Dune Part 2 (2024)
No offense, but this wasn't for me. There's way too much talent and effort and attention to detail in it for me to say it's bad, but god, am I not the audience for it.
Dune Part 2, retells the second half of Paul Atreides' crusade to drive the Harkonnen dynasty off the planet Arrakis as the leader of the Fremen, assuming the role as their prophesized messiah.
Not to be a killjoy, but productions like this are the reason people think Science-Fiction is for nerds. Dozens of wholly made up languages and cultures and traditions and fashions and machinery and not a single human emotion in the entire thing. It's honestly almost impressive. Now listen, I read the book this is based on half my lifetime ago. And as far as I can tell this movie is not strictly speaking a poor adaptation. For as much as I can remember, most of the same things happen. But its depiction of these plot beats is so mechanical and so bereft of relatable human emotion that I felt alienated all the way through.
Dune 2 is obsessed with worldbuilding. Most of its runtime is worldbuilding. To the point that it's actually jarring whenever a character expresses an intention or an emotion or anything aside from jargon laden, lore heavy exposition in English. Innumerable strange cultural and religious ceremonies are rendered in painstaking detail. There is a fairly lengthy section set on the home world of the villainous Harkonnen dynasty, whose entire aesthetic is pretty much what you get if you put "Star Wars Empire designed by H.R. Giger, photorealistic, high quality" into one of those AI image generators. It's all in black and white (implicitly diagetic because they have a black sun or something, I didn't get and I don't remember whether that was in the book or not) which is so full of compositional and editorial directorial indulgences that I started wondering, and I still do, if all Villeneuve saw in this material was a canvas to project his own visual interests onto.
Bear with me here. Some of what was interesting in the source material is still interesting here. Mainly the whole idea of how a prophecy sets its own fulfillment into motion. Honestly, it really feels like a Monkey's Paw situation. I lamented that the first Dune movie was lacking that orientalist mysticism, where Dune 2 is full of prophecies and visions and rituals but the complete lack of any humanity just turns faith into another mechanical process. Much like love is turned into a process, the relationship between Paul and his Fremen lover Chani somehow feeling less passionate than that of Anakin and Padme.
I mentioned, offhandedly, that I'm way more excited for the uncut releases of Rebel Moon than for any continuation of Dune and honestly, Dune Part 2 was nothing if not an affirmation. People, justifiedly, called out Rebel Moon's characters for being relatively straight forward archetypes, at least in the movies present release, but Dune 2's characters are mere plot devices, moved around to act out the plot of the book, relegated to an empty vehicle for Villeneuve's visual obsessions. Actually, no, let me elaborate on that. Did you ever notice how, in Villeneuve movies, people expressing emotions are presented like someone farting in church? No, hear me out. Remember that one scene in Blade Runner 2049, where K learns that he isn't a naturally born human after all and he briefly loses his composure, cursing his fate? And how it's framed in this weirdly unsympathetic, awkwardly detached way despite being the pivotal moment of his character development? Dune Part 2 is full of emotional moments that are directed almost exactly like that. In a way that alienates the viewer from the characters feelings, rather than letting them take part in them.
I started off writing this review with a verdict of "I respect its attention to detail and sophisticated visual direction but it wasn't for me." in mind but the more I wrote about it, the more I realized: I kinda hated this. Dune 2 is about what I imagine it would look like if one dark day, an AI could create a complete 3 hour movie. Visually sophisticated to the point of saturation, meticulously following the plot of a classic novel. Full of nerdy, detail obsessed world building. And devoid of any heart and soul. It's film making for people who dismiss moral clarity and human compassion in film as "woke". It's a classic story being drowned out by stylistic directorial obsessions in the same way the dreadful Hans Zimmer score (and if there's one person in the industry I wish would finally retire, it's him) is drowning out the dialogue.
Surely there's gotta be some acceptable compromise in high budget film making between Marvel "Playing to the cheap seats" glib banality and this kind of leaden, directorial indulgence. I never thought I'd be the one to stick up for populist cinema but at least I can acknowledge that something like James Cameron's Avatar movies, while much less artistic, are no less of an auteurist project, despite still maintaining accessibility. This just feels decadent. Masturbatory to the point I almost felt embarassed watching it in a theater with other people. With all due respect. Fuck this.
