Denis Villeneuve completes Frank Herbert's first novel. The most visually disciplined blockbuster of the 2020s.
Following the fall of House Atreides, Paul and his pregnant mother Jessica are taken in by the Fremen. Paul learns the desert. He rides a sandworm. Stilgar's tribe begins to recognise him as the Lisan al-Gaib — the off-world prophet promised by religious legend. Paul resists; Jessica accelerates. The Emperor and Baron Harkonnen converge on Arrakis to crush a Fremen uprising they don't yet understand the scale of.
By the film's end, Paul has drunk the Water of Life, declared his claim to the Imperial throne, and ridden out at the head of a holy war that will, in Herbert's novels, kill 61 billion people across the galaxy.
Greig Fraser's cinematography on Dune: Part Two is the visual high-water mark of 2020s blockbuster filmmaking. The Giedi Prime sequences — shot on infrared 65mm and presented in monochrome — are the most formally ambitious choice in mainstream cinema since Skyfall's Shanghai sequence. The Arrakis vistas are wide, patient, unhurried. Villeneuve's instinct is to hold a frame.
Hans Zimmer's score, again written for a custom orchestra including instruments built for the project, is darker and more rhythmic than Part One's. The Sietch sequences carry their own sonic vocabulary.
Frank Herbert wrote Dune (1965) partly in reaction to Lawrence of Arabia — to argue that messianic figures are dangerous, that prophecy is engineered, that the people who follow such figures are being used. Villeneuve makes that argument explicit in a way Part One could not. Chani (Zendaya), upgraded to second lead, becomes the audience's sceptical anchor. The film closes on her watching Paul ride off to war.
This is unusual for a $190m blockbuster. Most franchise filmmaking is invested in the heroism of its lead. Dune: Part Two ends with the lead drinking poison, becoming what he previously feared, and ordering a religious war. The film does not soften that.
Twelve minutes of screen time. Almost no dialogue. Practical sand work in Wadi Rum, CG worm work from Industrial Light & Magic, IMAX cameras moving across desert ridges. It is, sequence-for-sequence, the most ambitious set piece in big-budget science fiction since the asteroid chase in Empire Strikes Back.