Camestros Felapton

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Review: Dune Part 2

It seems odd to talk about spoilers for a story that’s been a Hugo Award finalist in one form or another six times.1 However, in this case, the spoilers are more for people who know the story well but who haven’t seen the film yet. There are a number of changes to the plot which all make sense and really don’t change the overall structure of the story but which are well worth discussing.

Dune Part 2 is nearly three hours long and if anything, the script has simplified the plot of the second half of the novel. The net effect is a film that appears to rush by in a stream of compelling images to the extent that it feels like a much shorter film. The space created by the simpler plot and expansive running time is filled with dramatic sequences that relish in the setting and the events of the story. Above all, the film taps into the sense of weirdness and immersion into another imagined culture that makes the book so beloved.

One thing I particularly liked was the way Fremen society was expanded upon. The impression of a planet of millions of hidden peoples with a variety of experiences and attitudes but also with a common culture was deftly done. The sietch communities feel like real places built by a complex society that is doing more than just surviving in the harsh environment and amid brutal oppression.

The foreshortened plot cuts out the time skip, so the transition from Paul as the fugitive heir to the House Atreides to Muad’Dib, guerilla leader and messianic figure takes place over months rather than years. The main impact of this to fans of the story is Paul’s sister Alia is not yet born by the end of the film, although the character still manages to have several lines of dialogue and an appearance in a vision (a cameo by Anya Taylor-Joy).

More interestingly, Chani’s role is modified somewhat also. She is presented as a voice for younger, more political-minded Fremen and those rightfully sceptical about a supernatural messiah figure (as, of course, Paul is also wary of for his own reasons). That adds a lot more tension to Chani and Paul’s relationship. The cast across the board is excellent but Zendaya in particular is impressive and adds a lot to a character who is otherwise somewhat underwritten in the original novel. That does lead to a notable change at the end of the film which I think was a smart choice.

Feyd Ruatha (Austin Butler) is compellingly appalling and made up to look just as unsettlingly weird as the other Harkonnen and yet also handsome at the same time. However, the film somehow ends up with less space to dwell on the utter horribleness of the Baron.

The possibility of a third film (presumably covering Dune Messiah) is not confirmed but the ending of Dune Part 2 really feels like a climactic mid-point to a story rather than a definitive end. Given how well this film has come out both critically and commercially, it feels likely a third film will be made. There are so many elements to the story that remain under-explored that there is more than enough for an equally compelling completion to Paul’s story.

Above all, I feel this film captures all the weird messiness of Dune. There are few stories that manage to be their own subversion and critique of their plot. Both parts 1 & 2 approach this with utter sincerity and while I personally love the more camp weirdness of David Lynch’s version, Villeneuve’s visual spectacular has an earnest to it that felt distancing in Part 1 and yet immersive in Part 2 in a way that now feels far more deliberate. I’m very keen to watch both parts back to back once they are both available. The extent to which these are just one very long film and which second the part alters the first part is something I should wait to assess but even without a rewatch I already like Part 1 more than I did because of the sequel.

Really, genuinely loved this film. I’m very eager to rewatch it and I hope a part 3 is made.

  1. Dune World 1964, Dune 1966, Children of Dune 1977, Dune (David Lynch) 1985, Frank Herbert’s Dune 2001 (Sci Fi Channel), Dune Part 1 2022 ↩︎

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43 responses to “Review: Dune Part 2”

  1. I am now so excited for Dune Messiah – it feels as though Villeneuve (and his collaborators) went into this project envisioning the whole story for Paul, and it looks as though we are going to see it (hah!). 

    And that I hope that will be it. Much as I like Children of Dune, I think it overdoes things and drops the ball a little bit too much, undermining some of Paul’s story. Others may disagree.

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    • I agree, Dune and Dune Messiah always seemed to me to make one coherent arc. After that, things got either curious or weird depending on how one looked at it.

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    • Yeah, I think Villeneuve was pretty up-front from the start about saying he felt the tragic/cautionary message that Herbert emphasized so strongly in Dune Messiah was an essential part of Dune that hadn’t been taken seriously enough before, and that the approach to adapting parts 1 & 2 would have that in mind even if he never got to do Messiah. So I wasn’t surprised about that being the intention, but I was still surprised that it came through so clearly in the actual movies.

      I don’t know what to expect from a 3rd movie— I wasn’t good at predicting the adaptation choices they made so far— but, since they’ve already shown willingness to make non-trivial changes with a thematic rationale, I wouldn’t be surprised if part 3 ended up dropping some of the plot machinations from Messiah and bringing in some elements from Children. The struggles of Alia and the kids to define their own identities may be tangential to Paul’s story, but I think thematically they’re relevant and could be portrayed interestingly without having to use every subplot.

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  2. Excellent review, highlighting that some changes were definitely for the better. I did very much like the generational/geographical schism, between the older, more religious generations (Stilgar) versus the younger, more skeptical generations (Chani).

    But one change that bothered me a lot was how Jessica became a driving force behind the propaganda campaign to solidify Paul as the Fremen Messiah. In the book, as I recall, she was not at all pleased with the idea and frequently fought it. (“He’s going to accept the religious mantle! He mustn’t do it!” and her comments about politics and religion driving the same chariot.)

    Jessica ordering Paul to drink the Water of Life, rather than Paul deciding to do so on his own, is another change I didn’t like at all – for much the same reason: it emphasizes how Jessica endorses the religious crusade aspect.

    Granted, in the book she was at least equally concerned about Paul focusing on reclaiming Arrakis for House Atreides as she was repelled by an outright religious crusade, but all in all I found the change made to Jessica’s motivations and intentions to be, frankly, out of character for her and it pissed me off.

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      • I agree that it’s a change, but I think it was necessary and makes the character more of an actual understandable character, for two reasons.

        First, unless I’m misremembering, the book presents her objection as basically philosophical and/or pragmatic. It’s a principle she believes, based on her training. That’s a very hard thing to dramatize convincingly when the issue hasn’t ever come up in Jessica’s life as far as we can tell; outside of Arrakis we haven’t seen any evidence that organized religion is even a thing. This would just be an opinion she expresses, 3/4 of the way through an epic.

        Second, I’m not sure it’s even a coherent principle on its own terms within the context of Herbert’s book. Herbert is saying a thing that his readers likely agree with, but what would “religion” and “politics” mean to a member of the Bene Gesserit order? The BG themselves have both religious and political characteristics, but they also have a hugely cynical attitude toward both: other people’s religion and other people’s politics are never independent things to be respected, they’re manipulated by the BG for reasons nobody else is allowed to know about. It’s still obvious why they would prefer not to be dealing with a rapidly-developing mass movement of fanatics, because their projects have depended on manipulating very slow-moving trends and influencing self-interested people. But from Jessica’s point of view, their ultimate project has already been achieved! She delivered a Kwisatz Haderach! She’s already gone rogue by taking a shortcut to that goal, so trying to explain why she would still hold to all the other BG ideas, as if they were real ideological principles and not tools for achieving a goal, is a non-trivial task and I’m not sure Herbert convincingly accomplished it.

        (Herbert’s characters IMO work to the extent that they need to as vehicles for the story and ideas he’s interested in. They rarely read to me as people with lived experience; that’s just not his thing. You could probably make an effective adaptation that really mirrors his style of writing, but it wouldn’t be built around subtle performances and recognizable human behaviors, it would have a more ritualistic archetypal form— maybe closer to what Lynch was going for in his movie, even though I don’t think that was well executed at all and mostly failed to get across the story and ideas.)

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        • The more I think about it, the less I can imagine how the movie could’ve possibly made any sense out of a scenario where Jessica is opposing Paul’s messianification.

          We’ve already been told (and shown, in a series of interactions— I’m constantly impressed with how well this adaptation chooses moments to dramatize not-very-simple ideas) that the BG have inserted a messiah narrative with specific details into Fremen mythology, for the benefit of future BG operatives. They’ve set it up so that when Jessica is in trouble, she and her son can pass for Mary and Jesus. And then what? Assuming the BG’s intent was just to give them a chance to survive, and not to actually lead a religious movement… that only makes sense if they can get out of there pretty soon. Which we know Jessica originally wanted to do, but after a certain point it’s no longer an option. So now here they are, and there’s already a subset of Fremen who think Paul is the Lisan al-Gaib. Paul could keep denying it and just be an accepted member of Sietch Tabr, but (because the movie has done a decent job of showing the Fremen as a non-monolith— and because Feyd is now pursuing genocide, instead of the book’s very questionable idea that Feyd would try to be politically popular with the Fremen) it’s obvious that that community by itself can’t possibly beat the Harkonnens. If Paul remains a local war leader, he’s probably doomed, and if he tries to become a secular political leader of the whole planet then he’ll be pushing against all the religious and political tendencies that the BG have engineered there— impractical for a native Fremen, let alone an outsider. Jessica is also probably doomed: she can’t just hang out and be a regular Reverend Mother who happens to have a regular warrior son, because she’s committed an incredibly dangerous sin in the eyes of literally all the other Reverend Mothers, and also she’s complicit in blasphemy in Fremen fundamentalist terms since she already got the Lisan al-Gaib ball rolling earlier. Realistically the only way out is through.

          If the movie wanted to show Jessica trying to put the brakes on Paul’s ascension, I think it would’ve had to present her as either 1. committed to her ideals even if that means she and her son the actual Kwisatz Haderach will die, or 2. huddling in fear without a plan and just hoping it’ll all work out somehow. Either of those would be hard to reconcile with anything else the book or the movies had shown us.

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    • “Jessica ordering Paul to drink the Water of Life, rather than Paul deciding to do so on his own, is another change I didn’t like at all – for much the same reason: it emphasizes how Jessica endorses the religious crusade aspect”

      Aside from what I said in my other comment, I think there’s another layer to this, conveyed more by Ferguson’s performance than by the dialogue. The feeling I got from it was that Jessica wasn’t just endorsing this as a practical move to make the crusade possible; she was also trying to bring him into an experience that was life-changing for her. The first movie had Jessica showing more fear and tentativeness and loneliness than in the book, which I know some people didn’t like, but I think that choice makes a lot of sense when we see how she’s changed. She agreed to do this near-fatal thing she didn’t understand because she had no other good options, but as a result she’s escaped from her old identity and rules and limited perceptions, she feels like anything’s possible, and she’s got an intense new personal connection she never had before. Ferguson portrays her with a manic edge— she’s a drug addict who’s undergone a religious conversion, not to the Fremen religion but to their own little spiritual family, and that’s worked out great for her, and Paul won’t understand until he’s been there.

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  4. I liked how the movie dealt with messianic figures and the worship they inspire (unwanted worship, in Paul’s case). Would he have even made Muad-Dib if it hadn’t been for fundamentalist Stilgar pushing everyone in that direction? And then when Paul, despite his reservations and previous denials, goes all-in with his role is kind of chilling.

    Also, the sandworms! Those three worms bursting out of the sand at the end and sending everybody running for cover….that was just a “wow” moment. The CGI for this movie was really well done, I thought.

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    • As with a lot of other things in these movies, I think the visual effects work extra well in ways beyond just the imagery in itself, because of the directing and the use of actors. Leading up to that big sandworm moment, Villeneuve takes a few seconds to show us Sardaukar soldiers preparing for some as-yet-unknown kind of attack, after they’ve just seen a mountain get nuked. We don’t really know who any of these guys are, but we see some faces with a mix of toughness and anxiety, and we’ve seen them be fierce in combat before, and they’re confident enough that they’re even committing to protecting the flag. And then these ginormous things appear and, before cutting to long shots with throngs of people running, we get just enough closer reactions to convey “WTF WTF can I still fight whatever that is OH HELL NO.”

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  5. I won’t be able to see it till it comes to some channel I get, or streaming, or on shiny discs. But I did quite like the first, so looking forward to it.

    I agree that they need to stop after Dune Messiah. I kinda wish I had, lol. By the time Leto II turns into a sandworm, it was too late to retroactively nope out. I think I made it through all the ones Herbert wrote himself just on principle.

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  8. I saw the movie yesterday, liked it a lot.

    But I do wonder how much of the story is lost on people with no knowledge of the book(s). I’ve only read the first book, and only once 30 years ago, but there where many places where what little I remember from the book helped me understand what went on on the screen – and where I might have been more “uh, what’s going on here?” if I hadn’t read the book.

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      • IIRC their actual agenda was murky in the book as well, but we got a bit more information about what what they where. Or at least they where more clearly described as mysterious to everyone else, so as a reader I could accept that I wasn’t supposed to know.

        I think the most important plot point where I relied on the book was the power balance between the emperor and the great houses, and how the emperor’s support of Harkonnen was a major breach of the norm. There were also a lot of smaller things about Fremen society, as well as sandworms, spice harvesting and life on Arrakis in general, that I think would have made a different impression without having read the books. I don’t know how much it would have bothered me if I hadn’t read the book, but I think the movie would have been a different experience.

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        • “…the power balance between the emperor and the great houses, and how the emperor’s support of Harkonnen was a major breach of the norm”

          The movies do make a point of telling us about those things, inasmuch as they apply to the story. In part 1 there are half a dozen times when people talk about the emperor using the Harkonnens against the Atreides to keep the great houses in line, and how the use of the Sardaukar has to be a secret, and how the lack of satellite coverage of Dune will help to keep the secret. They don’t recap it as much in part 2, although there’s a statement that the Emperor has committed a major crime by providing the Sardaukar.

          Even so, there’s the same issue there as with every other world-building element in the book: 5-6 hours of movie, with stuff constantly happening, can’t give the viewer nearly as much time to absorb and correlate information as they’d get when reading a book.

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        • “…at least they where more clearly described as mysterious to everyone else, so as a reader I could accept that I wasn’t supposed to know”

          Well, when part 1 introduces the Bene Gesserit as being very important to this big thing that’s happening to Paul, the dialogue between Paul and Jessica establishes that most people have a very limited idea of what the BG are really up to. And we literally see them as shadowy figures wearing veils, lurking behind authorities, and having secret meetings.

          But again, I’m not saying that any of this stuff will 100% get through to viewers who haven’t read the books, I just think it’s hard to say how much of that is about what these movies are or aren’t doing, and how much is just the inherent difficulty of getting things across to 100% of film viewers without constantly repeating exposition. There are always viewers who miss major plot points that seemed obvious to other viewers.

          Of course I can’t be objective since I do know the material. When my wife and I watched the Dune miniseries, it was easier to get a sense of what information was or wasn’t getting through for whatever reason, because she hadn’t read it or seen any other version; our conclusion was that I had overestimated the clarity of the plot in that version. But now she does already know the main elements of the story.

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          • I’ve always assumed that ‘Gesserit’ is meant to suggest “Jesuit” and that they share a reputation of plans within plans within plans but that they mainly have plans within plans for the sake of having plans within plans

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              • It’s been ages since I’ve read Dune, but wasn’t the BG plan to create the KH as the grandson of Duke Leto and Baron H (by marrying the daughter Paul was supposed to be to Feyd? So Jessica starts the story as a rebel who has disrupted the BG plan. Presumably a KH born of Atreides and Harkonnen would be well placed to take over the Empire without conquest (through dynastic maneuver). Jessica is improvising desperately once Leto is killed and all the wheels within wheels have come off for everyone’s plans at that point.

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  9. Well, I loved it. It’s been a couple years since my last reread, but I’ve always disliked the ending of Dune, it’s very abrupt and I never felt like Chani being relegated to concubine got the depth it deserved. I think the movie improved on both those. The ending was still abrupt, but by bringing in some events that take place between Dune and Messiah, but we but we only learn about them when we read Messiah, it gave it a more satisfying conclusion. And I assume this will lead to more showing and less telling in the third movie. And Chani…. Zendaya gave us an incredible performance. Her hurt and anger at being betrayed by her love was so well done and was such and obvious miss on the books part. At least to me.My only gripe was the Atraides House Atomics. I feel DV should have at least mentioned that House Atomics was a thing in the first movie. By not doing so, it felt a very contrived plot point to save the day (even despite knowing it wasn’t one in the books)

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  10. I loved it. Zendaya was phenomenal.

    My only gripe was that if DV ever brought the idea of “House Atomics” in the first movie I don’t remember it, so when they appeared in the second movie right in time to save the day, it felt like a badly contrived plot point, even having read the first two books many times. 

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  11. Finished the book. As my wife TYG says, it’s slow-moving but never dull. Indeed there’s so much intrigue and power struggle before they even get to Arrakis, I’m astonished Part One of the film was so tedious.

    I agree on Chani (TYG disagrees)—more interesting in the film than as Paul’s colorlessly devoted concubine in the book (nor does Jessica assuring her it will all work out convince me).

    The use of Islamic terms like jihad, even given the Empire came from Earth, feels very off. Using “pogrom” to describe Sardaukar efforts to wipe out the Fremen —no. Doesn’t work at all.

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