As director Denis Villeneuve likes to remind us, "Dune is a tragedy."
Frank Herbert's celebrated 1965 sci-fi novel is set some 20,000 years in the future. Human civilisation has collapsed, only to be reborn as an intergalactic feudal society ruled by a constellation of royal planets all vying for the favour of the machiavellian emperor.
Not quite the kind of near-future timeframe that is the usual preserve of science fiction but for all the remoteness of a far-flung universe, the heraldic tale of flawed and conflicted hero Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) is the oldest story in the known universe. And boy, is Dune a tragedy.
Villeneuve’s gobsmacking Dune Part One was all talky and impressionistic exposition, setting the scene for a universe of the mysterious witchy sisterhood the Bene Gesserit, warring noble families, giant sandworms, instantaneous space travel and trippy visions. It was a world-building space opera of unparalleled dimensions.
That pent-up energy explodes into full, vivid life in this formidable second half. But amid all the brilliantly mounted action pieces, Dune Part Two is a sombre and sinister affair.
It teems with menace and earnestness, almost to the point of bombast but Villeneuve, a fan of the book since he was a boy growing up in Quebec, also manages to capture on screen the twitchy and paranoid tale at the heart of Herbert’s monumental novel.
Two years after Dune Part One fared far better at the box office (and the Oscars) than even the director dared to hope, we are dropped like a floating Sardaukar warrior back into the vertiginous world of Arrakis and almost immediately the darkness descends.
Shrouded in desert mysticism and arcane utterances, Villeneuve again takes his visual cues from the likes of Lawrence of Arabia (a noted influence on Herbert’s novel) and even Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ for a sense of brutal future realism.
The noble House Atreides has been duped by the calculating Emperor into taking over the desert planet, much to the petulant chagrin of House Harkonnen, a renegade royal house with black blood and a talent for casual murder, headed by the corpulent mass of flesh that is Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård).
He executes a coup that leaves most of House Atreides butchered but the aristocratic Duke Paul and his mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) have escaped into the boundless desert and inveigled their way into the good favours of the mysterious and dangerous natives, the Fremen, a nomadic people led by Stilgar, played again by a lugubrious Javier Bardem.
From here Dune Part Two takes off as a full-blooded action movie with an even more sprawling cast and, perhaps with his eye on that crucial teen audience, Villeneuve focuses on the romance between Paul and young Fremen woman Chani (a flinty Zendaya).
However, an expanded cast means far more players on the chessboard and even as Villeneuve sheds some of the intricacies of the novel, character development tends to suffer. Emperor Shaddam Corrino IV (Christopher Walken, sulking his way through most of short time he’s on screen) and his crafty daughter Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh) barely make an impression and even Paul and Chani’s pivotal romance seems inert and rarely fleshed out.
Josh Brolin’s scowling imperial enforcer Gurney Helleck is back and pricks the pomposity with some well-aimed one-liners and even at one point a song (a jaunty little number on oud with the lyric, "His stillsuit is full of piss…"), while blink and you’ll miss 'em appearances from Anya Taylor-Joy and Léa Seydoux leave their own lingering mystique.
Villeneuve keeps the book’s myriad moving parts pumping with sheer force of will and jolts of pure adrenalin. He cuts from close-up intimacies of the leads (ah, so that’s how you kiss while wearing a stillsuit) and spectacular pitched battles. One minute we are studying faces in extreme closeup, trying to divine their innermost thoughts, the next we are looking at distant figures dwarfed by the Monument Valley vastness of Arrakis.
Chalamet as the aristocrat turned desert messiah certainly grows into the role as he grapples with a destiny that clearly appals him. He is destined for a cosmic reckoning with the hated Harkonnens but he knows his taste for revenge (an unthinkable motive for something as chivalrous as, say, a Jedi knight) must have been encoded by the genetic manipulation of those pesky Bene Gesserit nuns.
However, it is Austin Butler as intergalactic villain Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen who turns the sand to glass here. A black-toothed albino with alopecia and a deeply unnerving fetish for outlandish looking knives, he radiates menace and a talent for casual butchery that makes the bloated baron look reasonable.
Even those giant worms - as big as a jumbo jet and just as loud - that caused so much eyerolling and tittering in David Lynch’s bonkers but hugely entertaining 1984 Dune adaptation, come to ferocious life and the HR Geiger-like hardware clanks and whirrs out in the desert as the Fremen wage an increasingly effective guerrilla war against the enemy.
It is a truth universally acknowledged in science fiction that The Empire Strikes Back is the best Star Wars movie and so it is with Dune Part Two. It’s better than the first one but do we get a third chapter? According to reports, Villeneuve has already began writing an adaptation of Dune Messiah, Herbert’s sequel in which Paul isn’t just the messiah, he’s also a very naughty boy.
For now, the new Dune reaches a fever pitch of seductive strangeness and operatic drama. It’s a tragedy about the dangers of power and fanatism, a romance, and a superb action movie. Villeneuve’s audacious vision has set a new standard for the cinematic sci-fi epic.
Alan Corr @CorrAlan2
Dune 2 is in cinemas on Friday, 1 March
