking in junior college, the Villeneuve Dune movies make me want to re-read them (and pick up the cycle where I left it off back then) just to remind myself what they were really all about.

I was also amused at the way Villeneuve carefully copied the look of the Harkonnens’ fascist rallies from Leni Riefenstahl’s 1936 Triumph of the Will (her chilling Nazi propaganda film shot at the 1934 Nazi party congress in Nuremberg), but then again Riefenstahl’s dark, satanic masterpiece has become the go-to look for depicting the Nazis on film, from the time when the Nazis were still a going concern and World War II was in progress (and its outcome not yet determined) to now. A lot of “B” directors making wartime propaganda movies in the U.S. raided Triumph of the Will to show the Nazis in action, and in Dune: Part Two Villeneuve and his cinematographer, Greig Fraser, not only carefully copied Riefenstahl’s look but deliberately shot many scenes of the Harkonnens’ rallies in black-and-white, and in such a way that they could not go back and add color to the scenes if they didn’t work in monochrome. I find Denis Villenueve one of the most stubbornly frustrating directors of modern times; I actually liked the first film of his I saw, Arrival (about the attempts of an Earth linguist to figure out how to communicate with aliens from another planet) but I hated, loathed, detested and despised his purported Blade Runner sequel, Blade Runner: 2049. I thought Blade Runner: 2049 would have been the hands-down winner if the Academy ever did an award for “Most Terrible Sequel Ever to a Great Film,” and when I heard that Villeneuve was directing Dune my reaction was, “Oh, so he’s going to trash another science-fiction classic?” Villeneuve’s first two Dune films (he’s planning a third one to be based on Frank Herbert’s Dune Messiah) were O.K. action movies in the modern science-fiction/fantasy genre; neither as good as Arrival nor as wretched as Blade Runner: 2049, but they both suffer from an annoying ponderousness all too common in modern films, as if today’s directors think that they have to slow their movies down to a crawl to convince their audiences that this is Serious and Important.