In the Flesh: Dune Part 2

Paul “Muad’Dib” Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) hangs on the reins of a massive sandworm as it streaks through the desert, dunes collapsing in its wake like tidal waves in colorless slow-motion. Feyd Rautha Harkonnen (Austin Butler) duels an Atreides retainer in sun-bleached photo negative while masked figures like nightmarish paper cutouts from a book of Commedia Dell’Arte archetypes circle closer and closer around them. Airships like floating H. R. Giger sculpture installations bombard the mountainous walls of Sietch Tabr with fusillades of high explosive shells. Right out of the gate, Dune Part Two comes off as much more creatively mature and nuanced than its hit-or-miss predecessor. The costumes are weirder, the script is both subtler and more nuanced in its adaptational choices. Even Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV (Christopher Walken), a role traditionally about as interesting as wallpaper, is here given a light brushing of texture through his paternal love toward Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac) and his brokenhearted melancholy after having the younger man killed for reasons of cold political expediency. Even the driest parts of Herbert’s original novel, compelling in its own right but notoriously difficult to adapt, are trimmed and polished, kissed with just enough glimmer to make them shine.

Rebecca Ferguson, the highlight of Villeneuve’s first film, excels here. The decision to delay her daughter Alia’s (Anya Taylor-Joy) birth pays eerie dividends, as the awakened unborn fetus speaks to and through her with unpleasantly adult affect, lending the Lady Jessica a disturbing aura. Her cynical utilization of cultural messianic myths seeded by her order, the Bene Gesserit, among the indigenous Fremen comes off as deeply chilling, a hideous analogue to contemporary American instrumentalization of religious tensions and fundamentalism at home and abroad. Paul’s resistance to this manufactured destiny gives Chalamet a lot to chew on, and he acquits himself admirably, especially in his action scenes. His duel with Feyd Rautha is a beautiful piece of choreography, the tension of it really improved by Paul’s serious injury, the knife sticking out of him like the spear that pierced Christ’s side. There’s a frisson of horror to it all, a sense of this young man, ultimately still a boy in many ways, giving himself up to cultural and maternal pressures he can’t understand, making himself a conduit for unimaginable violence in order to exercise even the illusion of control over his own existence.

There are things I don’t love going on here, to be sure. Gurney Halleck’s (Josh Brolin) vendetta against Rabban Harkonnen (Dave Bautista) is pretty much a wet fart start to finish, an attempt to mine a meaningful subplot out of two mediocre lines. I’m still not sold on Hans Zimmer’s guitar-heavy score. Baron Harkonnen’s (Stellan Skarsgård) fat suit remains a failure of makeup and imagination, making him look more like a potato than a fat person. But even then, his death scene is wonderfully abject, the image of his body swarming with flies in the desert shocking and inhuman. And the good stuff, man, it makes it easy to forget these fleeting weaknesses. Zendaya and Chalamet have excellent chemistry, and she’s so genuine and sincere as Chani, a performance supported by Villeneuve’s decision to make her his foil instead of his native love interest. Javier Bardem is equal parts affecting and hilarious as Stilgar, whose excited hiss of “the Mahdi is too humble to admit he’s the Mahdi — even more proof that he is the Mahdi!” feels like something straight out of Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Dune’s second half is a real joy, full of breakneck momentum, sensual pleasures, and exciting design.