★★★½

The moment DUNC: Part One was over, I wanted Part Two.  That was the problem.

Now that Part Two has arrived, I can safely say that if we never get Part Three, I will not be disappointed.  Is there more to experience?  Certainly.  But the core story is complete – the themes imparted, and the sci-fi genre has just been updated in a way that will make nearly everything before it look, sound, and feel like an old relic.

I’m going to avoid using synonyms for “big” because it’s too easy and everyone does it.  But Part Two delivers on that which Part One promised, and some of it can be re-examined in light of the payoffs.  The messages from the deep we saw there bear direct consequences upon characters here.  A theme of messianic manipulation complicating political rivalry stands out in full here.  In Part One, Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) himself was the mark, but it strengthened a bond between him and his mother that saved both their lives in the desert.  Now in Part Two, the Kool-aid is spreading aggressively throughout the Fremen, as Paul continues to prove himself much the same way T.E. Lawrence did.  Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson)’s cold command of people is no longer quite the staple of family loyalty it was in Part One, and rather now casts a dark shadow on their intentions.

But the turn in Paul’s journey is the most dramatic and consequential.  His attitude as to his destiny shifts from an earnest embrace of it in Part One – largely driven by his dreaming of Chani (Zendaya) – to desperate evasion of it as he now sees a glimpse of him not so much leading as following, but where in doing so he brings starvation upon millions.  Part Two is not subtle with its intention to impart the cautionary tale.  But it is in the small ways it rotates the arc of every other character around Paul to tell that story.  When House Atreides first arrived on Arrakis, they were greeted by Fremen who immediately bought into the Lisan al Gaib story.  But the Fremen in Part Two mock Paul any time he tries to carry himself as though he is.  Even the audience in my theater laughed at Stilgar’s blind insistence that everything Paul does in the film was just another sign of him being the One.  But as everyone from the Fremen in front of me to the audience around me laughed, the focus of Part Two slowly shifts towards the perspective of the one and only person who isn’t laughing – Chani.

Zendaya is the film’s only problem.  She is a stale presence.  When she cries the desert spring’s tears on Paul, the moment is bigger than she can make it.  When she tries to disrupt the leadership meeting, she looks more bratty than persuasive, even though her character is in the right.  But most of this is redeemed by the ending – a moment of departure from Herbert’s novel, where Chani spurns Paul’s affection and does the same thing to him romantically as the Great Houses do politically.

This moment may not have been in the book, but I would not have been satisfied with the story of Part Two had it done anything else.  Denis Villeneuve makes his films with keen awareness for how mythology affects human beings.  In Incendies, he used familiar images of Middle Eastern tribal conflicts to create one of the most deeply affecting family tragedies I’ve ever seen.  In Sicario, he created the most viscerally real document of America’s border crisis a month before Donald Trump – the most border hawkish presidential candidate of the 21st century – announced his presidential bid.  In Arrival, he explored how language and linguistic differences derive from cultural and spiritual perceptions among people with literal life and death choices in front of them.  And it’s not an accident that that film also has a family tragedy in it, just as his Prisoners does – another film where trauma invades people’s private spaces and turns them into something horrifying.  But Paul will not hear the faint sound of a whistle that represents the call of redemption.  He is too consumed by the power of his Voice and the roar of the crowd.

Villeneuve plays into modern audiences’ ambivalence with messianic figures with the imagery he recalls.  The top of this review mentions T.E. Lawrence – an inherently self important and masochistic person who did as much as any outsider ever could to conquer a desert and become a savior figure for its people.  And you can only go so far in a review about DUNC before the parallels with Star Wars come up – specifically in this case those that involve the dangerous temptation to sweep away your civilization at the beck and call of a prophesied hero.  In the Prequels, Anakin’s tragic personal choices and the Republic’s tragic political choices are given voice by the one person who most intimately witnessed them both – Padme.  The line she spoke, “so this is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause” was overly simplistic and even childish, but it was the distilled essence of that story.  In Part Two, the same thing happens, and Villeneuve trusts that he does not need a melodramatic bromide to show it.

If nothing else, Part Two makes clear why the story of the novel was split into two halves for a film, and why David Lynch’s underrated 1984 adaptation of Herbert’s novel bit off more than it could chew.  The final battle turns the tables on the Emperor and House Harkonnen in such a way that makes it more than satisfying to watch, as their imperial armies are swept, buried, and flooded by the power of the desert harnessed by Paul and his fanatical Fremen.  Duke Leto Atreides probably never quite imagined that the “desert power” he was looking for would be needed, and could be directed so quickly and effectively, but Villeneuve puts it all on the screen.

There is a cold feel throughout both parts – a heavy Arrakin gravity and interference of thick fog and punishing in-air debris that give the impression of forces of nature bearing down on tiny humans, thereby forcing them into certain survival habits.  From there, as human beings become more and more conscious of these habits and those of their rivals, they attempt to exercise control – to leverage power and advantages with the creation of systems, societies, cults, and schemes of influence to do so.  And inevitably, these efforts conflict with those same attempts by others.  A lesser story would put a naive, blindly optimistic pair of lovebirds at the center and do everything possible to suggest that their love is the most powerful force.  Certainly, that was Christopher Nolan’s ambition in part with the way he made Interstellar.  But Frank Herbert’s novel is bigger than that.  DUNC certainly aims to look and feel bigger than that, as you get the feeling that this all may have happened before, or that we’re merely seeing a glimpse of a certain corner of time and space that makes for an interesting look at such behavior up close.  You can’t always explain the goosebumps you get watching a film like this, but you can’t deny that it’s there.

– Vivek