Recent Movie: Dune, Part Two

This is going to be less a review as an I told you so. When I reviewed the first part of Denis Villeneuve's adaptation of Frank Herbert's psychedelic space opera three years ago, I offered praise mingled with skepticism. I admired the film's stark, gargantuan visuals, but also observed how its monochromatic palette felt almost like a panicked reaction to the campy visual excess of David Lynch's 1984 film version. I praised some of the decisions Villeneuve and co-writer Jon Spaihts made to the novel's lumpy, problematic plot—and more importantly, their willingness to make those decisions and make the story their own—but also observed how they tended to file off anything that was too weird or creepy about the original story, streamlining it into a familiar, Game of Thrones-style tale of palace intrigue and squabbles between royal houses. There was something about the first Dune that seemed almost respectability-obsessed. It left me wondering how this would team handle the second half of the novel, which contains the bulk of its psychedelia, its deep dive into ecstatic religious fervor and psychic visions, its increasingly inhuman characters.

And, well. Dune, Part Two is a very good movie. An expansive, intense space epic of the type one doesn't get to see on the big screen very often, and which takes full advantage of the cinematic medium's ability to overwhelm our senses. It features thrilling battle scenes, powerful crowd scenes, and moving love scenes. It effectively carries Paul Atreides's story from its nadir at the end of the first movie, when Paul and his mother are scrambling to escape the Harkonnen troops who have slaughtered their entire noble house, to his accession as the galactic emperor and the launch of a religious war in his name. And it streamlines the original novel's story in a way that previous adaptations have struggled to achieve, delivering a decisive, comprehensible climax even as it undermines the triumphalism of Paul's achievement, laying the foundation for the coming adaptation of Dune: Messiah and his downfall. But it does all this by removing much of what made the original story strange and distinctive, in a way that eventually makes you wonder what the point of doing it even was.

A partial list of things one might consider fairly crucial to the plot of the original novel that Dune, Part Two either downplays or leaves entirely on the cutting room floor: the worm lifecycle and its role in the creation of spice; the Fremen spice orgy and its significance in their religion (here, Jessica converts the waters of life as a test of her psychic abilities, not as part of her role as a Fremen religious leader); the monumental importance of spice to the continuation of the galactic empire (it is startling to realize this, but we have now had nearly six hours of a Dune adaptation in which the phrase "the spice must flow" has not been uttered even a single time); the spacing guild; the religious and cultural significance of the sandworms in Fremen society; Paul and Chani's son Leto II and his death at the hands of Harkonnen troops; Paul's sister Alia in her preternaturally wise and knowing child form (Alia does appear to Paul in a vision as an adult, but the movie's timeframe has been compressed into a few months, and it ends before her birth).

That's not to say that there is no weirdness in the movie, no places where the ways in which it puts its stamp on the material seem designed to disorient and alienate. One very interesting choice it makes is how Jessica is changed by the ordeal of becoming reverend mother, muttering to the stored personalities of her ancestors, conversing with the unborn Alia, and orchestrating the embrace of Paul as the Fremen messiah with a brutality that is a far departure from her soft power approach in the original novel. (Though, this behavior is also reminiscent of the books' abominations, an impression that I am not sure the film intends.) More time is spent among the Bene Gesserit, presumably in order to entice audiences into watching the upcoming Max series Dune: The Prophecy, but still in a way that makes the order seem both ruthless and deranged, casually indulging in psychosexual manipulation and selective breeding. And Paul's Harkonnen counterpart Feyd-Rautha is given more screen time and a bit more complexity than the novel's psychotic hedonist, with the film even going so far as to indicate—in a decision that is silly but nevertheless thematically interesting—that he is another potential Kwisatz Haderach.

A moment's thought, however, will reveal that what all these characters have in common—and especially in Villeneuve's Dune, which even more than the novel prioritizes Paul's perspective—is that they are Others. Not figures we are meant to identify with, or who are uncomplicatedly on Paul's side like Gurney Halleck. The more Dune, Part Two wants us to see ourselves in a character, the more reticent it seems to make them something different from modern, 21st century people. 

You see this first of all in Paul himself, who spends a sizable chunk of the movie renouncing his role not only as the messiah, but as Duke Atreides, embracing life as a simple Fremen warrior, with its promise of community and the possibility of romance, without the complicating factor of having to claim lordship over a conquered people. Or in the depiction of the Fremen culture, which as well as decentering the spice and the worms, is also a great deal less militaristic and cavalierly accepting of death than in the original story. In the novel, when Paul kills the Fremen Jamis in a duel the reaction of the community is to calmly accept him, and hand over Jamis's possessions (which include his wife and two young sons) according to their custom. In the novel, Paul is greeted with dismay and hostility by Jamis's friends and family. And then of course there is the film's biggest departure, the way that it turns Chani into a point of view character, who spends the film suspicious of Jessica, resentful of the Bene Gesserit's planting of a messianic myth that has assigned Paul a key role in her culture, and who, instead of placidly accepting the position of concubine after Paul's triumph over Feyd-Rautha and betrothal to the princess Irulan, walks away in a rage over his choice to launch the galactic jihad.

To be clear, these are all decisions that have obviously been made with good intentions, in the hopes of dismantling the orientalism of the original novel, and puncturing its chosen one premise. And over the course of the film there are some rewarding payoffs to these choices. Paul's attempts to win over Chani and her friends in the film's early scenes, to overcome not only their distrust of outsiders but their disdain for Jessica and the Fremen elders' religion, gives us a glimpse into Fremen society that is more multifaceted and conflicted than the novel's dehumanized monolith. Chani's principled rejection of Paul's religious and political ascendancy, even as he comes into his full powers, adds a note of bitterness to the film's conclusion that is completely unique in the history of this much-adapted story. (On the other hand, the desire to make Paul and the Fremen seem "normal" means that, even more than previous adaptations—not to mention the original novel—Dune, Part Two is a version of the story that struggles to convey why it is necessary for Paul to take the waters of life, and what it means that he does so and lives.)

At the same time, these are all choices that feel like the screenwriting equivalent of the films' rejection of Lynch's garish color palette—whatever we do, they seem to be saying, we gotta make sure not to scare off the normies. So yes, it makes sense that Fremen society would be riven with social and religious dispute. But does it therefore follow that it has to be something so absolutely familiar and mundane? That the Fremen who are signposted as sympathetic, like Chani, would have values and opinions that so carefully track with modern ideas about colonialism and religion? Is there no room in this depiction for something genuinely alien, like the spice orgy and the worship of the worms? 

There is, too, something almost focus-tested in the way the film handles Paul and Chani. An awareness that the audience who will flock to the movie to see their teen idols don't want to be reminded that Paul is an aristocrat raised with an unthinking belief in his right to rule, whose problem with the Fremen worship of him is that he would rather be their duke. That they will be happy to see Zendaya playing a kickass warrior woman, but might recoil from a version of her who is a desert tribeswoman with a baby on her hip. The result doesn't so much humanize and deepen these characters and their setting, as swap out one set of stereotypes for another, this one with the sheen of progressivism on it.

And then there's the question of what this is all in service of. What are we even trying to achieve here? Dune, but unproblematic? Yes, the original novel is sexist and orientalist and ultimately very confused about the point it's trying to make, but these are not extraneous flaws that you can just pick off. They are baked into its core conceits. There's only so much you can do to remove them before you end up with something that is almost generic. And then you have to wonder why you bothered at all.

All that being said, I don't want to cape too hard for the honor of Dune, a novel that, as noted, has a lot of problems that three different adaptations have failed to successfully work through. It's maybe not the worst thing in the world if the canonical version of the story ends up being Villeneuve's, which does at least gesture at ideas like anti-colonialism and feminism, even if it doesn't go very deep into them. But there are places in this movie where you can see where the weirdness could have gone, without undermining what it ends up doing with Chani, Paul, or the Fremen. The choice to omit it feels pointed, deliberate, and ultimately not a little cowardly. For all my admiration of what Villeneuve has done, it's a choice that means I simply can't feel the same sort of excitement and absorption in Dune, Part Two that I did for its prequel. It's a good movie, but there's the shadow of a great one looming over it, one that I will always regret not getting to see.