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Action adventure
Rating: 2. Rating scale: 0 to 5.
”Dune 2”
Regi: Denis Villeneuve.
Manus: Denis Villeneuve, Jon Spaihts.
Starring: Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Austin Butler, and more. Duration: 2 hours 46 minutes (11 years). Language English. Cinema premiere.
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Savior or False Prophet? Doubt continues to haunt Timothée Chalamet’s gloomy branch in “Dune. Part two”, but it is above all the director Denis Villeneuve that makes me wonder. With “Blade runner 2049” (2017) he soared as a fearless big screen artist with the cinema as the obvious exhibition space. The movie itself, then? Just a hologram of the original’s soul.
Just as daring, he then moved on to “Dune” (2021), based on Frank Herbert’s “filmable” sci-fi epic, but once ready for launch, the pandemic struck and subscribers were lured to HBO Max with a rushed streaming premiere. Back then, blasting volume in the Imax lounge and bombastic special effects went a long way as vaccination against fear of the cinema’s death. Today? Now I feel ready to clean the critic’s glasses and distance myself from the cult of Villeneuve.
Even though it’s been a few years since the last one is instantly recognisable—in that respect, the second one doesn’t come across as a new film so much as a lagging extension of the first. Once again, Villeneuve works with images (taken by photographer Greig Fraser) that beg to be admired. Protagonists pause to gaze out over seductive horizons, classy objects are centered in shallow depth of field, and soldiers float slowly down to the ground from plastic craft so still they look like desktop wallpaper.
“The power over the spice is the power over everything,” thunders the opening line in alien language. The year is 10191 and now Paul Atreides (Chalamet) lives with the original inhabitants of Arrakis. The sand planet is the source of the universe’s most expensive commodity, “spice”: a life-extending and mind-sharpening drug.
On Arrakis, Paul tries to learn the customs and martial arts of the Sand People. While the people around the hero argue about whether he is the Messiah (or to speak post-colonial theories: a “white savior”), the feelings for Chani (Zendaya) deepen. The first kiss takes place on a sand dune and it feels much like watching two barbie dolls being forced together by an invisible third party.
Namely, in this universe, the good have been blessed with beautiful eyebrows while the most evil … have none at all.
Zero eroticism, just beauty. At least they have perfect eyebrows, which is not an insignificant detail. In this universe, the good have been blessed with beautiful eyebrows while the most evil, such as Stellan Skarsgård’s grotesque baron and Christopher Walken’s cold emperor. don’t have any at all. The hierarchy of niceness is somewhat reevaluated when the prophecy is scrutinized and a finger of warning is raised to trust charismatic leaders – but even the criticism of religion is so squarely old-fashioned that it makes the film’s future scenario feel stone age.
The new the supervillain, the baron’s younger nephew Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler), looks like a sexy relative of Nosferatu with goth style worthy of the singer in a nu metalband in the early 2000s. “He’s insane,” he is described simply, which Butler – who dropped the Elvis dialect to imitate Skarsgård’s grunts – portrays with an evil smile.
Austin Butler and Léa Seydoux are the newcomers to the “Dune” world. Photo: Niko Tavernise
Butler’s interpretation is more terrifying than Sting’s laughable version in David Lynch’s 1984 film adaptation, but also sad. Pitch-black sadomasochism leaves minimal room for nuance, further reminded when the villain demonstrates his fighting prowess in a gladiatorial game on a planet whose dark sun turns the exteriors black and white.
A sensuality is glimpsed in the visual narrative when the sensory effect of the spice is to be highlighted, but even then it is so pleasantly sparkling that it resembles a perfume advertisement. Considering the publisher’s history of adaptation, beautifully depicted in the documentary “Jodorowsky’s Dune” (2013), one cannot help but dream of how the surrealist Alejandro Jodorowsky had tackled these subjective dimensions.
The appeal of Jodorowsky’s version, of course, lies in the fact that it was never made. At least Villeneuve has managed to tame the beast, similar to what Paul does with a sandworm during an initiation rite. Order and order are good managerial qualities, good if you are to lead, but is that really what you want from an artist?
I almost feel sorry for Villeneuve. How painful it must be to take on such a long desert trek with a stick up your ass.
See more. Better movies based on “filmable” novels: ”Solaris” (1972), ”Naked lunch” (1991), ”Inherent vice” (2014).
Read other film and television reviews in DN and more texts by Sebastian Lindvall.
