Review by C.J. Bunce
Is Dune Part Two just Denis Villeneuve trying to make his Zach Snyder movie? It’s the puzzle–the distraction–I had watching and re-watching the sequel to the director’s much better 2021 first installment (reviewed here at borg). Somehow the franchise’s lead Timothée Chalamet takes a backseat to Elvis actor Austin Butler as his competition for the Emperor spot in an endless series of Vogue glamour shots that turn a good start into a monochrome, Hellraiser-inspired horror movie. It’s an excruciatingly long, slow, boring movie with uninspired sets, costumes, and cinematography that is a travesty in its waste of some of Hollywood’s top acting talent. In my review of his first Dune, I mentioned audiences can spot the director’s work instantly. That ended here when the George Miller feel he somehow avoided before merged into a near-slow motion homage to Zack Snyder’s 300.
Frank Herbert’s story is a tough nut to crack. Nearly every adaptation is an improvement of his plodding story of dueling royals fighting over spice, and the first part is indeed the best, which might be why the first movie worked so well. The ugly, creepy parts and characters that David Lynch’s version of Dune from 1984 is known for are all in the sequel, and Villeneuve does nothing to make it exciting and interesting. Ultimately the landing doesn’t stick and viewers are left with just another Chosen One story.
Where Chalamet maneuvered all the obstacles in his path in the first film, primarily being upstaged by today’s leading big-budget movie actors, here he is left with a few uninspired fight scenes but nothing memorable. Without the best features of the first movie, that’s Oscar Isaac and Jason Momoa, the remaining key cast doesn’t really do anything. Josh Brolin and Rebecca Ferguson are barely there, with Ferguson around more as a costume display. Stellan Skarsgård is a guy in a fat suit and Dave Bautista has a splash of paint, but otherwise the story’s Big Bad Harkonnen stars are a reminder that this is a re-assemblage of the Marvel’s Avengers cast. Christopher Walken looks completely out of place. All the scenes with Javier Bardem seem like they repeat. Yes, we get it, he thinks Paul Atreides is the Chosen One. When the audience knows what the characters don’t, it’s up to the director to give us something else to dig into.
If you look back to Star Wars, the target audience had no idea who the actors were in the movie. They had no chance to be constantly distracted by the star power filling out every corner of the screen and could focus on the story and action. Chalamet, Momoa, Ferguson, and Isaac were smartly balanced in the first film. The fault lies in the story and maybe the split into two movies, because the (limited, nonsensical) action in this part of the story is spread out to every character but Paul Atreides. But viewers should ask why a story with so much Arabian-inspired language and tropes results in a movie so devoid of a slate of actors reflecting that culture (recall how Firefly lacked Asian cast members, despite an Asian-based dialect?). Somehow the white-washing seems a greater omission in this sequel.
Which leaves us with Zendaya as Chani, the only interesting character in the film. She is the only person that shows any passion, any humanity. She’s also the most interesting of these sand fighters in nearly three hours of desert skirmishes. It’s not that she’s the only lead woman in the film who isn’t a fair-haired white actress (you’ll see a cringey Léa Seydoux, a bland Florence Pugh, a vacant Rebecca Ferguson, and a blink-and-you-miss-her Anya Taylor-Joy), but she seems to have the one good performance in the movie–she steals each scene and becomes part of the only subplot worth following–and that happened because of several changes from the novel. Unfortunately that thread drops off at the end with a cliffhanger–yes, a Dune 3 is apparently in the works to cover Herbert’s sequel, Dune: Messiah.
Unlike this turn, Villeneuve’s first Herbert adaptation was an improvement on The Chronicles of Riddick and John Carter of Mars. In the first movie Villeneuve seemed to be holding back on the make-up and costumes, which were hardly over-the-top compared to Riddick and John Carter, but here he takes a 360, with garish designs, over-the-top costumes and underdone makeups that try to compete with Trish Biggar’s more successful designs in the Star Wars prequels or even the costumes of Game of Thrones. It’s like they were plucked from New York’s Fashion Week. The costume designs for the Harkonnen and Bene Gesserit witch league seem to be reaching for the designs of the Inquisitors and Nightsisters from Star Wars: The Clone Wars. They fall short, into slasher horror imagery like Hellraiser.
Unless you’re intentionally making a black-and-white movie, audiences need color. Cinematographer Greig Fraser sucks the life out of the film with monotone. Real deserts are vibrant with color. Look at David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia or the Tatooine scenes in Star Wars. Scenes that switch to a colorless, swaggering Austin Butler chewing up (and spitting out) the scenery devalue the source material into what looks like Zack Snyder’s black-and-white edition of Justice League, or Frank Miller’s Sin City. What do these movies have to do with the world of Herbert’s Dune? Nothing. Cinematographer Fraser would have fared better filming this like his Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
Hans Zimmer had one of 2021’s best scores with Dune. This time all you’ll remember is noise turned up and down with each threat. And as for the visual effects, the hokey, baffling worm surfing looks like the CGI of a video game. It’s difficult to imagine a human conquering such a giant creature because it’s entirely unrealistic. That’s highlighted with the CGI here. Fantasy is fantasy, but fantasy worldbuilding requires grounding in real-world rules.
Nearly three hours should have held something worth seeing. But the promise of the first installment didn’t carry forward to the second. Dune Part Two is now streaming on Max.
