Dune: Part II
starring Rebecca Ferguson, Zendaya, Timothée Chalamet, Florence Pugh, Stellan Skarsgard, Josh Brolin, Charlotte Rampling, Austin Butler, Dave Bautista and Javier Bardem and also Christopher goddamned Walken
directed by Denis Villeneuve (Blade Runner 2049, Sicario, Arrival, the other Dune [not the 1980s one])
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It's been a few weeks since I saw this one, in a big ole IMAX theater with a bunch of strangers and my children, on a Thursday of its opening weekend. I don't know that it was the first time post-pandemic that we'd all rushed out together to see something in a crowd like this at the first opportunity, but I haven't spent a lot of time doing the math on it either. Even at the time, I was too wrapped up in the earnest, eager present-ness of the moment to realize I could have invested some money in the viral sandworm-themed popcorn bucket, that has now emerged as a force on the collectibles market. The joke is that it has an orifice you can take in any manner and by any angle you prefer, which is a nice change of pace as usually if you're spending $24.99 on what amounts to about eight cents' worth of popcorn, the only one being fisted is you.
We saw it in IMAX, as I said, so we paid the premium price for tickets, over $100 total for the four of us just to get in, before we'd even have considered the horny commemorative popcorn bucket. Sure, we got the pleasure of experiencing a film projected on essentially the wall of a blimp hangar, but as premium-price experiences go, IMAX is by far second choice to the "Dolby" theater at our local AMC. That's the one with the leather reclining seats that take up so much space, they impact capacity, which is probably 1/3 of the IMAX one. Sure, the seats are aging and kinda sticky, but still mostly function as designed. But the perception of scarcity and the fact that I'd waited too long (four days in advance! still already gone!) really put a damper on my viewing experience as I rocked my IMAX seat as far as it would deign, yielding about the same experience as an economy flight to Salt Lake City. Well, like that I guess if the airplane seat in front of you had a viewing screen embedded in the back of it large enough to defeat the aerodynamic properties of the aircraft, imperiling all on board. I haven't read up on the issue yet, but I guess there's a non-zero chance that's one of the problems with Boeing 737 MAX?
Movie hype in our culture in general is really at an all-time post-Avengers low. All the social and economic momentum of the Marvel/Star Wars compulsion phase of our collective being has waned to the point of being spent. People want to look to the abject failure of Madame Web as evidence, but none of the spinoff Sony Spider-Man-adjacent projects are a good indicator. Outside of the Venom ones, rescued by the inalienability of Tom Hardy, who demands to be reckoned with, they've all been memes factories. I haven't seen a frame of Kraven the Hunter, but we already know its entire life in the zeitgeist will be, like, two seconds of Russell Crowe from a trailer screaming "I've got a CRAVIN'!" in some half-Australian accent (as all his accents are) or something equally stupid. The half-life of these things are getting increasingly halved. You already forgot about the Jared Leto vampire one, don't lie.
This Dune sequel carried a little bit of juice, at least it felt like it did. Even adjusted for unflation,* $82.5 million for an opening weekend is a sad pittance, but in this economy and the fact that it's a three hour movie about being sad on/near/under sand, it sure feels like a hit!
Is it good? Reader, I thought it was. I walked out and the first thing I said when we breached the glass doors onto the Plaza of Retail in front of our mall cinema was "well, that was some confident film making." It is one thing this version shares with the David Lynch Dune from the 80s, something anyone adapting these wacko-ass stories has to bring to the table or risk getting straight-up sandwormed: unregulated chutzpah. If you aren't willing to get weird, this isn't the project for you. Nobody wants to see Zack Snyder's Dune. We already saw Zack Snyder's Star Wars and it somehow made George Lucas seem like Yorgos Lanthimos.
Villeneuve likes his sci-fi and has made a name with knotty, conceptual ideas and long stretches of pictures over dialogue in things like his Blade Runner sequel. There's room for feeling and experience, senses and sensation over exposition, leaning heavily on sound and production design to convey where words would just be in the dang way. Is there too much of that in a movie that nearly three hours long? Maybe. But while it feels heavy, it never feels burdened, even when it does hand-wave its way through some plot points at the end.
The cast continues to do what it does, centered mostly by two of the most gifted charisma merchants out there selling in Rebecca Ferguson and Javier Bardem. Ferguson has less to do in this one than in the first, a bit more trapped by the circumstances of the means of survival for herself, her son (the Chalamet boy) and her very chatty unborn daughter, but is still the best thing to watch when the camera is watching her. Bardem is kind of doing something else while everyone is busy acting all around him: inhabiting, being, making the landscape and culture exist through him as a totem, a vessel, a thing all stories reliant on world-building require. He is, as my GenZ gamer kids say, carrying.
He sort of as to as it couldn't be Chalamet, the de facto lead of the thing, as his arc requires him to be stifled out of being by wading through the act of becoming for the entire thing. It works in the sense that you buy it in the end when this slight waif of a boy, who will never be physically anything other than he is, but still cuts a creditable figure as a war-leader and physical threat.
Austin Butler gets the showiest, weirdest part and leans in to make it showier and weirder, for which I will always be grateful. I was surprised and delighted by his doofy-ass choice to basically do a Stellan Skarsgard impersonation as a speaking voice (even more impactful since he rarely is asked to use it). It's not easy to make psychopathic alopecia with a knife into something worth watching, but he lands it.
The star, more than the first one, is the filmmaking itself. The sense of strangeness, isolation, grief are conveyed as much by the scope and scale of the way everything is presented (the landscape most of all) than by the actors. And then for some reason, right in the middle, an absolute batshit pre-war German expressionist film breaks out, an overwhelming audience pummeling in the form of public bloodletting, fascist-adjacent crowd hysteria and a stark alien-ness, all in an almost entirely monochrome palette that hasn't been tried in mainstream cinema really since Sin City. It's the primary task of good science fiction to insist to the audience "You are somewhere else," which this movie achieves here, both for the viewers and as a crucial dividing line for the plot. These Harkonnens are a different breed of cat; the kind you know will eat you if you die alone in your house.
It's possible my positive response to the film is a reaction to a general restlessness in pop culture, where there doesn't seem to be anything coming to really lust after, in the healthy way people eager to be parted from their money can experience the experiences offered. Maybe it was the writer and actor strikes that we're paying for now, with a lull in new high-level offerings, making something this polished feel more satisfying than it is. It is, after all, the middle part of a trilogy, which is often something of an unfinished thought. And yes, I'd say it feels that way too. But given the absolute insanity of what is to come in the Dune story, maybe the instinct to keep the plot stuff as an afterthought is to give us a chance to breathe before we have to try to get our minds around the what-the-fuck-ness of what's to come.
Or maybe I'm just being too generous. Empire Strikes Back and Two Towers brought the thunder and they were middle movies. Literally zero trees in this one, let alone talking trees. Try harder, Frenchman.
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*After Rebel Moon and now that Jennifer Lopez one where she fights robots with another robot, the stay-at-home-ification of event movie watching is upon us. We're not adjusting for quality here (you heard me say Rebel Moon, right?), just budget and intent. $357 million worldwide in four days, we may never see your like again.
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