Dune Part Two (2024)

****/****
starring Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Javier Bardem
screenplay by Jon Spaihts and Denis Villeneuve, based on the novel by Frank Herbert
directed by Denis Villeneuve

by Walter Chaw

“And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of they life:”
–Genesis 3:14

Fanaticism is a closed circle, maddening because it’s impregnable, maddening because it destroys everything in the process of building itself. It’s a riddle without a solution, and once you’ve drunk deep the plasma spring, it’s a long way back–if you ever get there. There are people who “deprogram” cult members, but I don’t buy it, you guys. I’m of the belief that when you’re gone, you’re gone. You went by choice, after all. You denied your ears the beeswax but didn’t tie yourself to the mast. My mom bought into a cult for the last several years of her life. She held on to it tightly, and it gripped her right back. I suppose that’s one of the appealing things about cults: when you find the right one, you join the company of a great many people who agree with you. If you’re broken in some way, if your awareness of that has made you lonesome and alone, that must feel good. I take a little bit of the blame for her susceptibility to such things. I was a terrible son to her. Maybe she needed something to hold that would hold her back; I did, too. I found it in a wonderful wife and kids. She found it, some of it, in a cult that finally accepted her. I don’t know if I believe that. I don’t know what I believe. Maybe this is just narcissism–mine or hers, I don’t know either. But she’s dead now, and I’m the only one left to wonder about what happened between us.

Throughout the entire extended running time of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Part Two, messianic rebel and Lawrence of Arabia orientalist leader Paul Atriedes (Timothée Chalamet) refuses to court the support of millions of “southern fundamentalist” fighters because he knows that once he does, he will become the colonialist monster his mother, Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), has hoped he will be. She’s part of a cult, you see, the Bene Gesserit, which has spread a story about the coming of a white god to the brown lands and brown people that has taken hold in the brutal southern hemisphere of a planet, Arrakis, treasured and vied over for its natural resources. The allegory, proximate and ultimate, isn’t subtle. Paul falls in love with an indigenous fighter, Chani (Zendaya), learns the language and the ways, and is given a name by his chief advocate, Stilgar (Javier Bardem), both secret (“Usul,” meaning the foundation of a column in the film’s made-up language) and known (“Muad’dib,” after a small desert mouse that is resourceful enough to survive the harshest elements). No matter what Paul does to try to convince Stilgar he is a man and not the Quetzalcoatl to Stilgar’s Montezuma, it’s more evidence in Stilgar’s mind that Paul is, in fact, the fulfillment of an implanted colonial prophecy designed to control his people and the resource–a psychotropic spice called “melange” that allows for instant space-travel in this universe–unique to his planet. That’s the nature of fanaticism, cults, religions: whatever evidence you provide to disprove it becomes proof of it. It is a closed, peristaltic circle. Ouroboros, the worm devouring itself. I think sometimes not about how the worm eats but how it is never sated. The worm is insatiable.

Jessica’s cult wants to control the spice, because controlling the spice means controlling the rival planetary systems that depend on it for travel and commerce. Her cult has spent generations fomenting a messianic religion promising the rebirth of a saviour who will inaugurate an apocalypse resulting in the rapture. The Christian cult promises something similar–should it ever succeed at triggering a war in the Middle East–and has spent generations in the pursuit of enough political power in key areas of the world to get the dominoes to fall in precisely the form and shape of a stairway to their Christo-fascist notion of a homogenous Heaven. I imagine they play martial drums and metal horns there instead of harps. The clouds are the smoke, gritty and grey, from the camps. And it’s all meticulously staged by a beatific Leni Riefenstahl, her small, bone-white hands held in sanguine genuflection. Paul gets this. He says over and over that he will not go to the south, he will not appear before the “fundamentalists” and play out the “signs” his mother’s cult has designed for him. This is okay with his mother’s cult, though: If Paul doesn’t do it, then his rival Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler) definitely will. The cult has covered all the bases. A cult is a closed circle, and its appetite is boundless. But the war begins to go badly for Paul and his rebel force of just 200 guerilla fighters. They manage to sabotage a few harvesters (the equivalent of Lawrence’s Arab raids on Turkish supply lines during WWI), but as their numbers thin, it becomes clear to Paul that his last, best hope of saving what’s left of his family (his mother) and his adopted people, whom he wishes very much to be a part of but to whom he will only ever be a foreigner, is to fulfill a colonial prophecy constructed for the purpose of consolidating power behind a single religion. An apocalyptic death cult. “What do we do?” his general/high priest asks him, needing to be led, and Paul, who has now fully embraced the mantel of leader, could tell him to destroy the spice so the planet will be left in peace. Yet without hesitation, he says, “Go, bring [my rivals] Paradise.”

Like its predecessor, Dune Part Two is gorgeously filmed and prodigiously imagined. The technology, insect-based and rusted-out, used and lived-in in the style Star Wars popularized 47 years ago, feels like a logical evolution of machines given time, ingenuity, and the inevitability of war as the greatest forge for innovation. The battle sequences, certainly in IMAX, are enormous-feeling and trouser-ruffling in their sonic bombast. There are too many speeches, maybe, and there are quiet moments that might have hit harder with leads demonstrating better chemistry. There is an extended sequence celebrating Feyd-Rautha’s birthday on his homeworld featuring the indelible image of black fireworks that burst in the thick air of Giedi Prime like pustules sick with oil and tar exploded with hammers. It has a good knife fight, plus Christopher Walken and a surprisingly effective Florence Pugh (surprisingly effective given that her role is mainly expositional). And there are worms on Arrakis the size of channel tunnels with vagina dentata mouths that swallow everything but are never full. I’m thinking of an Anne Sexton poem I memorized called “The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator” and its closing lines:

The glimmering creatures are full of lies.
They are eating each other. They are overfed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Dune Part Two isn’t perfect. I’m not convinced by either of its young leads beyond that they look the part; I’m not convinced that one is the leader of men, and I’m not convinced the other has the depth and mystery to win his heart. Maybe I’ve aged out of being able to see these qualities in the very young. More fatally, in the pursuit of clarity, I’m not convinced the picture doesn’t fall over too often into oversimplification. But the overall effect–landing as the movie does while Gaza is martyred to the genocidal impulses of a Zionist colonization machine allied with an international cabal of white nationalists (note how fish-belly pale the villainous, 1930s-Berlin leather-daddy Harkonnen are, and how in this one, Paul says, “We are all Harkonnen,” and laughs a bitter kind of laughter)–is devastating. I wonder if the film doesn’t actually work better because its hero is swallowed whole by the monstrousness of his position. It is an epically-scaled tentpole from a major studio spending millions of dollars to tell the story of a messianic leader with vengeance on his lips who pulls his power from fundamentalists manipulated by his mother’s cult to bring about genocide, famine, death, and war. Plague? That, too, it’s suggested, via a series of visions Paul endures showing a man in his death throes as his mother glides past, beautiful and pure and not, as she is in the bulk of the film, a filthy Lady Macbeth hunched in secret war council with her unborn child, speaking to her in unsettling intravenous close-ups from inside her womb. Dune Part Two is almost more the companion piece to Alex Garland’s upcoming Civil War than its own first part–both films landing in the first third of 2024 like diving bells made brittle in the oceans of our fear and self-loathing this election year. How could we have painted ourselves into this humiliating moral corner? There’s no moral “out” left for us, not anymore, you mad fucking idiots. Best possible choice? The lesser of two evils? We don’t have choice. There isn’t a lesser evil. The worm is overfed and still insatiable.