Dune 2: Destiny and missed opportunities - a review
In science fiction, Dune towers over everything else. Paul Atreides, the unwilling hero who has greatness thrust upon him, the water-starved Fremen, spice (Frank Herbert was definitely psychedelically experienced; I mean it was the 60’s), sandworms—these are iconic shards of fiction. The novel is rich in themes: the perils of fulfilling your destiny, environmentalism, colonialism, the preference for mind over matter, the dangers of fanatic belief. Frank Herbert masterfully combined these elements in a world both utterly believable and fantastical. This complexity is where movie adaptations have long struggled, struggling to pick which themes of Dune must be emphasised.
Dune (2021) was a fresh attempt at adapting science fiction's Mount Everest by one of this century's finest directors. The sense of scale was great, things felt epic, and I could almost feel the heat of the Arrakis sand. But the movie wasn’t self-contained. It meandered, dragged, and limped to a conclusion that left the audience with zero closure. Still, it succeeded in making me want to watch what came next. Villeneuve’s bare metal aesthetic and dreamlike cinematography were a unique fit for his vision of Frank Herbert’s world. If they ever make Dune 2, they’ll have to rush through a lot of story, I remember thinking.
When I first walked out of the theatre a couple of days ago, I was ambivalent about Dune 2. It looked fantastic with inspired casting and design choices. But the pacing still didn’t seem to work. There were some beautifully realised highs,but the movie lacked emotional heft. You can see that Denis Vileneueve and team tried to adhere to many of the book’s thematic focal points, and that was their undoing. For me, the novel is transcendent in two areas: worldbuilding and its exploration of fanatic belief. Villeneuve's duology undeniably excels at the former. The sandworms, Giedi Prime, the Baron, Feyd Rautha, Arrakis, and Sietch Tabr all look believable, strange, and amazing. Vilenueve’s duology looks, sounds, and feels fantastic - but it’s like a fine dining meal that leaves you asking, “Was that it?” at the end.
Both movies fall flat at tackling the themes of belief. In Dune 2, the decision to make Javier Bardem’s Stilgar a character almost exclusively for comic relief grates against the seriousness of the rest of the film. There should be humour in a film this long and epic, but it seems misplaced to turn the very beliefs that will underpin a universe-shattering jihad into opportunities for gags.
Because the movie attempts to run through all the elements of the story tackled in the books while rewriting and expanding upon Chani and Jessica, character motivations and arcs go for a toss. This is definitely an attempt to give the female characters more agency. I agree with the intent of this, since Herbert’s novel is definitely quite dated and needed a jolt of sensitivity. However, Jessica in Herbert's novel is already a potent figure. She's a Bene Gesserit adept wielding powerful abilities and political savvy, making her motivations more complex than mere motherly concern. In Villeneuve's film, much of this nuance is lost.
Paul and Chani's relationship feels rushed and forced, though Zendaya does a great job playing Chani. The novel portrays a slow-burn attraction interwoven with mystical visions and a deep cultural understanding between them. The film glosses over this, offering dreamlike sequences but little concrete development of their bond. This serves to weaken the emotional impact of their later story.
Paul's emotional arcs in the 1st and 2nd movies seem to amount to forlorn gazes into the desert, rather than something that is forced upon him. Herbert's Paul Atreides is a tortured figure wrestling with a destiny violently thrust upon him. He undergoes immense psychological pressure, his humanity at odds with a terrible, prescient future. While Timothee Chalamet has the acting chops, the films portray this inner turmoil mostly through mood and visuals. It feels surface-level compared to the rich internal exploration in the novel.
Jodorowsky’s failed attempt at a Dune adaptation is a legend of ambition. His vision was operatic, surreal, and overflowing with symbolism – a far cry from Villeneuve's “grounded” approach. Lynch’s 1984 film is a jumbled mess, hampered by studio interference and an attempt to cram too much narrative into a limited runtime. This reliance on voiceover and exposition is arguably the antithesis of Herbert's work, as are the liberties taken with characterization. Nevertheless, fan-edited supercuts offer intriguing glimpses of what might have been, such as the Spice Diver" cut, which restores deleted scenes and improves the movie's flow.
Villeneuve's Dune films are technically impressive and visually stunning, achieving a sense of realism and scale previously absent in adaptations. However, this emphasis on spectacle and surface-level worldbuilding seems to come at the expense of the novel's thematic heart. The danger of the messianic figure and the destructive power of fanaticism, so central to Herbert's work, lose their disturbing edge. The result is a cinematic experience that dazzles the eye but leaves the heart unstimulated. It captures the spectacle of Dune but not its profound and unsettling hopelessness.
Herbert, in an interview, stated, "You cannot divorce religion from politics, or politics from planetary ecology, or planetary ecology from human psychology." Villeneuve's focus on politics and ecology misses the crucial link – the volatile, irrational power of human belief. It's this aspect that fuels Paul's rise and ignites the jihad tearing across the Imperium. By underplaying this theme and diluting it for laughs, Villeneuve's adaptation, while visually arresting, fails to deliver the full impact of Frank Herbert's masterpiece.