Review: Dune: Part Two

Lotsa Travelling, Very Little Journey

Where’s Alia?

Well, if you’ve seen Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two (2024), you pretty much know where Paul Atreides’ little sister is: She’s in Lady Jessica’s belly, where she’ll stay for the near-three-hour length of the film. And that turns out to be more of a problem than might appear at first blush.

Back when Dune: Part One was released, I went out on a limb while discussing the film with Jim Freund on WBAI’s Hour of the Wolf. It was anticipated that Villeneuve would be finishing up Dune’s story in the second film, which at the time of our conversation had yet to be green-lit. But I couldn’t see how the whole of Frank Herbert’s epic novel could be told in a mere two films. I noted that there was too much story remaining – you had the tale of Paul Atreides’ (Timothée Chalamet) time with the Fremen, gaining their trust and growing into (if that’s the phrase for it) his role as their not-so-reluctant messiah. And then there’d be the story of the Fremen’s war with the Harkonnens, and Paul’s ascendancy into leadership of the planet Arrakis, aka Dune. IMHO, it had to be a trilogy to do the story justice.

Villeneuve & Co. had other ideas.

I don’t know what prompted Villeneuve to try to wrap up the entire book in this one, extended film. Maybe Warner Bros. didn’t want to budget for a third chapter or, just as likely, Villeneuve saw Herbert’s next book, Dune Messiah, as the actual finale of the trilogy. The result is that the director/co-writer fell into the same trap as did George Lucas, who held that the middle chapter of a trilogy could be darker and left unresolved. The result for Dune: Part Two – as with The Empire Strikes Back – is a film that deepens the saga, but also winds up being an unsatisfying exercise in and of itself.

I’m not a real stickler for how faithful a film is to its source material – no film can encompass everything in a novel (novellas are better suited for film adaptation); stuff is going to get left out. But the virtual omission of the still-gestating St. Alia of the Knife in Dune Part Two (she makes a cameo appearance via psychic link to Paul) is a pointed marker to a catastrophically wrong decision made by Villeneuve while molding his narrative.

In the original novel, Lady Jessica eventually gives birth to Alia, a girl who, because of Jessica’s having ingested the Water of Life while pregnant, now possesses an adult consciousness within a child’s body (please leave your Reverse Poor Things comments at the door). By the end of the book, she’s a four-year-old psycho-killer, toddling around the battlefield while offing enemy soldiers with her crysknife.

Consider that timeline: Paul and Jessica fall in with the Fremen while the woman is still pregnant. By the end of the book, at least four years have passed. That’s time enough for Paul to be integrated into Freman society, gain their trust, rise in power, and become their leader. Now look at what Villeneuve has done: Unless Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) has given birth in a moment we’re not shown and Alia is subsequently kept offscreen – which would be an odd dramatic choice in-and-of itself – everything in Part Two happens within the span of, maximum, nine months (unless, of course, the insta-matured Alia liked it so much in Jessica’s tum-tum that she decided to hang out for another 48 months). Most films of necessity compress time, but Villeneuve’s radical condensation turns out to have ramifications beyond just sidelining one character. The tale of Paul’s journey into adulthood becomes choppy and cursory; the dramatic beats truncated rather than explored. By all measures, Part Two should be a powerful tale of a child (or teen, more accurately) becoming an adult instantly saddled with imposing responsibilities. But too much has to happen, too many story points have to be ticked off, for the film to give Paul’s odyssey justice. The most important narrative line in Dune, and it gets shunted to the side.

But if Dune: Part Two isn’t quite satisfactory, it’s nowhere near a disaster, either. Villeneuve creates a beautiful – frequently stunning – universe; every shot is striking, and an extended sequence set on Giedi Prime, rendered in a stark black and white (apparently filmed using infrared cameras), pretty much steals the show. The world-building is impressive, and the action sequences – both large scale CG and real-life hand-to-hand – are well-choreographed. I regret not having seen it on a large screen, but even conveyed on my home flat-screen, Dune: Part Two’s visuals manage to amaze.

I may not love Dune: Part Two, but neither can I write it off. Warners, or Villeneuve, or both, made one, very bad decision, one they could not find a way out of. But, as I pointed out to Jim Freund, Dune: Parts One and Two now join The Wizard of Oz and The Maltese Falcon in a rare club, films whose imagery becomes iconic for a literary work. From here forward, when people think of Dune, the images Villeneuve conjured for these two films will be brought to mind. Despite its flaws, Dune: Part Two is now the definitive realization of Frank Herbert’s universe, and that’s a triumph in itself.