Dune: Part Two (March 1)

About two thirds of the way through this movie as I was starting to nod off at all the wide shots of Fremen riding worms from the South Pole to Sietch Tabr and from Sietch Tabr to Carthag (have I mentioned before the way in which the new Obi Wan series is mostly just lengthy commentary on the lack of affordable mass transit on Tattooine?), Friend sat down next to me and said, “I didn’t miss anything, did I?” It took until an hour later when he clarified that he had been here yesterday to see the movie opening night and came by in a storm just to hear my thoughts, which is maybe the nicest movie-related thing someone has done for me ever. So, we sat for a while and talked about it, and I’ll relate a lot of his thoughts because he had the fortitude to wade back into the Frank Herbert novel to figure out what he’d liked so much about the book and the Syfy series that didn’t land in the Villenueve adaptation, and I would’ve been more than content to sort of roll my eyes at the whole spectacle.

The thing(s) I liked and then a bunch of expectations that were dashed: Austin Butler’s Skarsgård impression is actually my favorite thing about this entire movie. I think I read in an interview that he chose to do it because of how he thought that Feyd Rautha’s obsession with his uncle would impact his speech patterns, but also I think it really just makes Bautista’s performance feel really underwhelming, which is fun on its own. Florence Pugh speaks for all of about two minutes. Anya Taylor-Joy’s “secret casting” is mostly a secret even to the movie, which simultaneously casts her too old AND too young for what she’s trying to do? Friend suggests that the book and Syfy adaptation had the wilder and more satisfying choice of birthing Alia Atreides and letting her murder the Baron as a weird little freaky witch child instead of just (spoiler) severing his life support kind of randomly when the Emperor returns to the planet.

Christopher Walken as the Emperor does not, in fact, say, “The Spice must flow,” which feels like a missed opportunity. Borrowing from Friend’s wider critique, in which he compared Dune’s issue to the lack of horniness in Oppenheimer, the seduction of Feyd Rautha is notably unsexy despite the fact that Léa Seydoux is one of the most entrancing performers on the planet, and one of the only actors allowed to appear fully naked in a Wes Anderson movie. So, even though she has the ability to mind control weak little fuckboys and her orders are specifically to “humiliate” him, instead she sort of just walks him into her room and asks tell/asks him to kneel.

Similarly the Chani/Paul sex is practically non existent and the steamy three-way cockblocking at the end with Princess Irulan is also elided for another time–presumably once they can figure out whether Florence Pugh is going to be the same age as Paul’s baby sister in the next movie??

The thing that really tanks the movie as a whole is how much of joyless slog it is. The first movie really distinguishes itself in comparison as quietly campy, which I think I referenced in my review oh so many years ago: the funny hats, the way that the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen floats up to the ceiling during an assassination attempt like an abandoned balloon at a children’s birthday party, Voicing your would-be kidnappers until killing themselves during your kidnapping attempt, the bath full of ooze, Jason Momoa.

It had some earnest moments too, but really we all forgave it for that. Everything that happened off planet was an absolute delight and then the moment that we land on Arrakis we really lean hard on Sand to tell our story and the plot kind of grinds to a halt. In fact, the more sand in any given shot, the slower the story progresses.

The second movie takes place almost exclusively on Arrakis, so you can already tell through the transitive properties of sand-to-plot that it’s going to feel like a thousand years have passed any time that Chani and Paul are on screen together.

And really, that’s fine, at first. Stilgar is funny. Like, actually funny! People in the audience audibly laughed when he tries to convince everyone else that Paul is space Jesus! It’s a good bit. It’s just that it’s a bit that cannot sustain itself, especially once Jessica drinks the blue goo and the plot shifts from one that’s primarily a love story or a space opera into a disorderly critique of space religion and colonialism featuring even fewer PoC than the last movie somehow?

Dune Messiah is, in so many different respects, a really simple story, and one that Frank Herbert’s son in the forward readily admits rubbed fans the wrong way when it first came out. If memory serves, Dune trades in its grand space opera structure with thirty moving parts and replaces it with a single caper in which the Guild Navigators partner up with the Princess Irulan to come up with a way to assassinate someone who can see multiple realities into the future. It’s a cool idea! And also it’s super silly! There are ghola shapeshifters! There’s people walking around in tanks full of spice! And there’s no way that anything of the sort is going to be in the next and last installment of this resolutely too serious film series.