'Dune: Part Two' finally delivers what Herbert's novel deserves

Denis Villeneuve stuck the landing.

I've only followed Villeneuve's filmmaking career since "Sicario" in 2015 - he's been directing feature films since 1998 - but every film he's made from "Sicario" forward, including 2016's "Arrival," 2017's "Blade Runner 2049" and 2021's "Dune," has been virtually flawless.

"Dune: Part Two" is no exception, as Villeneuve gives Frank Herbert's 1965 epic science fiction novel the cinematic adaptation it's always deserved. Even brilliant auteurs that include Alejandro Jodorowsky and David Lynch could never quite pull it off.

Yes, because Frank was an autodidactic polymath who wrote prose with the precision of an engineer, certain plot points are inevitably sacrificed to the gods of narrative economy.

Stephen McKinley Henderson's endearing Thufir Hawat sadly does not return, while the compression of the novel's timeline means we never meet the eerie child prodigy version of Paul Atreides' younger sister Alia, although she still plays an outsize role in the proceedings.

Easily the most dramatic revisions to Herbert's text lie in Villeneuve's depiction of the Fremen warrior Chani, whose portrayal by Zendaya lends her both a genuine, appealing chemistry and a fierce ideological combativeness with Timothée Chalamet's outcast royal heir, Paul Atreides.

Given the more headstrong independence and warranted suspicious nature with which Villeneuve and Zendaya imbue Chani, her relationships with Paul and his prophecy-promoting mother Jessica are broadly altered from how Herbert left them at the end of his first "Dune" novel, which makes me wonder how Villeneuve plans to pick up those threads in his upcoming adaptation of Herbert's sequel novel, "Dune Messiah."

Nonetheless, as bittersweet as this makes the organically developing romance that Zendaya and Chalamet create between Chani and Paul, Villeneuve's deviations from Herbert's text are actually more faithful to Herbert's intended warnings against blind allegiance to even initially well-intentioned charismatic leaders.

For all of Chalamet's youthful and pretty physical features, he explodes with terrifying wrath when Paul shrugs off the last of his lingering moral qualms about pursuing a cosmos-spanning holy war in the wake of his mother's sustained campaign of manipulation.

Those who watched Mike Flanagan's crackerjack adaptation of Stephen King's "Doctor Sleep" know how formidable Rebecca Ferguson can be, from her chillingly playful performance as the predatory Rose the Hat, but Ferguson elevates her game to another dimension as the Reverend Mother Jessica, who is willing to do absolutely anything to protect her son.

As çdid in the role of Diana in the 1980s "V" TV franchise, I predict Ferguson's Jessica is going to imprint herself on an entire generation of lonely adolescent nerds (note that I include my own younger self in this category), because Ferguson plays Jessica as if Jocasta had rolled up a level in Clytemnestra.

Chalamet and Ferguson are well-matched by the ruthlessness and brutality of the rest of this film's cast. Charlotte Rampling's Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam continues to be "That B" in her mercilessly self-serving and long-term calculations, while newcomer Léa Seydoux's Lady Margot Fenring expands that theme of how effectively the Bene Gesserit's canny women can direct powerful forces from behind the throne.

While Ian McNeice remains my favorite Vladimir Harkonnen, from the Syfy channel's "Frank Herbert's Dune" and "Frank Herbert's Children of Dune" miniseries, in 2000 and 2003 respectively, Stellan Skarsgård finally and fully inhabits the role of the depraved and degenerate Baron of House Harkonnen with the words "Happy birthday, nephew."

Like Paul Atreides, Baron Harkonnen's nephew Feyd-Rautha is the heir to a royal dynasty, who's well-trained in hand-to-hand combat, so I appreciate that Villeneuve afforded Paul and Feyd a perverse measure of mutual respect, even though Feyd might be more psychotic and devoid of any vestige of humanity than his debauched uncle.

Austin Butler, who impressed me in Baz Luhrmann's "Elvis," manages to outdo even the wild-haired younger version of Sting, who had depicted Feyd-Rautha in David Lynch's "Dune" in 1984, and the showdown between Butler's Feyd and Chalamet's Paul is as impeccably staged as the "Duel of the Fates" sequence in "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace."

Even the admittedly scientifically dubious conceit of Giedi Prime's sunlight turning everything black-and-white serves to underscore - as does the harsh, arid, planet-spanning desert of Arrakis - how extreme environments can breed extreme cultures, and leaders.

The uncompromising inhumanity of Giedi Prime's architecture recalls the grotesquely gorgeous artwork of H.R. Giger, whom Alejandro Jodorowsky had commissioned to create designs for his own attempted adaptation of "Dune."

On a lighter note, a grizzled Josh Brolin continues to play loyal House Atreides soldier Gurney Halleck like everyone's favorite gruff uncle, while Javier Bardem's religiously awed performance, as Fremen tribal leader Stilgar, somehow manages to recreate the hilarious "Monty Python's Life of Brian" messiah meme, while remaining completely consistent to his book characterization.

Villeneuve is such an actor's director, he even manages to wring a subtle, understated acting performance out of Christopher Walken, here playing the emperor of the known universe, but I predict that it will be Florence Pugh, as the emperor's perceptive and conscientious daughter Irulan, who will be the one to watch in Villeneuve's "Dune Messiah."

Gang, I could go on about this film forever, so just go see it, OK?

Author Bio

Kirk Boxleitner, Reporter

Shelton-Mason County Journal & Belfair Herald
[email protected]