Dune: Part 2 [2024]
“The Madhi is too humble to say He is the Madhi. Even more reason to know He is! As written!”
In a lot of ways, being able to summarize an entire 2-hour and 46-minute film into a single word makes for a focused and intentional product. In a lot of other ways, the single word used can either damn or herald said product. Dune: Part 2 [hereby known as “D2”] has been welcomed into the world with overwhelming critical and audience-based praise. Holding high 8’s and 9’s almost everywhere around the web, D2 has come hard out of the gate and rocked the scifi-action world just as much [or more] than its predecessor. To get back to the point, however, D2’s entire premise, presentation, and experience can be summed up into a single word… and that word is “insistent”.
The Harkonens have vowed to stamp out every last Atreides, but all is not as it seems on Arrakis and, after joining with the Fremen, Paul and his mother, Jessica, now find themselves on the cusp of prophecy and survival. A resistance is building deep within the dunes of this desert planet… and all it needs is a leader.
One of the most important tenets of good storytelling is “show, don’t tell”, and it’s too bad that both Denis Villeneuve and Jon Spaihts seem to have entirely forgotten that most important rule while writing the script for D2. A movie about spectacle [and spectacle alone] one could jump into D2 at almost any part of the story and, if one found themselves confused, could simply rewind five-or-so minutes to solve said issue. That’s because D2’s plot can essentially be summarized as:
Character claims or otherwise intimates that something needs to happen.
Different character resists.
Thing happens with almost no consequences or justification.
…
3-hours go by as this repeats over and over.
While this isn’t always a bad way to go about things in a simpler movie, D2 presents itself as something large and involved; not a flashy, meaningless popcorn flick. What strikes me the most about this setup for D2 in particular is that the story feels almost no need to inspire any sort of confidence in the audience with anything that it says. Over and over and over we’re told things that are never proven in any contextual way, beyond them either instantly concluding, or the film simply saying “see it’s true, right?” and then not giving us a chance to answer. At one point someone calls a character we’re yet to meet “psychotic” and implies that their inclusion in whatever ploy is being discussed is a risk to all involved. We then meet said character and spend a fair amount of time with them as the film goes on… and they never do anything out of the ordinary for their family/ setting. They’re just kind of… another one of the Harkonen boys doing Harkonen things… Hardly worthy of any sort of note. In another scene, we’re told something along the lines of “He’ll be fine, Stilgar has trained him well,”… but we both didn’t even know this training was happening and we’re never shown it [despite having spent all of our time with these characters], and the thing the training is for seems absolutely and utterly impossible to train for, so it’s very strange to just hand wave us away like that. It’s a problem that the movie suffers in spades throughout its entire runtime and it’s extremely frustrating.
I feel like D2 needed to be twice as long, built in two parts all its own, or that it should have been an HBO-style miniseries so that we could actually get proper context, history, and connection to almost anything happening onscreen. The way the film’s plot is handled is simply too irritating for most of the emotional intent that it insists is there to actually come across and leaves most moments that should matter beyond being “cool” flat and forgettable. As I mentioned, we’re constantly given scenes where someone will tell us that some one or event is XYZ way or thing, and then we just kind of have to live with it because the film nearly never proves it to us through their actions, thoughts, or secrets. In all of its 166-minutes, D2 spends a shockingly small amount of effort explaining how things like worm riding function, what the hell Stilgar means when he says “I tuned this one special for you”, or why a Harkonen soldier says “No shields!” early on. There’s a lot left on the table with the way this movie is both edited and written, and its overall impact is hurt immensely because there are reasons for these things that it simply isn’t interested in explaining.
Coming off of the genuinely poor storytelling, however, is the absolutely insane production design of the entire experience. This is a movie that, if you’re even vaguely interested, you should see loud, large, and with friends. This film is what Marvel thinks it is in just about every way. From the creativity of high-scifi tech, to the costumes, and world design; D2 is nothing short of stunning from one moment to the next — in a visual sense anyway —, and I’m glad it was delayed to 2024 so it didn’t have to compete with Poor Things or Barbie. In another of the “major accolades” categories, D2’s score vastly outshines its predecessor in almost every way… except for employment. While the music itself is more powerful, more engaging, and more interesting; it’s also more bluntly used… So bluntly, in fact, as to evoke comedy in more than one scene, rather than drama.
“May thy knife chip and shatter.”
While things like cinematography, visual effects, production design, and score truly do make D2 a standout competitor come the 2025 awards season, there’s simply too many things wrong with the way the story is told for this to be worth remembering for anything but raw thrills. Janky editing that takes the audience from one scene to the next with little to no concern around pacing or context at times, entire in-universe technologies and taboos that are completely ignored [atomics anyone?], or the simple concept of giving the audience more evidence to either believe or disprove the entire prophecy the film’s narrative centers around are all huge issues present in D2. Things are simply told to you, and then they happen, and you have so little connection to nearly any and all characters featured in the plot that very little of it matters. Say the phrase “Fly, you fools!” in any given group of people, and watch as several of their hearts break as they remember what happens moments later. By the end of D2, we’ve spent a combined 5-hours and 21-minutes with some of these characters… and we couldn’t care any less about what happens to any one of them. There’s a small feeling of triumph at times, and, perhaps, a small amount of anxiety in dangerous situations, but nothing more than the slightest twinge of “I should probably be feeling something right now”.
D2 is an immensely cool film with lots of great stuff to look at and is well worth the price of admission if all you want is to hang out with your buddies and watch some cool scifi. If you liked the first one, you’ll likely enjoy this almost exactly the same; maybe even a little more. If you had qualms with the first, they certainly have not been fixed here as D2 is “more” in every sense of the word. It’s more fun, it’s more well choreographed, it’s more loud, it’s… you get it. It’s just “more”. So, if you had any issues or loves before, those are going to be amplified here. If you’re going to see this, see it in theaters on a nice screen; don’t wait for streaming unless you’ve got a good setup at home. If you’re on the fence, same advice. If you aren’t interested… you’re not really missing anything except the hilarity of my friends’ shitty Starship Troopers jokes, and you wouldn’t get those without us anyway.
