Dune: Part Two

Denis Villeneuve’s screen adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic science-fiction novel Dune faced a challenging debut in 2021. Theaters were still in the grips of the pandemic, and Warner Bros. Discovery opted to release the film on its HBO Max streaming service the same day it came out in theaters, cannibalizing the box office. Despite these obstacles, the film managed to gross more than $400 million worldwide, justifying Villeneuve’s return to the desert planet of Arrakis so he could adapt the second half of the novel.

In the first movie, House Atreides had been all but wiped out by the evil Harkonnens who desire to control the universe’s most valuable commodity—spice, the psychotropic dust that makes interstellar travel possible.

Dune: Part Two picks up where the last movie left off. Paul and his mother, the Lady Jessica, have fled to Arrakis’s wasteland hoping to find sanctuary with the planet’s native inhabitants known as Fremen. The first third of the movie depicts their attempts to gain acceptance by these fiercely independent people and learn how to survive in an inhospitable terrain. When the wicked Harrkonens try to wipe out the Fremen, Paul rallies his new allies to exact revenge for the fall of House Atreides.

Most of the cast returns for this sequel. Timothée Chalamet plays Paul as a young man growing into his role as a reluctant messiah. Rebecca Ferguson is Paul’s calculating mother who wants to see him fulfill his destiny more than he does. Javier Bardem plays Stilgar, one of the Fremen leaders, and he brings some surprising comic relief to an otherwise somber franchise. Zendaya, as Paul's love interest, gets much more screen time than she did in the first installment. We also get some newcomers. Austin Butler joins the film as Feyd-Rautha, the talented, yet depraved scion of House Harkonnen. Christopher Walken plays the desperate emperor of the universe, and Florence Pugh his enigmatic daughter.

Like the first installment, Dune: Part Two, earns its PG-13 rating from scenes of war as well as up-close-and-personal violence, and bad language is pretty mild compared to similarly rated movies. Part Two includes a little more sensuality than the first film, but Villeneuve shows restraint. He includes two lovers lying together, but they’re only filmed from the neck up.

Unlike the novel, which spanned years, these movies take place over a matter of months. Villeneuve is willing to depart from his source material, but I wish he had departed a little more. The film clocks in at 166 minutes, and I think Villeneuve could have improved the pacing by cutting Austin Butler’s character from the story. Dune purists will find that suggestion heretical, but it would have made for a more cohesive film. On the whole though, Dune Part Two is a worthy follow-up to the first movie, and Villeneuve plans a third installment based on the second novel in the series to complete Paul’s story.

Dune is an epic adventure, but it’s also a morality tale with one of its main themes being the dangers of co-opting religion for political power. Paul is destined to become the Fremen messiah, but he knows the prophecies about his coming are political fabrications. He hates what he’s becoming, but he becomes it anyway. How else can he stop the Harkonnens?

Frank Herbert, who seemed suspicious of all religion, probably didn’t have Augustine of Hippo in mind when he wrote Dune, but the book’s themes resemble the fifth-century Christian bishop’s critique of human society without grace. In Dune, the elites manipulate commoners with their prophecies. Ancient Rome was the same way with the educated classes promoting a civic religion to help control the population. Augustine also says the Romans didn’t possess real virtue. Rather they merely possessed splendid vices that kept even worse wickedness in check.

Paul Atreides is cut of the same cloth, embracing his role as a dark messiah to thwart the even greater wickedness of the Harkonnens. On the graceless desert planet of Dune, vengeance is possible, but redemption is not.