DUNE: PART II (Denis Villeneuve 2024)

[Chris Knipp]

I like the new bald Austin Butler baddie. He used to be Elvis,,but he's grown a whole new set of mean muscles, and is fast and lethal with a knife.

Again as in Part One Villeneuve has given us a glorious desert spectacle. But it's going to look like this could go on forever and never get anywhere. My new authority is Justin Chang, now the film critic of The New Yorker.. It's a shock, because after reading Anthony Lane's fancifull, witty writing for years, Chang's seems so straightforward and flat. But he gets to the point. And he says this about the film's use of the book's Arab and islamic elements:

Yet if the movie is, among other things, a timely parable of Arab liberation, it’s at best a slippery and reluctant one, in which the politics of revolution feel curiously under-juiced. In retaining the material’s Arabic filigree, albeit with a glaring paucity of Arab actors in key Fremen roles, Villeneuve and his co-writer, Jon Spaihts, follow the text with a cautious, noncommittal blandness.

In a similar vein when speaking of a shift to the emperor of Arrakis (Christopher Walken) and his daughter (Florence Pugh), he comments, "the change of scenery is all but undone by the characters' colorless solemnity." Chang misses the "louche sexual menace" of Sting's Feyd-Rautha instead of Austin Butler, and says what's issing here is "an imaginative density, a hint of psychoerotic danger, the grotesque, teeming aliveness of a fully inhabited world."

Ouch.

Villeneuve's Dune wII is beautiful, it is tasteful (which I like: Lynch's is gross), the plot outlines ware crystal clear and pared down. But maybe Chang is right: a lot is missing here.

But for full-on joyous admiration of the new DUNE watch the Oscar Expert bros tell all the ways they think it succeeds wonderfully well HERE.