Dune: Part Two—The System Makes Monsters

 Let’s start back in 2021, before the Warner Brothers logo. A black screen. Silence. Silence broken by a brief observation in the ominous battle language of the Emperor of the Known Universe’s Sardaukar warriors:

 “Dreams are messages from the deep.”

Throughout Dune: Part One, Denis Villeneuve’s gorgeous, grand-scale adaptation of the opening hunk of Frank Herbert’s big-deal-to-this-day novel, young protagonist Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) grapples with disturbing, near-prophetic dreams. While his friend and mentor Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa) tries to counsel Paul that “everything important happens when we’re awake,” the Atreides’ ill-fated venture on Arrakis only proves the opposite to Paul. Narrowly escaping a ruthless coup spearheaded by the Atriedes’ longtime nemeses in House Harkonnen, Paul and his mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) are further tormented by the death of Paul’s father and Jessica’s partner Leto (Oscar Isaac)—knowledge that cranks Paul’s visions up to even more disturbing heights. And when Duncan gives his life to ensure Paul and Jessica’s escape from the Harkonnens and their Sardaukar allies—perishing exactly like Paul had foreseen he would, Paul starts taking the dreams not as what might be, but what will be. 

 For Paul, his visions are not messages. They’re a system. Like Leto’s plan to win Arrakis’ indigenous Fremen communities to his side through mutual respect and honoring treaties. Like the Harkonnen’s brutality-brutality-and-more-brutality approach to power, interpersonal relationships, and dinner guest policy. Like the eons-long-intrigues of the secretive Bene Gesserit sisterhood. Like the Imperium itself. Dune: Part One closes with Paul embracing this, following the path his visions have laid out—he and Jessica join the Fremen, that together they might overthrow the Harkonnens, reclaim Arrakis, and avenge the Atreides.

 With Dune: Part Two, Villeneuve and his creative collaborators play this for awesome in the awe sense spectacle and moral horror. It’s thrilling, it’s well-performed (in certain cases downright stupendously performed), and it’s impressively, committedly bleak for a big, bombastic blockbuster. By my read, the creative team build that bleakness by exploring the myriad ways that systems (religions, governments, family codes, and more fantastically precognizance) strip people of their humanity and then weaving that inhumanity into the increasing scale of Dune: Part Two’s action.

 Take, for instance, the wicked na-Baron Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler, who steals the show and currently stands as 2024’s Cinematic Villain to Beat)—the sadistic heir to House Harkonnen. The Harkonnens live by a deliver-or-suffer code so severe that retaliation has become both routine and spectacle (hop back to Part One, where it wasn’t enough for Stellan Skarsgård’s Baron Vladimir Harkonnen to overthrow Leto and reveal that his beloved partner and son are dead before executing him—no, Leto had to be naked and Vlad had to indulge in a gargantuan meal pillaged from the Atreides’ kitchens). It’s not enough to execute the survivors of House Atreides, no their gladiatorial deaths at Feyd-Rautha’s hands are a birthday present, celebrated with cheering and inkblot fireworks (a black-and-white sequence that stands out as the strongest moment of a consistently gorgeous film). On his own, Feyd-Rautha would be a murderous, rapacious creep. In a family that builds everything on overwhelming viciousness, he’s continually pushed to become worse. The teeny, tiny sparks of something vaguely resembling decency’s estranged third cousin (his physical courage in battle and genuine—if sneering—respect for worthy foes) stand out for having survived a family creed that reduces its adherents to willing brutes.

 Alternatively, consider the protagonists—Jessica and Paul. To survive and protect Paul, Jessica embraces the path her fellow Bene Gesserit seeded in civilizations across the galaxy, playing the part of the messiah’s mother—even as she progressively alienates herself from the very son she’s giving everything for by twisting the community he has joined and fallen in love with from his peers to his devotees.

 And Paul? To avenge his father and overthrow the merciless system that demanded he die for being widely loved, he fights the good fight as best he can. He learns from and joins the Fremen. He falls deeply in love with Chani (Zendaya)—first seen as a dream, and then known as his mentor in the Fremen, his friend, his confidante, and his beloved. And it’s not enough. Not for the kind of win he wants. That sort of victory only lies by casting aside his own humanity and playing the part that was written (not necessarily for him, but he’s perfectly suited to play it). He’ll have to stop learning from his dreams and start following them—and not in the “shoot for the moon, even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars” sense. All to seize control of the system. After all, like Virginia Madsen’s Princess Irulan said several adaptations of Dune previously, the Spice must flow. Or, to paraphrase the Sardaukar narrator who kicks off Part Two’s pre-opening titles, “Control over Spice is control over all.”

The cost will be terrible, and Paul pays it anyway. By the time he and Feyd-Rautha face off, Paul’s gone all in. He’ll love Chani forever—but he’s cut away much of why she loves him. He’ll avenge his father—but reduce the whole of his life to his death, that he might become a religious artifact. He’ll bring the Fremen the paradise they’ve worked so long for—but he’ll twist them more than Jessica. It’s telling that, of the two duellists in Dune: Part Two’s climactic knife fight, Feyd-Rautha—who is, to be clear, about as vile as vile gets—comes across as the more human of the two in a few specific ways.

 The duel is as much a clarification after a series of deliberately escalating action set pieces as it is a piece of strong, character-based action choreography (courtesy of The Paper Tigers’ Roger Yuan). Dune: Part Two’s massive set pieces reflect not only the scale of the immediate conflict, but the scale of that conflict’s impact. These are battles that shake the very foundation of an empire. Paul and Feyd-Rautha’s duel zooms back to the human, to what remains once all is said and done and that one Shelley poem seems apropos.

Dune: Part Two's a heck of a piece of work, the sort of idiosyncratic blockbuster filmmaking that, beyond the thrills of its craft and performance, thrills by its existence and the existence of the care that was put into it. It demands to be seen.