Herbert’s novel is a great juicy slab of a book, a meticulously detailed and enjoyably engrossing fantasy about belief and doubt, survival and struggle, idealism and nihilism. Herbert was a worldbuilder par excellence and he drew from an astonishment of references to create a fantastical realm. The results are unusual enough to inspire curiosity and, at times, a sense of wonder, even as the story retains a connection to the reality outside its pages. It’s a dense palimpsest, with influences ranging from Greek mythology to Shakespearean tragedy and Jungian psychology. Time and again, especially in its representations of a hostile environment and religious fanaticism, it can also seem like a warning to the present day.
Villeneuve’s approach in adapting the novel is, effectively, one of judicious distillation. Like the first movie, “Part Two” advances the plot fluently (it’s easy to follow), through both dialogue and action sequences that are true to the spirit of the book, its overarching narrative arc, vibe and weirdness. The dialogue sounds natural, even when characters are throwing around names like the Bene Gesserit, the misterioso religious sorority that assumes greater prominence in “Part Two.” As crucially, the action sequences don’t stop the movie dead or make the rest of it seem irrelevant. Mainstream adventure films often toggle between expository and action sequences with wearyingly predictability; here, everything flows.
“Dune” is finally a war story, like many contemporary screen spectacles, and it isn’t long into “Part Two” before bodies begin to fall. In the swiftly paced opener, Harkonnen soldiers, led by a bald shouter called the Beast Rabban (Dave Bautista), descend to the desert floor from their flying machines. Wearing bulky uniforms that make them seem as lumbering as old-school deep-sea divers, the soldiers seem too ungainly to take on the Fremen, agile fighters with parkour moves and billy goat balance. Villeneuve is good at surprises, though, and he knows how to marshal contrasts — light and dark, immensity and puniness — to create interest and tension. Soon enough the Harkonnen are rapidly jetpacking through the air, and it’s on.
“Part Two” moves with comparable dexterity despite all the weightiness, the byzantine complexities and knotty conspiracies shared among different factions. The sequel brings back a number of familiar faces, including Josh Brolin as the Atreides loyalist Gurney Halleck and Stellan Skarsgard as the monstrous Baron. The leader of House Harkonnen, the Baron spends much of his time killing his minions or marinating his often-bared, massively spherical body in a tub of what looks like crude oil. Rabban, his inept nephew, is soon overshadowed by the most striking addition to the “Dune” detachment, another nephew, Feyd-Rautha, a malignancy played by an unrecognizable, utterly creepy Austin Butler.
As spectrally white and seemingly hairless as his uncle, Feyd-Rautha looks like a bulked-up worm. He’s a warrior and every bit as wicked as his uncle. Yet he isn’t the usual sexed-up antihero despite the curves of Butler’s muscles and his sensual pout, and the character remains a disturbing narrative question mark. Feyd-Rautha becomes Paul’s challenger, but he also serves as a counterpart to the huge sandworms that travel beneath Arrakis’s surface and produce the planet’s invaluable natural resource, known as melange or spice. As crucial as petroleum, as addictive as smack, spice sparkles like pixie dust, alters minds, turns eyes vivid blue but mostly it keeps this universe running — and violently churning.
