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By Nicolás BarberoFeatures Correspondent
Warner BrosDenis Villeneuve’s epic sci-fi sequel abandons logic and clarity, but ends up being one of the strangest pieces of artistic psychedelia ever produced by a major studio, light years away from the average Hollywood blockbuster.
A notable portion of Denis Villeneuve’s epic sci-fi sequel, Dune: Part Two, concerns giant worms racing across the desert at breakneck speed. They do it so often, in so many key scenes, that you’ll eventually wonder how it’s possible. What exactly powers these enormous legless, eyeless monsters? They don’t move like snakes, and worms generally aren’t known for their speed, so how do creatures as big as bullet trains manage to move as fast as bullet trains, too?
The answer is that you just have to shrug your shoulders and move on. And the same goes for almost everything else in Dune: Part Two. After about an hour, it becomes clear that the filmmakers have abandoned logic and clarity, but once you accept that it’s not going to make much sense, you can stop worrying and immerse yourself in one of the most astonishingly strange pieces of history. artistic psychedelia that has never emerged from a major studio.
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Adapted from the second half of Dune, Frank Herbert’s influential 1965 novel, the film begins where latest He left it in 2021: in the desert. Timothée Chalamet returns as Paul Atreides, an interstellar aristocrat whose family has just been massacred by the evil Harkonnens: Stellan SkarsgtoThe third is the Marlon Brando-esque baron, and Dave Bautista is the brutal thug who murders so many of his own employees that he makes Darth Vader look like Santa Claus.
Paul and his mother (Rebecca Ferguson) are now hiding out with the Fremen, the native tribes of the planet Arrakis, including their brave leader (Javier Bardem, providing much-needed down-to-Earth joy) and a young warrior, Chani. . (Zendaya, who frowns a lot). There is a good chance that the Fremen will help Paul fight the Harkonnens, but he has to gain their trust first. And that, as you may have guessed, involves learning to ride on the back of a gigantic worm, like an illegal surfer on a train.
A strange aspect of Dune: Part Two is that Paul’s stay in the desert is the main plot of the film, although there are many subplots to compensate for it. There is some cryptic talk about blue “water of life” that looks like toilet bowl cleaner, there are some mystical visions and dream sequences, and there is some political and religious debate about whether Paul is the Messiah promised by ancient Fremen prophecies. Meanwhile, on another planet, Christopher Walken and Florence Pugh have some conversations as the galactic emperor and his daughter, with Léa Seydoux as his sly companion. And on yet another planet (I think), Austin Butler appears as a new Harkonnen villain.
Director: Denis Villeneuve.
Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Josh Brolin, Austin Butler, Florence Pugh
Duration: 2h 46m
There’s certainly a lot going on in Dune: Part Two, then, but Paul himself doesn’t do much except hang around with the Fremen, so viewers will soon understand why Luke Skywalker left Tatooine in the first hour of Star Wars: It turns out that There is only so much sand you want to look at. In a cast filled with an absurd number of the best actors in contemporary cinema, it is Butler who steals the show as a vampiric sadist with some of the buxom rocker sensuality that the actor had in Elvis – and in many ways, he is more more protagonist than Paul.
Unfortunately, no one else makes much of an impression. I mean, they make an impression, visually, because they’re so beautiful and their outfits are so dazzlingly embellished (in the future, it seems, everyone will dress like they’re Janelle Monáe at the Met Gala), but no one in Dune: Part Two is a distinctive or rounded individual.
Warner BrosVilleneuve and his co-writer, Jon Spaihts, simply don’t give any of the characters enough interesting things to say or do, despite the 166-minute running time at their disposal. The heart of the film is supposedly the romance between Paul and Chani, but it’s so underdeveloped that it’s impossible to care whether they’ll live happily ever after or not. And who knows if they will live happily ever after? Dune: Part Two brings us to the end of Herbert’s first Dune novel, but numerous plot threads are left hanging, presumably in the hope that they will be tied up in Dune: Part Three.
One might expect a big-budget space opera to excite and move one, and in those terms, Villeneuve’s sprawling, pretentious madness has to count as an abject failure. But if you want to feel amazed, that’s another question. Proudly serious and portentous, the film has so many great themes and an atmosphere so powerfully charged with doom that it more than justifies the price of a movie ticket. The alien rituals and languages are so detailed, and the otherworldly design so elaborate, that at times it really does feel like you’re looking at the product of a distant civilization. Some viewers will go crazy and leave the cinema, but others will be spellbound. Everyone will agree that it is light years away from the average Hollywood blockbuster.
In the 1970s, the visionary Alejandro Jodorowsky planned to make his own Dune movieand one of the people he employed was HR Giger, the Swiss artist who would later design Alien. His project collapsed, but parts of Dune: Part 2 seem as monumental, lavishly strange, and downright disturbing as anything Jodorowsky and Giger could have had in mind.
★★★☆☆
Dune: Part Two launches March 1.
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