Dune: Part Two
First screened and reviewed in March 2024
Director: Denis Villeneuve. Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Zendaya, Javier Bardem, Austin Butler, Josh Brolin, Florence Pugh, Christopher Walken, Charlotte Rampling, Stellan Skarsgärd, Dave Bautista, Souhelia Yacoub, Alison Halstead, L#&233;a Seydoux, Anya Taylor-Joy. Screenplay: Denis Villeneuve and Jon Spaihts (based on the novel by Frank Herbert).
VOR: ③  I credit it for going balls to the wall, and concept wasn't unpromising, despite egregious mishandling. Last act is a creepy cop-out?


   
Photo © 2024 Warner Bros. / Legendary Entertainment
I get that this movie is taking some risks in its storytelling arc and landing at a darkly resonant time for a story about nationalism, religion, and forever war. But, for all that, Dune: Part Two felt dull and draggy to me in ways the first one didn't.

Having already handled so much labor of world-building and complex factionalizing in the prior installment, Part Two trusts us to attach much more to individual characters and to follow their knotty journeys with each other. For me, this posed two problems. One, I had a strong sense we were in tight closeup for a much greater proportion of this movie than in Part One, with fewer panoramas or intricate details of mise-en-scène to savor or from which to make meaning. Even the worlds where we already have a leg up (Arrakis, Geidi Prime) feel much more anonymous, less audiovisually enveloping, and the spaces we encounter for the first time, like wherever Christopher Walken's Emperor and Florence Pugh's Princess Irulan hang out, barely clarified themselves to me. Dune: Part One made itself impressively legible to a newcomer, well beyond my expectations, by delineating its handsome, ornate, yet creepily empty worlds so clearly; that movie felt like a tectonic collision among a few massive plates, much bigger and weightier than even their "biggest," weightiest characters. Dune: Part Two felt by contrast like a steely, somber melodrama among differently spooked and spooky figures who had much less palpable connections to the spaces they inhabited.

Making matters worse, or at least more tedious, are a series of casting and scripting choices that limit how effective a character-driven spectacular this can be. Timothée Chalamet has not, to my eye, spiritually or visually grown into the considerable scope required of his controversially messianic role as Paul Atreides. If his physical performance suggests little of Paul's potency, swagger, or cloaked psychological complexities, his vocal performance is worse, sounding more or less like Chalamet always sounds but with some new, Scent of a Woman proclivities toward SUDDEN SHOUTING!! that do not conjure the gravitas they intend. About Zendaya, whom many viewers have singled out as Part Two's standout and linchpin, I can only say that I found her every bit as callow and out of her depth as her brief flashes in Part One suggested she would be. She, too, gets fitfully, unconvincingly shouty in ways that project attitude rather than power, sounds unmistakably like an emissary from the planet California, and over-relies even more than usual on that pissy-housecat expression that's offered as a catch-all for surliness, pensiveness, political ire, uncertainty, distrust, betrayal, blank observation. The "love" between these two doesn't remotely convince, much less does the sex, lamely blocked by a palpably uncomfortable Denis Villeneuve. Paul and Chani are the foci in this movie's massive and volatile ellipse, and their interpreters, I'm sorry to attest, don't seem nearly up to that task.

At least the task itself is ambitious, thematically punchy, and shot by Greig Fraser with his characteristic grandeur and chromatic burnish. There's ample reason to see Dune: Part Two, and I can understand why so many people like and even prefer it. But almost across the board, I'd call it a step down. A new, snarly villain played by Austin Butler arrives more than halfway through the movie. His impact is dulled, though, not just by too-postponed and too-little acquaintance but also by the uninteresting flatness of his psychopathy, the overworked and unengaging makeup job (there's nowhere for your eye to attach), and Butler's somewhat strenuous vocal work, as though trying to compensate for his young costars' indifference to this aspect of their craft. Florence Pugh is dangled immediately as a cryptic new cast addition but then doesn't feel important again for about 2½ more hours. Christopher Walken, bless him, is an absolute misfire. Even his costumes, by the otherwise impeccable and adventurous Jacqueline West, look like last-minute toss-offs, uncomfortable, undetailed, unfitted to his silhouette, all of which you could say about the performance itself. Javier Bardem makes a much more professional go, despite being saddled with the same line and the same epiphany about a dozen times. Josh Brolin materializes halfway through and is just, I don't know, Josh Brolin; if we needed more script-trimming suggestions, I have some. Charlotte Rampling is still a frigging wolverine of a shadowy, Machiavellian mother superior of her cultish sect/coven, but we don't get enough of her.

If this is a downbeat response to a movie I did admire in some ways, that's a fair evocation of how Dune: Part Two felt to watch. The whole saga ain't no disco, and it ain't no country club either, but there's a heavy joylessness to these proceedings, even in excess of the necessarily grim task of conveying these story points. Every once in a while, Part Two still offers up some exhilaration, as in the stunning mix of camera placement, sound, action choreography, and visual effects that afford us a first-person experience of a racecar-fast plunge across infinite desert, all on the back of one of Dune's iconic sand worms. I admit I was more interested in these creatures when they felt like ungovernable emblems of a hostile planet-colony's implacable otherness, even or especially from the vantage of its occupiers. In Part Two they've been almost thoroughly domesticated, instrumentalized for plot reasons, in the way that almost every character feels more like a plot necessity than a personage. Doesn't mean there's nothing to enjoy here, but in almost every way I could mean this, where's the spice? Grade: C+

(I originally wrote this review on Letterboxd.)

Academy Award Nominations:
Best Picture
Best Cinematography: Greig Fraser
Best Production Design: Patrice Vermette, Shane Vieau
Best Sound: Gareth John, Ron Bartlett, Richard King, Doug Hemphill
Best Visual Effects: Paul Lambert, Rhys Salcombe, Stephen James, Gerd Nefzer

Golden Globe Nominations:
Best Picture (Drama)
Best Original Score: Hans Zimmer
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