Denis Villeneuve has a way with dread. The opening of his Oscar-nominated 2010 drama, Incendies, surveys a room full of child soldiers having their heads shaved for battle, a Kubrickian homage with a queasy mix of empathy and exploitation, scored by an anxious Radiohead anthem. Such sinister showmanship is the French Canadian filmmaker’s stock-in-trade, and since crossing over from Quebec to Hollywood, he’s applied his slow-burn methodology to bigger and bigger projects with mostly impressive results. The effectiveness of accomplished midrange thrillers like Prisoners and Sicario lies in their sense of steadily encroaching evil—the feeling that, no matter how bad things are getting, there’s something worse around the corner. Switching to sci-fi for Arrival and Blade Runner 2049 meant inflating the bad vibes to apocalyptic extremes. And if there’s a common denominator between Villeneuve’s two Dune movies—the second of which arrives slightly later than expected due to the SAG-AFTRA strikes—it’s their mix of tactile majesty and ambient, free-floating menace. Martin Scorsese once compared the MCU films to a theme park ride; at nearly three carefully distended hours, Dune: Part Two feels more like a funeral procession. Inertia creeps, moving up slowly.
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The morbidity is baked into the material. Frank Herbert’s source novels were styled as allegories of sky-is-falling Cold War geopolitics, with anti-imperialist critiques and barely sublimated eco-horror themes. George Lucas made the original Star Wars in thrall to Dune; his achievement was effectively to depoliticize his predecessor’s ideologically loaded form of space opera. What Star Wars added to the equation was, well, a new hope—one that hybridized Herbert’s despairing vision with the circumspect, all-American heroism of old Westerns and gee-whiz serials, cute anthropomorphic robots, and Han Solo as a walking one-liner dispenser. The closest thing Dune has to Han Solo is Josh Brolin’s sardonic Gurney Halleck, a roughneck who doesn’t exactly have a lot of competition on Arrakis as the resident cutup.
As one of the more solemn A-list filmmakers around, Villeneuve is temperamentally suited to this assignment. He’s the perfect tenant for such a jagged and cavernous intellectual property—a filmmaker more interested in reverence than renovation. He’s not liable to impose a personal vision like Alejandro Jodorowsky or David Lynch, whose reward for sweltering in Mexico for six months with Sting was a blank check to make the passion project that turned out to be Blue Velvet. Lynch’s Dune looks, in retrospect, like a noble failure, as well as an inspiring parable of the one-for-you, one-for-me variety. Villeneuve’s track record of box office and critical excellence means he exercises near-total control over both the selection and execution of his films, which is why it’s interesting—and a little disconcerting—that he seems content to remain a cog in the Dune machine. The genuine daring of his embarking on Part One without the guarantee of a sequel has shifted into a cozier sort of caretaking; after the movie grossed nearly half a billion dollars at the height of a global pandemic, he’ll get as many kicks at the can as he wants. Hence Part Two’s decidedly and defiantly open ending, which, for those keeping score at home, makes two strategic anticlimaxes in a row.
By way of recap: When we last saw the slender Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), he was hiding out in the remotest, most sandworm-infested regions of Arrakis with his pregnant mother, Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), after their aristocratic bloodline, including Paul’s father, Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac), was all but wiped out in a sneak attack masterminded by the conquest-driven Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard). Villeneuve’s decision at the end of Part One to cut off Paul’s story just as he was becoming indoctrinated in the Sunni-coded warrior sect known as the Fremen—delaying his prophesied evolution from a callow princeling to a revolutionary firebrand—was on one level an acknowledgment of the series’ epic scope. But it was also a canny commercial consideration. In an era of franchise overload, Part One’s relative reticence was refreshing: It actually left audiences wanting more.
How those viewers will feel when Part Two devotes so much of its first act to a form of doomy, slow-motion stasis is another question. Having done the hard work of world-building in the first installment, Villeneuve initially seems content to sort of just hang out amid the wreckage. The sequel opens with a tersely satisfying action set piece—a sunblasted skirmish between a group of Harkonnen henchmen and Paul’s not-so-merry band of Fremen associates, whose struggles against their more heavily armed adversaries are secondary to the ongoing conflict with their environment (although they’ve learned how to use their home turf to their advantage). Villeneuve is always good at gory details, and scenes where the Fremen literally drain the corpses of comrades and rivals alike for liquid resources have an icky, clinical fascination; the revelation of a reservoir filled with such recycled bodily fluids approaches a sort of mordant poetry.
The Fremen are led by the soulful, battle-tested mystic Stilgar (Javier Bardem), who projects moral authority but still has some convincing to do about the white boy he’s taken under his wing. Specifically, he has to sell the idea that Paul, once properly radicalized, might grow up to be a mythic savior. Less ambivalent—and yet even more anxiously invested—is Chani (Zendaya), Paul’s potential lover and an emblem of her people’s wary regard for the ostensibly noble “Great Houses” that hover, literally and figuratively, over their resource-rich stomping grounds. This malevolent and capricious ruling class gets plenty of screen time in the form of returning characters like Harkonnen, a gelatinous grotesque given to submerging in oil baths, and the veiled kingmaker Gaius Helen Mohiam (Charlotte Rampling). New players include Austin Butler as Harkonnen’s cruel combat-fetishist nephew, Feyd-Rautha (floated by his uncle as a potential successor); Florence Pugh as Princess Irulan (a key player left out of Part One); and her father, Shaddam IV, a galactic emperor played endearingly and inevitably by Christopher Walken with the self-parodying shtick of one of his SNL sketches.
To say this is a vast and charismatic ensemble is an understatement, and we haven’t even gotten to Léa Seydoux as a seductive and manipulative secret agent. If Villeneuve errs on the side of giving his actors stuff to do, his instincts are in the right place: Everybody here is talented and deserves screen time. But the characters are so instrumentalized by the demands of the plot—especially in its long, relentlessly crosscut midsection—that the actors feel marginalized, even when they’re supposed to be on display. Exhibit A would be Butler, who’s been duly hyped and given a properly demonic look (think Billy Corgan circa Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness plus a six-pack and minus eyebrows). Feyd-Rautha first shows up in a brutal and memorable monochrome gladiatorial sequence styled for maximum eyeball-searing impact. The problem is that the character doesn’t have anywhere to go from there, and neither does Butler. He cuts a menacing figure with a serpentine smile—and he does a mean Skarsgard impression—but that’s about it.
As for the leads, Chalamet remains deceptively well-cast in a part that leverages his heartthrob status against more ambiguous qualities, while Ferguson bristles with just the right sphinxlike stoicism. (In this world, women are manipulative, impeccably dressed enigmas who exist to skeptically prod male worthiness.) There’s just enough thorniness in Paul and Jessica’s mother-son relationship to keep their scenes sharp, but they also have a surfeit of downtime: Both are subject to rituals that literally knock them out of commission for scenes at a time. These trials underline the physical and psychic perils of the Duneverse, which pushes even its powerful inhabitants to their limits. But the pileup of scenes depicting convalescence has another effect: It adds to the sense of a massive, formidable movie unable to get rolling, the cinematic equivalent of a Shai-Hulud stuck in neutral.
Such heavy-bottomed megatonnage is, on some level, an achievement in and of itself. Villeneuve’s recent comments about distrusting dialogue and wanting to make a silent movie are borne out by the eloquence of his best images (and unfortunately by his occasional struggles to make exposition interesting). When it comes to pure architectural or textural spectacle, Villeneuve may even be the equal of his spiritual predecessor Ridley Scott, with whom he shares an innate gift for conveying scale and building sequences for both spatial coherence and narrative tension. (When Paul proves his mettle by shanghaiing a passing sandworm, it’s pure white-knuckle kineticism.) As an artist, he’s also as hard to peg as Sir Ridley, whose hypnotic eye as a filmmaker belies the question of actual perspective—of what he sees in his material and whether it’s more than the simple promise of another project (or paycheck).
This has not always been the case. If you were to go back beyond Incendies to Villeneuve’s absurdist French-language breakthrough Maelstrom, you’d discover a wacky and gratifyingly eccentric mash-up of myth and modernity, with some palpably personal storytelling flourishes. (The story is narrated by a dying fish, a choice inspired by the director’s battle with trout-inflicted food poisoning.) The director’s haunting true-crime drama Polytechnique, about the notorious 1989 Montreal massacre, undeniably imitated Gus Van Sant’s Palme d’Or–winning Elephant, but it was also the work of an inventive, experimental artist with something at stake. Even a short like the award-winning Next Floor—about a luxurious gourmet banquet gone awry—manifested as a knowing commentary on conspicuous consumption, angled slyly against the powers that be.
But for all its very real shock and awe, Dune: Part Two is ultimately too one-note to register as a trenchant commentary on real-world affairs, past or present. The Harkonnens are surely colonial bad guys but in a cartoony, indirect way, while the presentation of the Fremen as easily swayed religious fundamentalists is more about keeping the plot moving than interrogating dogma. Yes, the story is dark, but not in any particularly complex ways; its grimness is more like a factory setting. It’s a strange paradox that the bulkier Villeneuve’s movies get, the less gravitas they have. Not only that, but by burrowing so deeply into Herbert’s vision, he risks disappearing completely. Villeneuve’s directorial “touches” here don’t seem to have been made by human hands; it’s more like auteurism by algorithm. An existential question: What does a movie directed by a replicant look like?
This may all seem a little churlish for a movie that’s currently breaking Rotten Tomatoes records and is likely to clean up at the box office. As a feat of project management, Dune: Part Two is undeniable. But given how fundamentally bizarre the world of Dune is—or should be—critical consensus seems like an odd goal. Shouldn’t it be weirder? Villeneuve’s movie features so many sterling components—Greig Fraser’s drably elegant cinematography, Joe Walker’s shivery editing, Hans Zimmer’s wailing score—that it could be taken for a masterpiece, and yet its perfection is more dutiful than exhilarating. There’s definitely more story to be told, and while Villeneuve has proved himself as the right guy to tell it, it’d be nice to think (or imagine) that a filmmaker hailed for his consistency still has some surprises up his sleeve. Until then, the wait for Part Three, however long, will be steeped in ambiguous feelings—not quite dread, but not exactly excitement, either.
Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.