'Dune: Part Two' Review

Gorgeous visuals and an excellent ensemble can't overcome its two bland lead performances and a muddled script

I should preface this review by saying that I am a huge fan of the original Dune novel, which I bought and read in preparation for watching the first film (I thought I had bought the book with too little time to read it before the release until it got fortuitously delayed an entire year). It’s an engrossing and highly readable for such a dense story brimming with a world that’s as real as Tolkien’s (who would resent that comparison).

I’m also a huge fan of Denis Villeneuve’s: ever since I watched Arrival in theaters back in 2016 I’ve eagerly followed his career and gone back and watched some his other masterpieces, including Prisoners and Sicario. He’s right up there with Nolan in terms of being able to work on an insanely massive scale and still leave his unique artistic fingerprints on the story.

That being said…

…I was not a fan of this film.

I was already pretty mixed on 2021’s Dune, a film that’s last hour should have been the first hour of this film. I was really hoping that being able to end the story on a satisfying note with this one would give it an edge over it’s predecessor: yet with the announcement of Dune: Messiah it’s clear this film went through a lot of draft changes in going from the final film in a planned duology to the second film in a trilogy (this is the second time Warner Bros. has done this). The story, which shifts dramatically from being achingly slow and meandering to introducing a new plot twist every five minutes, definitely seemed like it went through a lot of different iterations. Characters from both the book and even the previous movie get completely excised, leading to a less impactful conclusion as the story struggles to contain the sheer amount of stuff that happens in those last couple hundred pages of the novel. Is it any wonder that this film was moved from November 2023 to March 2024? The claim was that this move was because the actors couldn’t promote the film during the SAG-AFTRA strike, but after seeing this film I’m not so sure; it also doesn’t help that legendary screenwriter Eric Roth- who co-wrote the first film’s Oscar-nominated screenplay- did not return to help write this one.

I actually just rewatched Dune (2021) for the first time since it released a few hours before sitting down to write this review: and I have to say after the disaster of Wonka I forgot that Timothée Chalamet is actually quite good in it. He conveys the dual aspects of Paul Atreides’ boyishness and precociousness quite well, and the scene where he almost goes crazy from a spice vision is handled perfectly.

I can’t really say what happened in this film with Chalamet’s performance, although I partially blame the script for kind of dumbing down his character in favor of Zendaya’s Chani. Villenueve has said that putting Chani at the forefront was a way to sort of get an outsider’s perspective on Paul’s transformation, but most of Paul and Chani’s scenes together- especially in the first half- lack the chemistry necessary to really get the audience invested when things change later. I hate to say it, but there are shades of Anakin and Padme here (complete with the sand). Both actors seem to be on autopilot, and it ends up being Javier Bardem’s Stilgar who saves many of the scenes they’re in with his surprising comic relief. Bardem proves to be a welcome spark of humanity in a film filled with a lot of expositional droning.

Also welcome is Austin Butler’s entertainingly bizarre take on Feyd-Rautha: since the character is one of Baron Harkonnen’s (a criminally underused Stellan Skarsgård) nephews, Butler chose to literally do a spot-on impression of Skarsgård and it’s actually pretty mesmerizing. Unfortunately, after a fantastic gladiator sequence (possibly the best scene in the film) he really isn’t given much to do until the film’s climax, continuing a pattern of this movie casting really great supporting actors and not doing much with them. Chiefest of all strange choices was the casting of none other than Christopher Walken as Emperor Shaddam Corrino IV, who essentially just plays Christopher Walken (mind you, this was entertaining for all the wrong reasons. I was half-expecting Walken to walk up to Chalamet and ask him if he knew the story of the two mice who fell into a bucket of cream).

Overall, I don’t necessarily think this was a bad film, but I do think the script needed a lot more time in the oven, especially when it became part of a trilogy and not a two-parter. George Lucas and Christopher Nolan have both made some of the largest epics ever and each takes about three years between films to make them: is it any wonder why the new Star Wars movies, shot only two years apart each, felt so dissonant and rushed? In all fairness, second acts are the hardest act to crack, and I do feel that Dune: Messiah could be the best of the three films (although based on the book it may also be the weirdest) and give this now-trilogy a satisfying conclusion…

…unless Warner Bros wants to go even further and adapt the book where Paul’s son turns into a giant worm.