Dune: Part Two (2024)

It's a PG-13 movie that I genuinely thought was R-rated.  There's an f-bomb in the movie with a lot of other language.  But the bigger thing that might be upsetting is just the sheer brutal death that happens in the movie.  We're not talking about horror movie death, but it isn't old Godzilla movie death either.  This is a movie about war using guerilla tactics.  It often isn't pretty.  Couple the fact that war is directly tied to fundamentalist religion, and you have some heavy content.  PG-13.

DIRECTOR:  Denis Villeneuve

Oh my goodness, I have too many prefaces to make before I actually start writing.  First of all, I'm going to be slowing down on the writing.  Really, that means I'm probably going to be writing less per blog entry coupled with fewer entries.  It's summer and I just got my notes back on my novel.  That means that I need to invest more time in that I just don't have the hours in the day to write two things at full blast. Since the novel takes priority, I hope you are cool with shorter entries less frequently.  Secondly, I watched Dune: Part Two under horrible circumstances.  Everyone's been preaching this movie.  But when this movie came out in theaters, we had just had a newborn.  Since I had already read the book, I knew that there was no rush to see this in theaters.  I have a nice setup at home.  I didn't need to worry about spoilers.  But I got my 4K and my life got insane.  We kept starting these late projects and we would watch only fifteen minutes at a time of this movie that I was insanely excited to see.  Do I acknowledge that it's genius?  Yes.  Do I need to watch it sometime in one sitting?  More than anything I've ever done.

The book of Dune never really grabbed me.  I probably wrote about this in my first Dune blog.  It's a book of space politics that I find incredibly slow and belabored.  I know that Dune was always one of those movies that seemed impossible to film because it grounds the concept of heroism and archetypal tropes into something very complex and nuanced.  Again, I used to watch the 1984 Dune all of the time, thinking that it was the adventure story that a lot of people expected from the first movie. Our brains are wired to think that Paul Atreides is the hero. Heck, he's got all of the attributes of the White Savior.  But Dune is more genius than I really even gave it credit for.  While I always kind of understood that Dune was more than a story of a revolution on a desert planet, my brain always found that narrative comfortable.  Yeah, intellectually I got that Dune touched on some pretty dicey subjects matter when it comes to religious fundamentalism and violence.  But I had never read the second book, which kind of spells it out for me.

That's why I find the fact that Dune: Part Two is all about embracing the messiness of religion and war. And points to both Frank Herbert and Denis Villeneuve for understanding that they aren't going to give me an easy answer.  At the end of Dune: Part One, Paul is in this place where there's nothing that can help him.  He is first-and-foremost a victim of cruel governments who have robbed him of his family.  He is the pawn of a religious order who have been manipulating him for tens of thousands of years before he is born. If he tries to do the morally best thing, he's abandoning a people to the ravages of a parasitical order and he would probably die himself.  But the takeaway from Dune: Part Two is that there are far worse things than death and that's the selling of one's soul.  

It's really weird.  Paul basically, partially through his own fault, manipulates a religion to wipe out all of his oppressors.  From the Fremens' perspective, they're happy.  For the first time in eons, these people finally have control of their own land.  They are self-governing.  And goodness me, if only the other houses were smart enough to leave that well enough alone, there might be a very clear delinition between good and evil.  But like the real world, there's something about men that absolutely need to vanquish their enemies before them. It's really messed up but that's what makes good storytelling, right?  I adore that the Fremens, at least in these stories, are completely sympathetic.  The weird part is that, from moment one, entire factions and regions of the Fremen are called "fundamentalists."  Still, all of us are hooting-and-hollering for these fundamentalists.  It tickles my brain.

Smartest thing about this movie?  Putting Chani as such a predominant character.  One of the things that I never remembered about the book was the other perspective.  As Paul rises to power and starts pushing this notion that he is the Lisan al Gaib, it's through Chani's eyes that we see the horror of what Paul is becoming.  Golly, Timothee Chalamet and Zendaya have good chemistry, even if they are only friends.  But we see someone who from moment one stresses that she has no religious notions behind Paul.  If anything, she and Paul bond over the fact that Paul is an ordinary man. The only thing that makes him special is that he's an outsider.  But as time progresses and the power of religious fervor changes the course of the politics of this planet, Paul goes through something that I have to question.  Part of me thinks that Paul never really believes in the entire prophecy.  He's this guy who doesn't want to push that button and manipulate people.  He sees the evil behind taking advantage of these people desperate for a savior.  But there's another part of me that thinks that Paul starts to believe his own press.  It's after that whole Water of Life sequence.  He goes from being this underground freedom fighter to being something very upsetting.  And every time that I think that Paul might have some kind of powers that would make him a deity, there's always kind of a throwaway line from a member of the Bene Gesseret explaining that Paul was basically either trained to do godly things or genetically predisposed to have traits that others would find godlike.  I mean, you have a movie that questions the validity of violent religious fundamentalism; it's not shocking that it even questions the very notion of a deity.

The movie is so good.  I didn't think that I would like Austin Butler as this very creepy Harkonnen villain, but he works so darned well.  Part of that comes from the look of the character, but he makes a lovely mirror to the hero.  The end conflict betwen the na-Baron and Paul is something to behold.  These are both people who have crossed lines.  We still bond with Paul.  He's been our protagonist for a lot of hours at this point and there's something to be said for the fact that he doesn't look like the devil. But then there's the absolute, over-the-top evil of Feyd-Ruatha as he just comes full force at something that is considered beneath him.  It's good stuff.

One day I'll sit down and watch the movie again.  It's pretty darned good. I wish I had time in my life to actually do both movies in one sitting, but that's probably never going to happen.  Either way, Denis Villeneuve made a movie that was considered unfilmable and pulled it off.  Heck, to be a little blapshemous, I'd go as far as to say that he did even better than the book.  Again, not the biggest book fan, but Villeneuve made a story that I found overwhelming to the point of getting boring and made it engaging for a really long single narrative.  That man can cook,