Dune 2 review: A blockbuster epic that pays off Part 1’s promises

Ever since the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows movies were announced, two-part films have been a scourge on blockbuster cinema. At their best, they’ve often felt like hollow attempts to stretch lucrative material into something even more profitable. At worst, they’ve felt like two incomplete halves that make up a disappointing whole. But Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Dune feels like a special exception. The first movie, publicly billed as Dune and revealed as Dune: Part One only in the credits, handled the world-building and all the expositional heavy lifting. It all came with the understanding that the conclusion could be an all-killer, no-filler science fiction epic. And that’s exactly what Dune: Part Two delivers.

Dune: Part One followed the fallout as the Atreides family and its young scion Paul (Timothée Chalamet) were given control of Arrakis, the one planet in the universe that produces an ultra-valuable commodity known as spice. After only a short time on the planet, the Atreides were betrayed by the previous controlling family, the Harkonnens, who seized the planet again, nearly wiping out the Atreides in the process. Only Paul and his mother, Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), escaped to the deserts of Arrakis.

All of this is worth noting here primarily because this sequel wastes no time whatsoever on a real recap. Instead, Dune: Part Two picks up with Paul and Jessica easing into life among the Fremen, the Arrakis natives who have made its harsh deserts their home. Jessica, following a plan established by the mysterious order of space witches, the Bene Gesserit, continues to spread the idea that Paul is the Fremen’s prophesied messiah. Eventually, she becomes a Fremen spiritual leader herself.

Meanwhile, Paul is quickly making a name for himself as a Fremen warrior, and finding increasingly creative ways to stop the Harkonnens from restarting their spice-harvesting operations on Arrakis, mostly via guerilla-warfare-style attacks and raids. Paul, fellow Fremen warriors Chani (Zendaya) and Stilgar (Javier Bardem), and the rest of the Fremen take on the Harkonnens’ massive spice-harvesting sandcrawlers with surprise attacks that start from under the desert sand, using Arrakis’ native giant sandworms and laser weapons that cut vehicles in half in an instant.

These scenes are Dune: Part Two’s earliest flexes, seamlessly blending the massive scale of the Harkonnen desert vehicles with the Fremen’s brutal, efficient, and beautiful hand-to-hand combat. Characters dart back and forth between the legs of the crawlers while hiding from thopters circling ahead, as their allies battle behind them with fists, knives, and guns. It’s an impressive balance of intimate violence and epic scale, and Villeneuve employs it brilliantly all over the action-heavy Part Two.

These raids pepper the first hour or so of the 166-minute movie, and they always feel like a treat when they appear. They inevitably push Paul closer to his destiny: leading the Fremen in an all-out war to take Arrakis back from the Harkonnens, and maybe even to overthrow the Emperor who cannily set up the conflict in the first place. What makes this typical Chosen One story so interesting is that Paul is reluctant to accept such power, because he knows through his prophetic visions that his ascension will bring about untold death and destruction throughout the universe. But with every adult in his life pushing him toward his destiny and only Chani to hold him back, Paul slowly starts to see the necessity and advantages that power affords.

Dune: Part Two handles this complex character turn for Paul with surprising deftness. In large part, that’s thanks to Chalamet’s ability to sell both Paul’s charismatic, populist strongman side and his brooding, conflicted adolescent nature — and more importantly, flip between the two modes on a dime. No matter which mode he’s in, it’s easy to feel the weight of the other mode on his mind. When Paul directs the Fremen’s violence, it’s clear he’s just as scared as he hopes his enemies will be. But for all Chalamet’s incredible work in the movie, Zendaya is the one who sells Dune: Part Two’s surprising moral complexity.

In the movie’s quietest scenes, with just the two of them, Zendaya employs a gruff sensitivity that makes Chalamet’s more emotional scenes as Paul stand out even more starkly. It’s an impressive chemistry that gives both terrific actors moments to shine in ways that blockbusters rarely afford, with complex debates over morality and culture rather than the triter, tearful admissions of love that are common in epics like this.

Image: Warner Bros.

Their counterpart, and the final point on Dune: Part Two’s trident of exceptional young performances, comes in the form of Na-Baron Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen (Elvis star Austin Butler). Brought to Arrakis to end Paul’s raids and destroy the Fremen once and for all, Feyd-Rautha is a born psychopath more bloodthirsty even than his uncle Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård). And Butler relishes every ounce of the character’s villainy. Villeneuve weaponizes all Butler’s rock-star charm, giving him the same close-ups that made him irresistible as Baz Luhrmann’s version of Elvis, except that Butler widens his haunting spotlight eyes and flicks his tongue instead of smiling. Butler imbues the character with all the alien grace of a snake slithering across a high-fashion runway, at once completely out of place and strangely perfect.

All this is aided by the fact that one of Feyd-Rautha’s first scenes is also one of the movie’s most electric: a celebratory fight at an arena on the Harkonnen home planet. The scene is shot entirely in black-and-white infrared, giving everything a gorgeous, sickly glow. It looks incredible, simultaneously setting up a perfect character introduction for Feyd-Rautha and, more broadly, explaining incredible amounts about Harkonnen society via vibes alone. It’s the kind of visually audacious scene that should overwhelm the entire movie. Instead, it fits perfectly into Villeneuve’s parade of equally amazing images in Dune: Part Two.

Image: Warner Bros.

Villeneuve’s science fiction has always looked incredible, particularly at the scale he works at for movies like Arrival, Blade Runner 2049, and Dune: Part One. But each of those movies has a showiness that’s both understandable and distracting. Villeneuve often starts his scenes on an element of nature, or something else mundane and recognizable, then slowly pans to reveal whatever massive, imposing monument will eventually dominate the frame.

It’s impossible to blame Villeneuve for his impulse to point and marvel at the images his team has created, or the way he so seamlessly merges elements of the natural world with the visual effects necessary to build these worlds. Villeneuve has repeated this trick over and over throughout his career, and it’s undeniably awe-inspiring every single time he does it. But these moments are distracting too. They’re overwhelming in a way that reduces the films, even briefly, to singular icons of grandeur rather than images that make up a story.

In Dune: Part Two, however, Villeneuve has matured as a filmmaker. The movie is no less impressive than his previous work, maybe even more impressive. But these moments of visual splendor often come and go with little fanfare, supporting the character and action of a scene rather than distracting from them. Villeneuve has never had this kind of overt visual confidence before. It’s a clear statement that no single visual has to be the movie’s signature moment, because it’s surrounded by a thousand other beautiful, breathtaking images that somehow all feel perfectly aligned.

Image: Warner Bros.

Dune: Part Two is full of a thousand of these little tightrope acts, falling between massive set-pieces and the dozens of desperate hand-to-hand fights they’re built from. Between the kind of comforting hero myths that make up most blockbuster storytelling, and more complicated questions about the dangers of people who wield power and command violence. Between gorgeous images and distracting showiness.

But all this delicate balance is only possible because Dune: Part One already did the heavy lifting. For those who loved it, the promise of Part Two was that the conclusion of Paul’s journey would be even more exciting, beautiful, and poignant. For those who were bored during Part One, the promise was that all the slow, exposition-heavy pacing was in service of streamlining this next installment. Dune: Part Two is exactly the movie Part One promised it could be, the rare sequel that not only outdoes its predecessor, but improves it in retrospect. It’s more than just a fitting finale to Villeneuve’s adaptation, though: It’s also one of the best blockbusters of the century so far, and an instant sci-fi classic.

Dune: Part Two is in theaters on March 1.