You have to marvel, as "Dune: Part Two" thunders across the teeming IMAX screen, at the way director Denis Villeneuve manages to keep the movie's many moving parts under control. Juggling an endless succession of vast sprawling crowds, insectoid airships and blazing aerial explosions, Villeneuve lets nothing escape his grasp — even the densely entangling story, which is a handful all on its own.
With "Dune: Part Two" — or "D2," let's say — finally upon us, it's clear that Villeneuve's first swing at Frank Herbert's 1965 novel, the 2021 "Dune," was the merest warmup. In that film, manipulating hypnotic geometries of light and shadow, the director patiently laid out his many plot elements — the contending great houses of Atreides and Harkonnen, the rebellious desert tribe of Fremen, and the planetary homeworlds of Caladan, Giedi Prime and Arrakis, the latter also known as Dune.
"Dune" — or "D1," why not — was a master class in fantasy world-building, but heavily burdened by its boatloads of exposition. While not wholly uneventful, it was a little light on epical action. This is not a problem with "D2," which hits the ground howling and never lets up, lashed onward, once again, by the virtuoso camera strategies of Villeneuve and cinematographer Greig Fraser, and by Hans Zimmer's titanic score.
The movie begins where the first film left off, in the wake of the murder of the noble Duke Leto Atreides by the unspeakable Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard). (Happily, the Baron is still residing in a vat of viscous black oil — one of the great sci-fi movie images.) Leto's son, Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet), and Paul's mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), a member of the mystical sisterhood of the Bene Gesserit, have been banished to the vast Arrakian desert, which glitters with deposits of the powerful psychedelic spice called melange. The Baron, who has seized control of the highly profitable spice-mining operation on Arrakis (the only source of the substance), is confident that mother and son will die in this harsh wasteland. But he hadn't expected them to encounter a tribe of helpful Fremen led by the rebel warrior Stilgar (Javier Bardem), who perceives in Paul the fulfillment of an ancient Fremen prophecy about a visionary champion who will end his people's domination by spice-hungry outlanders. Also on Arrakis, Paul finally meets the young Fremen fighter named Chani (Zendaya), who, as we saw in "D1," is literally the girl of his dreams. (Although it turns out she's not a believer in the great-savior prophecy of which he is said to be the embodiment: "This prophecy is how they control us," she says.)
Herbert's story is a warning about the danger of placing power in the hands of a charismatic leader, and in "D2" we see Paul — borne aloft on a wave of Fremen adulation — beginning to drift into megalomania, downsizing his values to accommodate the possibility of a ruinous interstellar war. Chalamet gives a nicely shaded account of this character, playing him as a wispy idealist in the picture's early innings before morphing into a man of stony will as the story gathers power. His performance also gives Zendaya something substantial to play against — Chani's love for Paul, while real and deep, is slowly being corroded by his descent into political intrigues. The movie is still a grand romance — the two leads have real chemistry — but it has unusual emotional layers.
Villeneuve has drawn top performances from his large cast, especially by Ferguson (who's pretty much never not excellent), Charlotte Rampling (returning as the spectral Reverend Mother Mohiam, a Bene Gesserit hardliner), and Dave Bautista (back again as the Baron's sadistic nephew, Beast Rabban). The standout, however, is Austin Butler, who brings a loathsome, serpentine spirit to the role of the psychotic Feyd-Rautha (a part played by Sting in the 1984 David Lynch version of "Dune"). With his shaved head, black-washed mouth and eyes sunk deep beneath a ridge of browless bone, Butler fully projects the unsettling lunacy of a man who enjoys reaching out and killing anyone who might be at hand, for no reason whatsoever.
Butler has two great scenes — one a tightly choreographed knife fight with Chalamet, the other a stunningly designed gladiatorial contest in an enormous arena (a monument to digital production). But this is a movie with no shortage of painstakingly conceived scenes and images. The sight of Fremen soldiers siphoning off precious water from battlefield corpses. An eerie shot of Ferguson surrounded by a clump of black-robed Bene Gesserit crones with glowing blue eyes (an effect of spice ingestion). A ride atop a giant sandworm that's not totally ridiculous. And, at one point, a closeup of a dead man's ear crawling with ants (an image from Lynch's "Blue Velvet" — Villeneuve has acknowledged his mixed feelings about Lynch's "Dune," but expressed only the highest regard for the director himself).
At this point, "Dune" fans may be wondering what's next for this franchise — or if it even is a franchise. In one of the movie's many unabashedly misterioso moments, Chalamet, in a transport of visions, says, "I see possible futures all around us." Me, too. I see "D3."
Kurt Loder is the film critic for Reason Online. To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.
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