Dune: Part Two is a 2024 Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures release, based on the novel ‘Dune’ by Frank Hubert and directed by Denis Villeneuve. The film stars a large cast of big-time players including Timothee Chalamet, Zendaya, Javier Bardem, Rebecca Ferguson, Florence Pugh, Austin Butler, Dave Bautista, and more. This film is an almost direct follow up to the events of Dune: Part One from 2021 and follows our central character Paul Atreides (Chalamet) uniting with the desert people, the Fremen, in an attempt to seek revenge on the Harkonnen and whoever else had to do with his destroying his people. This is a sci-fi epic with a large cast of characters and different houses and races of people, so there’s a lot of world building, lore, and different motivations to keep up with throughout. Certainly, don’t walk in to watch this without seeing Part One and expect to understand the story, hell I watched Part One again just 2 days before going to see this and still had to really pay attention to pick up on everything that was going on with all the characters. The world building, sci fi epic kind of thing is always welcome though to me and usually builds some of the densest stories and characters, take Star Wars for example, and Dune is well on its way to doing that as well. Most all of our characters belong to either the House of Atreides, the Fremen, the Harkonnens, or the Bene Gesserit and we peel back the layers of each of these tribes throughout these two movies and see their relationships with one another, their motivations, and how each of them live.
This movie was a cinematic marvel I will say, I saw this in IMAX and it was well worth the viewing on a bigger screen with more booming sound. The way it was shot was just a spectacle to look at in certain frames, a lot of the desert landscape shots were beautiful. Some of the moments were made all the more epic as well in IMAX, like the riding of the desert worm scene was intense! My seat was shaking with the sound as he dove through sand dunes on the back of a giant desert worm, I felt like I was transported there on the back of the desert worm myself. The cinematography and score of the film were both pretty awesome and magically done and did a great job at drawing you into the world and keeping your attention held. Some of my personal complaints would firstly be that this movie felt like a 2nd part in a trilogy in some of the worst ways, it didn’t answer all the questions we were left with in Part One and instead introduced more questions we are now left with until the eventual 3rd and final chapter. I don’t think I would ever just watch Dune Part Two if I was sitting down to watch a movie one night, like I could do with The Empire Strikes Back or Attack of the Clones for example and be left completely satisfied. I also wasn’t completely happy with how the Harkonnens were handled in this chapter of the story. Bautista’s Rabban, Butler’s Feyd-Rautha, and Skarsgard’s Baron felt like the embodiment of the evil in this film and were the main antagonists for Paul and the Fremen in both Part One and this, but as badass as those characters and that race of people were they didn’t necessarily feel like they were developed enough and didn’t pose as much of a threat throughout this movie as I would’ve liked them too. The Fremen kind of stayed one step ahead the entire time and I was actually really drawn to the Harkonnens story and just wanted more from that, the time spent on their planet and the duel involving Feyd-Rautha (Butler) and the prisoners from Atreides was one of my favorite shot scenes in the film. I was also not entirely drawn into Paul and Chani’s (Chalamet and Zendaya) love story either, I am drawn into both of their characters individually and think they’re both fascinating and have a lot to offer and I could even tell from Part One that that was the way their relationship was going to go, but I didn’t feel like there was maybe enough development between them to fully buy into that. They could have just stayed close friends that constantly challenged one another and it wouldn’t have changed much, if anything, to the overall script and story.
Now I know it sounds like I have beef with this movie and that’s not the case, just wanted to air out my own personal qualms within the story, but that’s not to say that I wasn’t blown away by the cinematography, the sound design, and the world building, and I was fully invested in a majority of the characters in the film as well. I can certainly see this movie making a haul come 2024 film awards season and given the critic and user ratings I think most would probably agree. Everyone from the actors, to the costume design, to the cinematographers and camera operators, to the composers who created the score delivered with A level work here. It’s almost a guarantee that if you were into Dune One that you are going to be into this, but don’t go to watch it if you have never seen the first one or even haven’t seen it in years, you’ll almost certainly have to touch up on the world of Dune to be fully brought into the story and know what is going on.
