Dune Part Two
At a glance...
- Directed by Denis Villeneuve
- Released in 2024
- Runtime 167 minutes
- Watched at Pacific Place
- Final feelings: I just don't care about this.
Felt exhausted after this film so for a review, here's a transcription of my text messages to my movie group chat that I wrote after seeing this:
I left the theater feeling really tired and exhausted. It's not a particularly beautiful movie to watch. I feel like the only thing i could get out of a movie like this is just to admire how big it all feels. That's what I heard other people talking about as I left the theater.
But I don't care about magnitude inherently, a movie this long (5 hours long if you count both movies together) needs to say something to me and i just don't think it's saying anything. People say that dune is a warning against the Messianic story of fanatical religious belief. Frank Herbert was so frustrated that people didn't get that from his book he wrote a sequel that should have just been titled Paul Atreides is the bad guy.
I don't think this movie adequately conveys that meaning either. And at that point, maybe we should question if this kind of story is really an effective way to warn against white saviorism and that kind of message.
Like, in this movie, I'm supposed to notice that Chani is skeptical of Paul's ascendance and she is supposed to act as the voice of reason against him. Which is great. Love that for Chani. I love that of the millions of Fremen on dune, there is exactly 1 who is willing to voice any resistance to the liberatory power of some white boy heir to multiple houses of power. That makes me feel like this is really a story about why it's bad to believe in a Messiah.
Idk I'm being flippant, but it just felt like. So much movie to say so little. At least they could have lit the damn thing better so I could see more shit.
-end message
Some additional thoughts: I really turned against this movie in that scene where gurney halleck gets his glorious revenge kill against the harkonenn guy played by Dave Bautista. Once he showed back up it became clear what the actual focus of this movie was, which is using the millions of brown Arab-coded characters as cool set dressing for a story of spurned and betrayed white people. The fremen have just as legitimate a reason to be motivated by vengeance and to seek to end the scourge of imperial control on their planet as the remnants of house atreides, but of course they ultimately become anonymized for Josh Brolin's star power.
Another thought, I have read dune before and remembered loving it when I was younger. Would I feel the same sort of critical feelings for the book upon re-read? I'm not sure. I think there is a specific way the movie feels like it knows about some of the criticisms of the source material but doesn't have the courage to actually make an artistic stance in any direction with respect to that criticism. I remember loving the world building of dune so much that I wanted to write my own worlds and stories, I felt deeply inspired by Frank Herbert's work. I feel no such inspiration from these movies and have struggled to articulate exactly why but I guess it's related to just how sterile and precise these movies feel. Anyway, I really gave dune a chance, we'll see if I have the endurance necessary to watch part 3 when it comes out.