Split Decision: “Dune: Part Two”
Saturday, February 15, 2025 at 5:00PM In the Split Decision series, two of our writers face off on an Oscar-nominated movie one loves and the other doesn't. Today, Cláudio Alves and Lynn Lee discuss Dune: Part Two...
CLÁUDIO ALVES: As far as the Best Picture Oscar race is concerned, sequels are quite the rarity. Early year releases are even rarer. Yet, Dune: Part Two made it into the Academy's top ten, scoring four additional nominations - Cinematography, Production Design, Visual Effects, and Sound. Sure, by this metric, it pales in comparison to Part One, with its double-digit nods and six wins. But it's still a remarkable achievement. To be honest, I had a much better time with the sequel than with its predecessor. Part of it concerns a better grasp of what Villeneuve is doing in his adaptation of Frank Herbert's magnum opus, observing people as grains of sand in the winds of an imagined history rather than as characters. It's about the tragedy of going beyond personhood and the labor of building mythos and monuments, which results in a cold, mural-like cinematic experience that feels more coherent than its first chapter made it seem. In its alienation, I saw a purpose I didn't find in 2021.
I gather you had a different experience, Lynn. How does Dune: Part Two compare to Part One in your book?
LYNN LEE: It's funny, Cláudio - I completely agree with your assessment of what Part Two is doing, only to have the exact opposite response! To be clear, I don't hate or even dislike the film. Quite the contrary. I admire Villeneuve's craftsmanship and commitment to his (and I think Herbert's, though I haven't read the books) vision of Dune as ur-myth. However, its coldness...what can I say?...left me cold. Its alienation alienated me…
I preferred Part One because it felt more human scaled in both scope and tone. Even though I knew where the story was going, I still felt the suspense, the dread, and the anguish of watching the Atreides' fate - or this chapter of it, anyway - play out. I felt the emotional connection between the characters - Paul and his father, Gurney Halleck, Duncan Idaho - and the desperation of Paul and Lady Jessica's escape. In contrast, every beat of Part Two’s narrative feels so relentlessly predetermined, ritualistic, ceremonial - by design - that I couldn't feel any emotional stakes at all, despite the best efforts of Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya to provide some. Why care about a relationship that's clearly going to be subsumed to the larger arc of Dune history? Even Chani's skepticism, the occasional humorous note provided by Stilgar (Javier Bardem seems to be the only one having fun with his role) and the other clear signs that this history has been carefully manufactured and manipulated can't do anything about its heavy inevitability. That may be precisely the point, but it also leads to an overarching dramatic inertia.
The one really electrifying moment, for me, was ironically near the very end - the final fight scene between Paul and Feyd-Rautha. Something about the way it was choreographed and filmed, and the intensity of Chalamet and Austin Butler's performances, for the first time made me hold my breath in the same way that Part One did. But then this momentary tension, too, is soon subsumed into the Ascendance of the Qwisatz Haderich.
CLÁUDIO: I'd love to know more about your thoughts on the cast.
Regarding the two twinks in that climatic face-off, I confess I'm not too in love with either of their performances. Don't get me wrong - they're good, just a bit unexciting. Then again, that feels like part of the deal with Paul as someone whose state of being goes beyond human comprehension within this sequel's narrative. I guess I wanted even more alienation if that makes sense. Give me a real off-putting take on a person whose humanity has been crushed by knowledge and an artificial fate. Butler's having fun with it, I feel, and I appreciate his surrender to freakishness. However, he's still eclipsed by the folks in the ensemble who have best managed the negotiation between playing characters in a space opera, figures in history books, ideas in a philosophical screed.
As you pointed out, Bardem's having fun for sure, and it's an infectious sort of joy. No wonder he's become a meme on social media. I know here, at The Film Experience, the majority of writers find this year's Best Supporting Actor lineup an exceptional quintet, but I would find it stronger with some other performances in the mix. Bardem would have been a nice addition, even if he doesn't show up on my personal ballot. Someone who comes really close to cracking my preferred top five is Rebecca Ferguson. While reading Dune, Lady Jessica was my favorite character and I'm glad this Swedish thespian fulfilled the promise on the page. She's giving me a lot of the outright monstrosity I wanted to see in Chalamet, transcending the little warmth she had in Part One to become something altogether unknowable, maybe wrong, perpetually mind-boggling. In other words, she scared me in a film whose cosmic horrors and threat of intergalactic jihad often feel like faraway abstractions.
Indeed, the women of Dune far outclass the men. There's Charlotte Rampling bringing her presence and persona back into the fold of Herbert's universe, and Léa Seydoux providing a sensual variation on the concept of the Bene Gesserit. What a phenomenal little morsel of a star turn that was. I guess Florence Pugh could have been more engaging as Irulan, though the meatiest material in her arc awaits in Messiah. I also understand those who decry Zendaya as one note, always leaning on Chani's sullen skepticism to the point she becomes a flame of interior unrest blazing away in the background of every scene she's in. It's not a work of peaks and valleys nor great complexity. Then again, I'm unsure if a different approach would have been better. She seems in tune with Villeneuve's vision, how he zeroes on her mutinous gaze, and even changes the book's conclusion to have Chani leave us with those eyes shining with disappointment, anger, mayhap fear.
LYNN: I should have qualified - Butler is indeed having fun with his role, though it's still in service of maintaining the overall myth. Still, I enjoyed his take on the movie's resident psychopath (ok, most overt resident psychopath - plenty to choose from in this universe) even if he's not given much room to play more than one dimension of that character. As for the rest of the cast, I think here we face the same divide as before, in that you want colder and more alien, and I want more empathy! Not that one is better than the other, and I don't disagree that Rebecca Ferguson is very good at the former. Though it says something that my favorite moment in her performance is that look of utter shock during the final duel, when for a split second she thinks Paul has lost and all her plotting and planning for naught - followed by the teary-eyed relief when he prevails. That's not the Bene Gesserit, or not wholly - that's Paul's mother.
As for our two young superstars, I think Chalamet does the best he can in trying to show some lingering humanity and internal conflict on Paul's part in his relations with Chani and the Fremen. But that struggle doesn't move me as his callowness and vulnerability did in Part One. And I'm afraid I'm in the camp that found Zendaya lacking range as Chani; I found myself wishing she and Pugh (who really isn't given enough to do) had swapped roles. Also, while I understand the impetus to write movie-Chani with more agency and independent-mindedness than book-Chani, I couldn't help wondering how Villeneuve plans to square those traits with her ultimate destiny. How will Paul convince this Chani to forgive his betrayal and come back? I just don't see it, though I'm also curious to see it.
Setting aside the narrative and acting choices, I think we can agree that the film looks and sounds phenomenal. Do you have a favorite scene or set piece?
CLÁUDIO: I have a friend who has told me they felt Part Two smaller and less visually varied than Part One, especially at a level of Production Design. Looking at both pictures, I can't quite square up with those conclusions because, in fact, I found much more thought-provoking variation in this sequel. The Fremen's underground pool is such a glorious vision, yet serene in its grandeur. It contrasts with Paul's rise to power in an amorphous space defined by the interplay of light and darkness and thousands of moving bodies. The Atreides' nuclear vault does similar things with proportion and lighting, both suggesting something larger than life and the present, yet ominously evil. It signals triumph for our putative heroes, but breaking into that space is also a violation that portends wrongness. Then you have Villeneuve's counter-intuitive view of the Padishah Emperor's court as a place of calm and quiet, almost humble in its splendor. It speaks of a universe where the simplicity of a garden and unassuming human-scaled architecture are the biggest luxury of all. As someone more aesthetically aligned with David Lynch's gold-plated Baroque vision for the 1984 movie, I enjoyed being surprised and given another perspective.
But I am, admittedly, beating around the bush. My favorite passage in the whole movie, the set piece that most engaged me, was the sequence when Villeneuve's camera visits the Harkonnen's home world on a day of celebration. The idea of a black sun that renders ambient light as an infrared black-and-white is cool as all hell to this formalist cinephile who loves pretty things above all else. Those jester-like costumes Jacqueline West devised for the arena? Divine. The sonic pendulum of Lady Margot's seduction? The stuff of dreams. I was vibrating on my seat and not just because of the amazing sound design, absolutely elated and having the time of my life. Even in slow seduction, creepy hypnosis, the movie kept me entertained like nobody's business.
Did you similarly surrender to the sequence's alien pull, or is this another divergence between our views on Dune: Part Two?
LYNN: No, on this we are in perfect agreement! The Harkonnen planet is the standout in a film hardly lacking in visual wows. The first time I watched this sequence I wondered why it looked so unsettling and so different from any other black & white film I'd ever seen. Only later did I learn about the use of special infrared cameras - has anyone ever done that before in a movie? Regardless, it's genius, perfectly capturing the utter inhumanity of this world and making a relatively familiar scene - gladiatorial combat in an arena - downright uncanny, even surreal (those ink-blot fireworks are an especially nice touch), an effect only heightened by the half-brutalist, half-art deco architecture and the seemingly immense distance between the performers and the spectators. And yes, those weird circling jesters who look like they stepped out of a fever dream mash-up of Amadeus and Pan's Labyrinth. It's all at once alienating and irresistibly transfixing.
The other sequence that's really stuck with me, and that may in fact be its perfect obverse, is that of Paul riding the sandworm. I love the solar plexus-shaking soundscape. I love how the perspective shifts between extreme long shot, emphasizing Paul's tininess against the immensity of the Arrakis landscape and its most formidable inhabitant, and the close-up of him fighting first to hold on and then to gain control. As with Feyd-Rautha's "birthday fight," it's a test in which the outcome is never in doubt, and yet the mood is different - exhilarating rather than chilling - until the final "oh shit" moment when we, like Chani, realize this Muad'Dib has awakened something far more dangerous than the sandworm. Cut to an engraving of his feat: the making of the myth, the first step to calcifying legend. Good stuff.
But since I've shared some of what I liked about the movie, it's only fair to ask: was there anything about it that didn't work for you, or anything you wish Villeneuve had done differently? Did you feel, with the conclusion of Part Two (which does, I believe, end where the first book does), a sense of completeness, or did it leave you wanting to continue into Dune Messiah? Oddly, while unlike many I didn't have an issue with the first Dune being supposedly all build-up and stage-setting for Part Two, I did feel Part Two heavily gesturing towards a Part Three; it didn't feel like the end, to me, any more than the first movie did. And this, in some ways, annoyed me more than having to wait for Part Two.
CLÁUDIO: While I'm a fan of Dune: Part Two, you wouldn't catch me calling it a perfect movie. I have a litany of notes on it that differ from the positivity of my overall feelings. A lot of it has to do with an essential disconnect between what I find fascinating about Herbert's world-building and what excites Villeneuve the most. I respond to the grotesquerie of the novel, how strange some of its suggested images are, how far it goes into outré concepts that would flirt with absurdism when rendered on screen. My biggest gripe regarding adaptation centers on the filmmakers' choice to excise little Alia's pre-born weirdness from the narrative. She's my favorite part from David Lynche's Dune, and, sure, she'd have been tonally and aesthetically incoherent with Villeneuve's vision. However, I still wish he had challenged himself rather than whittled down this nonsense to fit his cinema of stoic monumentality and po-faced grandeur. It feels toothless as a choice, cowardly even. Indeed, if there's something I feel worked much better in Part One, it's the visions Paul and Jessica have. They felt much weightier before, unencumbered by stuff like Anya Taylor-Joy's cameo - more distracting than anything.
That said, I continue to prefer the sequel over the 2021 movie and had the opposite reaction to what you described. Part One felt like half a movie in ways Part Two does not. And I guess some of that is how Villeneuve used his second movie to present some pushback against notions of Paul's heroism, already anticipating what Herbert only made clear and impossible to misinterpret in Messiah. There is no glory in the victories achieved at the end of this journey, the sense of tragedy having replaced the anticipation I got from the end of the first movie. As dramatically unsatisfying as that sounds, it gave me a sense of closure, conceptual if not necessarily narrative.
LYNN: Confession: I've never seen David Lynch's Dune, though I've been curious about it for a long time. Despite or perhaps because of its reputation as an ambitious mess, Lynch has always felt to me like a better fit than Villeneuve for Herbert's gonzo vision. It's not unlike why I prefer Tim Burton's take on Batman (and the Joker) to Chris Nolan's.
In any case, "stoic monumentality and po-faced grandeur" is a great tagline for Villeneuve's Dune. That's really what it's all about, right? All that solemn spectacle is asterisked but not really undercut by the skepticism seeded throughout Part Two. It's a bit as if Villeneuve is trying to have his cake and eat it too - give us the impulse gratifications of watching a proto-Luke Skywalker/Lawrence of Arrakis kick ass and win hearts and minds while strongly hinting he's a false god and a freak. (Come to think of it, David Lean was doing something similar with Lawrence of Arabia, only his Lawrence had more charm and humor.)
Similarly with the ending. Yes, it shows the hollowness of Paul's victory and gestures towards the tragedy of proclaiming himself messiah. But it also perfectly tees up the next phase of the hollow victory parade. The face-off with the other Houses. The unleashed Fremen. The new princess-wife and the angry betrayed lover, and the new sister, played by three of the brightest stars in the It Girl firmament. I mean, damn, it works: I want to see the next chapter, even if I know it's blood and tears all the way down. Don't you?
CLÁUDIO: Honestly, what excites me most about Messiah is that the material should force Villeneuve's hand. How can he adapt that book and continue to excise or minimize the novels' sheer weirdness? I want to see a Guild Navigator on the big screen. Give me that orange-fumed insanity and give it to me now. I guess I'm also pretty psyched for further opportunities to see what this cast makes of Herbert's universe, especially the women. Sure, my favorite part of Alia Atreides's horrifying tale is in Children of Dune, but Messiah will still provide more chances to appreciate her tragedy. Pugh will finally get something to do!
If Villeneuve's Dune project were to end with this Part Two, I think I'd be satisfied. But I can't deny it - you're right that I want to see it all down to the bitter end. And if this goes beyond the Canadian auteur, I can only hope a great cineaste gets to bring the God Emperor to the big screen in all his wormy glory. That's where I'm at with this Best Picture nominee. It succeeds at all it's trying to do, feels complete and fulfills a vision eschewing narrative convention for something altogether weirder in a mainstream blockbuster context. It's also a herald of what's yet to come, a promise of more epic visions in our collective future.
Any closing thoughts on your side?
LYNN: Bring Jodorowsky back! Just kidding, haha...but in all seriousness, it's hard to imagine a director other than Villeneuve that could translate the weirdness of the sequels into a mainstream movie. Maybe even Villeneuve won't be able to do it, though I can't wait to find out.
In the meantime, I give him full credit for making Part Two as coherent and watchable as it is. I just wish it had pulled more of a gut reaction from me - more of an emotional, as opposed to aesthetic or cerebral, response. But there's no denying it's an impressive achievement on its own terms.
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Reader Comments (3)
I’m surprised neither of you mention Leni Riefenstahl in discussing the Harkonnen sequence…
Remember when Film Twitter was convinced that Austin Butler was going to get nominated for this?
In accordance with the prevailing Geometry Dash online gaming norms, our character will also assume the appearance of a cube or other geometric shape.