Dune: Part 2 Of 2021's Space Odyssey Is Here

Dune: Part Two

Denis Villeneuve Masterfully Conducts His Epic Space Opera

Needless to say, Dune: Part Two maintains a high strike-rate upon our senses. But it is when the camera focuses on the faces of performers that we sense the film’s gratifying human pulse, writes Prahlad Srihari.

AN INTERGALACTIC EMPEROR, a predatory industrialist, and an occult sisterhood are all pulling strings from behind the scenes in Dune: Part Two. But there is yet another puppet-master steering Denis Villeneuve’s prodigious vision, fine-tuning its harmonic dread, orchestrating every beat, scheme and reveal: Hans Zimmer. The music of the German composer drapes itself over almost every frame of the hotly anticipated follow-up to 2021’s Dune. At two hours and 46 minutes, the film extends its grip through a fine blend of the organic and the metallic, soulful pieces and powerful crescendos. Like the giant sandworms, Zimmer’s score is towering but always on the move. It keeps pace with the tidal swells of the story and burrows its way into the mind. It articulates the inner struggle of our reluctant hero looking for the tiniest loophole through which to escape the shackles of his “terrible purpose”. Above all, it deftly reinforces the tension between the oppressive weight of fate and the no-less oppressive weight of free will.

For Frank Herbert, Dune was a telescope and microscope rolled into one, surveying a fragile ecology where belief could just as easily be used to subjugate as inspire. For Villeneuve, Dune is a window into a future where messianic convulsions and ecological brinkmanship also make for sublime pageantry. This is not to suggest that Villeneuve takes Herbert’s warning against placing too much faith in one white man lightly. If anything, the Quebec filmmaker’s unwavering sincerity is what holds our attention in the first place. But he understands the art of speculative wonder isn’t cheapened but enshrined by the thrills of richly realised image-making.

A messiah figure hooks on to a leviathan worm and rides it across a desert like he was surfing a rogue wave in the middle of an ocean. A deep blue potion either kills or transforms its drinker. A pale deranged figure puts on a show in a gladiator match on a black sun-lit world devoid of colour. A setting sun silhouettes warriors against the fiery orange landscape of a desert planet. Needless to say, Dune: Part Two maintains a high strike-rate upon our senses. But it is when the camera focuses on the faces of performers that we sense the film’s gratifying human pulse. For all the pyrotechnics and bone-rattling sounds, there is also a touch of silent-cinema magic to Villeneuve’s work. Even as vistas and details and action are mustered into his spice opera, he always stays intimately attuned to character. A sense of inescapable destiny emerges in the film once deposed aristocrat Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) begins to welcome his role as a messiah.

Part One concluded with Paul and his mother Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) cast out into the vast expanse of the desert planet Arrakis, after his father Leto was killed in a coup staged by long-time rivals, the Harkonnens. Stranded in the hostile wilderness, Paul and Jessica found refuge among the native Fremen people. Part Two opens on Paul familiarising himself with their ways. But his presence splits the native community into two camps. One is made up of fundamentalists, led by Fremen chief Stilgar (Javier Bardem), who see Paul as the saviour prophesied to bring them deliverance from off-world colonisers and take back control of their planet along with its precious spice production. The other is made up of sceptics, like the young warrior Chani (Zendaya), who refuse to believe their saviour would be an outsider.

With time, between sandwalking sessions and resistance missions, Chani comes to love and respect Paul — enough to fight alongside him against the Harkonnens. But history has also given her enough reasons to believe the prophecy could be a fiction perpetuated to keep the Fremen compliant. Paul himself shares Chani’s scepticism. He knows the prophecy is seeded by the Bene Gesserit, a eugenics cult of which his mother Jessica is a card-carrying member. As the new Reverend Mother to the Fremen, Jessica spreads the gospel about Paul, influencing all to help turn myth into reality, while in close consultation with the unborn daughter in her womb. Elsewhere, Lady Margot (Léa Seydoux) is working on Bene Gesserit’s contingency plan, while Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh) and her father, the Padishah Emperor (Christopher Walken), grow more and more concerned about the rising popularity of the Fremen who goes by the nickname Muad’Dib — unaware that he is Paul.

Will Paul become the figurehead for the genocidal war from his nightmarish visions or will he be able to resist the fate marked out for him? Paul’s pickle becomes the viewer’s relish under Villeneuve’s spell. At the end of two parts, the story of Dune gets a clearer dramatic shape. If Part One was “only the beginning,” Part Two feels like the beginning of the end, teasing the possibility of a third, if not final, part to the saga. The film may be big in scope and ideas and “Braveheart” energy, but it also allows its cast to tell a story through smaller moments: there is Chalamet and Ferguson tapping into the tension between Paul and Jessica on the right way forward; there is Ferguson exulting in Jessica’s underhandedness; there is Chalamet coming into his own as Paul comes into his own, overcoming his imposter syndrome and accepting his inner darkness as the present slowly but surely catches up with his prescient glimpses into the future; there is Butler leaning into Feyd-Rautha’s barbarity; there is Bardem venting the fog of Stilgar’s blind faith; and there is Zendaya conveying the disappointment of having your worst fears confirmed. Paul’s story indeed plays differently when seen through Chani’s eyes as opposed to Stilgar’s.

Dune: Part Two is another equal opportunity special effects event that seamlessly blends CGI and practical elements. It is impossible not to be in awe of Greig Fraser’s eye for texture and contrast. Take even the backdrops for the action he so handsomely films. The warm colours of sandy Arrakis create a perfect foil to the anaemic washed-out palette of Giedi Prime, the dystopian homeworld of the Harkonnens. As far as the action is concerned, the flow of tension and the clarity of choreography prove to be the most immersive special effects of them all. When Paul and the Fremen ambush the Harkonnen soldiers by burrowing in the sand, waiting to pounce on their enemies, the action pits native knowledge of the lands against an outsider threat’s state-of-the-art weaponry. But where the action truly soars is in the climactic battle, a furious spectacle of majestic plotting and dynamic movement. Those final 30-odd minutes alone render all the hype non-essential. Forget the hype. Just hydrate.

Dune: Part Two is now playing in theatres across India.

Rewatch Dune: Part One

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