Dune: Part Two Review
Sand gets everywhere, much like fanaticism.
Please let me preface this review by saying SPOILERS, for god’s sake, spoilers, for both book and film.
“Lisan al Gaib!’
That will be heard. Let me say, that will be heard. Director Denis Villeneuve has doubled down on the apparently connected themes of rampant fundamentalism and troubled women in his adaptation, rather tellingly of the times we live in in terms of his choice to pursue them with such abandon. Bene Gesserit witches connive the hell out of everything they sniff, as is their way, but Chani and Jessica’s characters are unceremoniously kicked out of their literary molds and placed as more contentious foils to protagonist Paul Atreides, and you will hear ‘Lisan al Gaib’, shockingly breathed at Paul whenever he does anything from beat somebody up to letting out a wet fart.
Why not? He is pursuing his vision for the story. But is his vision spice-laced? I challenge him!
It’s admittedly difficult for me to review Dune: Part Dos, simply because I am unsure of what constitutes fair criticism of a film which essentially had it’s entire story spoiled by that pesky Frank Herbert publishing the story decades ago.
I sat in the theatre waiting for x to happen and wondering why y wasn’t, which might not be the best posture for a filmic experience.
Yet, having my pants almost literally blown off in the cinema by, say, The Lord of the Rings, with damned-great prior knowledge of what takes place, gives me even greater cause to pause and leads me to query as to why one figuratively blows and the other, figurately… blows.
However, let me just say that I enjoyed Dune: Part Two.
I am fairly sure that in several months time I’ll watch it again and have a perfectly solid experience, as was the case with Dune the First. Both times I left the cinema half-bemused, half-pleased by a strange telling of a very complex story.
But the crux is whether either Dune will recess into the B-tier ‘fun’ of history as opposed to lodging itself deeper into my core cortex of artistic and personal significance, much like the A-tier Lord of the Rings films so rightly did. It’s difficult to say, but something tells me it may be the former.
Now, I do rather hate to make a link to the Star Wars sequels, but it serves a purpose to do so: there we also find sheer excellence in visual presentation accompanied by strange, slacking storytelling.
I’ll say it plain. Dune: Number Two’s storytelling is quite ham-fisted.
Can I be sure, seeing as I already knew the effing story? I feel a bit like the Kwizatz Haderach, prescient and detached, yet shaken to the core by events out of my control.
…No, I still think it’s ham-fisted and I’ll dive into why presently.
The second half of Dune the book is quite odd. Much of the story features Paul as a distant, mythical figure, as we see the effects of his actions ripple throughout the (higher) strata of known universal society.
Who is Muad’dib? What on earth is happening on Arrakis? (as it were) etc.
Contrast this with the first half of the book, which follows Paul’s life closely; describing supporting characters, the changeover of power on Arrakis and the subsequent betrayal of House Atreides, before Paul and Jessica’s trials in the desert and encountering the Fremen.
Dune: Part One wrestled with the weight of exposition necessary to fill everyone in and a desire for relatable characters and plot development. I think it handled this quite well, though not perfectly.
Making the characters more relatable meant deviation from the source material; it made them less the humans ten thousand years better off in the evolutionary competition, trained from birth to have unnerving levels of physical and mental control, educated to frightening degrees and in charge of an entire planet; more scrappy, lucky, and miraculous.
Paul can somehow coerce action through his voice, and yet Villeneuve choice to reveal this incredible feat via a friendly breakfast table and by having Paul asking his mother to top up his glass.
This briefly explains why, when extrapolated, I think Villeneuve’s Dune saga will be the hot thing of the moment, quite rightly, but in time it will fade to a lesser rank of greatness than it could have achieved, due to this vein of flaws; it doesn’t try to explore the complex themes of the book, despite the fact that the story depends on them, instead diverting to unbalanced and unsupported narratives.
We have Villenueve repeatedly banging us over the head with the message of the relative bizarreness of fundamentalism and wielding Jessica and Chani as ironically blunt story instruments, in a serious shift away from the book; these contrivances are ironically fundamental to the story of Dune 2, the removal of which would render it’s story inert.
Characters are reduced to caricatures in Villeneuve’s style-over-substance, plot-over-story approach, which is somewhat of a hamstringing when dealing with such rich source material as Dune to say the least. Paul is nice then nasty. Chani cares then hates. Stilgar is the fundamental guy. Jessica is bonkers and evil. Baron is angry, wants money and power and…
You see what I mean? Perhaps for the uninitiated, this is sufficient, experiencing all this crap for the first time as they are. It is spectacular to be fair. Yet ‘sufficient’ does not rise to greatness.
So what actually happens?
The Dune: Part the Two’s script runs headfirst into Act Two of the Dune book… which, from Paul and Chani’s perspective, basically recounts three years passing, with: Paul repeatedly kicking Harkonnen ass; training Fremen; having a child, and then we have the finale. We don’t really see him much when he isn’t quivering about drinking Shai-Hulud’s death-piss (the water of life) or engaging in a spice orgy. (Look it up. Look it all up.)
Yet this decision from Frank Herbert is fascinating from a literary perspective, as the medium allows and thrives on a deep dive into the thoughts of an interesting selection of characters. Everybody is sincerely shaken by Paul and it’s quite gratifying after the events of the first half to pivot away from him and follow the perpetrators shitting their space-clothes as a result of his rise.
One senses the film feels compelled to follow Paul more closely, and attempts to prop up this narrative hollow by bending story features to it’s will, namely, the aforementioned fixation with fundamentalism and trouble with the two most important women in Paul’s life.
How else could they create enough drama to make the film work?
How indeed.
There we have the problem, and one can argue that simply because Villeneuve chose to change the book shows an issue with his version, though that would be pure fundamentalism; and that’s a problem, right?
A more sophisticated criticism would ask why it’s a problem.
It’s a problem because the changes Villeneuve makes don’t make sense.
This is not surprising considering it’s a storyline which hinges on precision in complexity and features characters that are inherently remarkable. It isn’t as simple as saying the film’s protagonist decided to go The Red Lion pub instead of the book’s The King’s Arms, and I’ll explain why it isn’t merely quibbling.
Take the fundamentalism for an example, and as a solid starting point. Not only is it boringly repetitive, but the narrative support required for this dramatic tension doesn’t add up because the whole point of the strength of the Fremen is that they’re united — they share water, and withstand decades of genocidal war. How can this be if their entire world is split between North and South and holds such vastly opposing beliefs? Even Stilgar’s sietch is shown to have festering division! It doesn’t make any sense. Story points have to be supported, logical and have symmetry with reality, if they are to register as ‘true’ in our minds and thence to hit us in the narrative gut.
This contrivance becomes diluted quickly as it doesn’t have legs, and because of that, the story the script tries to weave through it becomes repetitive and wasteful - much unlike the Fremen.
Stilgar is reduced to a parrot, demoted to giddily sighing “Lisan al Gaib” at Paul every few minutes. I found it all somewhat amusing but ultimately it was one-note and contrived. These people are smarter than this, more united, which is why they’re so dangerous, and ironically, ultimately beyond Paul’s control (which is the point in the book).
Moving to Chani, her arc is connected to the fundamentalist controversy, which reveals its spreading narrative infection, as she is set up to react to this manufactured issue.
Now, similarly, I take issue with this source of drama because I found her criticism of Paul to be incredibly selfish in the face of the threat that she is shown to be well aware of; namely, that if Paul doesn’t ascend in power, the Fremen will be wiped out. Her narrow-mindedness is regurgitated as supposedly independent thinking which nonetheless doesn’t address the very real problems facing her people. This, too, is built upon the fundamentalist narrative weakness, which vainly paints Paul’s blossoming into prescient leader as somehow inherently bad.
Moving on to Jessica; again, her character simply orbits around the obsession with exploitative fundamentalist belief, but is reduced to a cartoon villain to serve the need for a message of an overly-loud theme.
Her personality stinks in a simplistic way, only worsening as the story ‘develops,’ into facile malevolent jelly, as with Paul, when drinking the water of life. She is then seemingly possessed by her foetus and takes to staring at people menacingly to get them to do what she wants, and this significant character diversion isn’t explained at all.
It’s startling, but I think, quite stupid. None of this is justified, and on the contrary, what we’ve seen of Jessica previously has shown her to be extremely resourceful and loyal and with stupendous levels of self-control, and while at times conflicted, she is shown to have a good conscience and a sense of accountability.
All this is wiped-out in a plot-jihad of epic proportions at the behest of the THEME(S).
We watch, in Dune 2, Paul doing many of the things we vaguely heard about in the book, and the reason why we didn’t is that it’s boring to hear about the umpteenth spice harvester get wrecked. Author Frank Herbert knew that the grinding minutiae of an attritional guerilla war would become tiresome quickly, instead focusing on the personalities of such terrifying influence who ordered the movement of planetary players.
We don’t see spice orgies (boo!), we don’t delve into the quantum psycho-real depths of spice-induced mind expansion, we don’t get Chani having Paul’s baby, and sadly (SPOILERS, I WARNED YOU) losing that baby to the war, we don’t have Jessica attuning to Fremen life and the central three characters sharing loving, through at times, strained, relationships. Instead, we get artificial drama.
One can argue that the ‘downfall’ of Paul into Messianic leader is the payoff of the much-harkened approaching tidal wave of fanatic bell-ringing, but: what would be different, even if there wasn’t such a negative air of gloom about it?
Paul has to ultimately choose whether to defeat the authorities arrayed against him via his leadership of a superstitious people, regardless of ‘umm-ing’ and ‘ah-ing’ about fundamentalism - it makes no difference to their cause whatsoever. Indeed, his decision to do so is actually heroic, pitted against the dread he experiences when seeing the future. This is the great idea of the book; the pain of doing the right thing, or rather, the unimaginable pain of not doing the right thing, because for Paul, not to take control would be unbearable, as it would destroy everything he holds dear.
This includes himself, and the rejection of leading the individual will to survive into darkness, a very anti-human instinct, which is juxtaposed and compared with the roaring holy war which would shake up the universe’s human composition, to say the least.
There is the conflict, the drama; it’s an interstellar, metaphysical, DNA-level war in physics and philosophy — not Jessica staring at kids and Chani complaining that her boyfriend is trying to save literally everyone.
The film paints Paul’s campaign as drenched in selfishness and manipulation, and all the good people, except Chani, are slaves to it. Does she want everyone to die? Can no-one communicate or reflect in this film? Didn’t Paul mention to Chani beforehand that he’d be marrying the Princess in order to take the throne?
Or did he not see that one coming?
So, ultimately, by fiddling with the narrative algebra of such a cohesively written work, Villeneuve cheapens it’s original power and replaces it with something which sits awkwardly in a posture of broken pieces, in order to pursue his personal preference of an imprinted message.
Anytime someone adapts a good, sound work with their reservations, at the cost of the original’s integrity, it leads to failure, because you can’t change some of it without changing all of it.
Think of a tight story as like a bent bowstring; it’s logic is the consistency and tension. If you tweak it — SNAP.
To conclude, the greatness of the film, which is no doubt there, belongs to the book. Despite a lamentable narrative unbalancing, the iconic nature of the source material shines, and it’s what makes Dune The Two the phenomenon it is. I enjoyed it. Man, its Dune for god’s sake.
Beautiful sets, great music, stunning effects, it’s there. I liked the experience very much.
But those are all one-to-one, simple description to visual representation. Story is where this has failed to hit the mark of what could have been. It could have been great.
Feyd-Rautha was great. Basically, all the actors were good or very good.
Only storytelling it’s truly the hardest thing to get right - no offense to the set designers, musicians, visual effects teams, etc., as they do a great job.
But the problem with story-writing is that the tempting personal possibilities make it very dangerous; you can so easily think you’re doing the right thing when actually you’re drifting off-course. Visuals on the other hand, and, to a degree, therefore, sound, are fairly simple to conceptualize (though difficult to manifest) when they’re so well described.
I mention the Star Wars sequels, The Hobbit trilogy. The technical nature of both sets of films is beyond reproach, but the stories…
When making fiction, the characters and events of the book should feel rebellious, independent and strong, and the creator should be accountable to them. When one begins to act as a dictator to the story, it goes awry, and that’s what happened with Dune.
So, Denis Villeneuve was not the Kwizitz Haderach Emperor to Frank Herbert’s narrative, and his foibles were not conducive to it’s integrity, which should be no surprise. His revolution has failed - his people, unfortunately, decimated. But, the material he rode on like a phat sandworm remains, and that’s why I enjoyed Dune: Part Two and why it’s doing so very well, and will rightly continue to do so - at least for the moment.
