(courtesy IMP Awards)
There is something about science fiction that lends itself to big epic storytelling.
Maybe it’s the sprawling, limitless imagination that fuels its endlessly expansive narratives, the big ideas that find a ready home in a genre ready made for high-impact messaging, or simply the fact that you can go anywhere, be anything in an environment a million times removed (quote literally) from anything with which we are familiar.
Whatever the power behind the drive to epic bigness, and it’s likely all of the above and then some in considerable quantities, sci-fi goes big and does not even think of going home, something that’s hugely in evidence in Dune: Part Two, the second instalment in what appears to now be a trilogy and the far more cohesive successor to Dune: Part One.
This is a film that takes the expositional set-up of the first movie, during which ———- SPOILERS AHEAD !!!!! ———- House Atreides, one of the big powerful families in a far-future techno-medieval empire, has been set up to fail by an emperor clearly threatened by the fact the head of the house, Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac), who rules with firmness but kindness and decency too, is increasing his power and influence to a sizeable degree.
Leto, of course, is not the kind of person to wantonly empire build but the emperor, convinced everyone is as insecure and avaricious as he seems to be – he’s not seen in the first film but his hand is heavy on the storyline – treats him as if he is, and sets him on the planet Arrakis whose spice mining, which fuels interstellar flight and is thus incredibly valuable, is taken off the vile, fascistic Harkonnen who in turn are used by the empire’s ruler to launch a surprise attack one night which all but obliterates the Atreides clan.
All that is left is Paul Atreides, let’s heir, and his mystical mother Lady Jessica (Sarah Ferguson) who is a member of the Bene Gesserit, a fundamentalist women-only religious order whose members possess impressive mental and physical abilities and who are the power players behind just about throne going.
Together they are taken in by the indigenous people of Arrakis, the Fremen, who have worked out over millennia how to survive in the planet’s arid and unforgiving desert landscape.
So, as Dune: Part Two opens, what little is left of House Atreides is on the run, the Harkonnens, who are all sociopathically dark and twisted, are back on Arrakis in strength and the Fremen are launching highly successful guerrilla raids, convinced that not only is the planet rightfully theirs (which it is) but that their messiah draws near in the form of a reluctant Paul Atreides, who will bring not only liberation but who has the power to transform Arrakis back into a verdant, garden world.
Paul, though trained by his mother all his life to be the messiah in question, the Kwisatz Haderach, is having none of it, content to pass all the tests he needs to endure to become a bona fide Fremen, fall in love with Chani (Zendaya), a rebellious Fremen warrior with a mind of her own, and to build a life far away from the machinations of power which have so ruined his family.
But what you want and what you get are often not the same thing, and Dune: Part Two, directed as was the first film by Denis Villenueve (who co-wrote the screenplay with Jon Spaihts, based on the book Dune by Frank Herbert) to stunningly thoughtful effect, rich with ideas and lush, expansive cinematography that dazzles, explores what happens when you are caught between a strong, enduring sense of what you need and desire and the impelling calls of destiny, amplified by Paul’s own mother who goes full on religious zealot as the movie progresses, which will not go unheeded.
Dune: Part Two is, as is the book, very much about belief in all kinds of forms.
We see Paul resisting his role as the messiah even as the fundamentalist southern tribes of the Fremen, led in part by true believer Stilgar (Javie Bardem), egged on by the Bene Gesserit, assert that he has a destiny which cannot go unfulfilled.
We also witness the schism between Paul and his mother who is drawn ever into the web of fundamentalist belief which also divides the far more secular Fremen of the north of the planet and their far more fervent southern neighbours.
In many ways, as well as delivering up astoundingly BIG world-building and landscapes that utterly boggle and entrance, Dune: Part Two carries massive messaging with it, although, and this is one place where the ball drops in what is otherwise a superlative sci-fi experience, not much is really done with it, beyond delivering up impressive spectacle.
This is Dune: Part Two does ring a little hollow.
It’s big in so many things and utterly beguiling ways, and it’s impossible to walk away from what is art as much as anything else and not be impressed on just about every level.
But what Dune: Part Two has in visual and narrative epicness, it loses in its emotional hollowness – the only real emotions that hit home and strike a chord is the grand love affair between Paul and Chani which, like the path of much true love, does not always have a smooth ride – and also its inability to do much with what it has to say.
It’s clear that all that implacable religiosity and political skullduggery which it brings about is not a good thing for the Fremen or the wider people of the galaxy, but while Paul opposes it to begin with and looks like a real leader with singular purpose and vision that refuses to bow to the prevailing winds of belief around him, he almost instantly buckles to bring about the final act of the film, a narrative convenience that fuels an inarguably huge closing chapter of Dune: Part Two but which utterly undercuts who he is as a protagonist.
It’s not a fatal move, and honestly, the film is so massive and sprawling and relentlessly full of forward momentum – though it still has plenty of time for meditative moments of serious contemplation though even these sometimes get a little too serious and overly self-important – that you might not notice or care, but if you care about the integrity of characters in a story, it’s a major misstep that detracts from the seemingly heroic actions that follow.
To be honest though, in the end, Paul is not hero, not really, and while he brings about substantial change in the galactic power structures, not least on Arrakis itself, he is not the hero you might looking for which leaves Dune: Part Two as a most unusual piece of sci-fi soap operatic storytelling where everything is big and undeniably superlatively impressive (it’s hard not to be wowed by it as every turn) but which lacks an emotional inner core or sense of what it’s really trying to say, leaving you beguiled but curiously empty after a three-hour journey through some pretty intense landscape indeed.