Dune II

Or: Desert Power II, The Desert Gets More Powerful

Or, still: Dear Abby, My Partner is the Messiah, and a Very Naughty Boy.

I have a fever, and the only cure is desert power. When we last left Paul Atraides (Timorous Chameleon) the spiced up space-wunderkind and his mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) things were not looking well. With a dead father, a shattered house, on the run from the evil deflated party ballon of their foes, they were entirely dependent on the indigenous Fremen of Arakas, called Dune. The shots were long. The visions were trippy. Zendaya had hardly any lines. Not all of these problems have been addressed (and the amount of times desert power is said earnestly is distressingly low) but Denis Villenevue’s second installment of Frank Herbert’s Dune has at least solidified its storytelling and delivers the science fiction sublime, that captured our attentions three long years ago.

A big improvement is we get to see more Zendaya, as Freman warrior Chani. While taken by Paul’s magnetism, she’s much less sure about his status as Chosen One then the rest of her people. Her relationship with her friend Shishakli (an excellent performance by Souheila Yacoub) turn Chani away from the fated girlfriend of the original source, and brings needed depth to the unavoidable awkwardness of Dune’s central Outsider-Natives-Better-Than-The-Natives, plot. (Though of course, much is made of the fact that Paul’s first worm ride, hooks him up with the largest worm in memory. Chani cannot have been pleased.)

Chani’s war between affection and dependence, is reflected by Javier Bardem’s Stilgar, an elder statesmen fully committed the prophesy Paul is meant to fulfill, and more than willing to lay down his life and reputation for the promised paradise. “I don’t care if you believe! I believe!” he shouts at Paul in a moment of hopelessness, a delivery that left me oddly teary. He provides much needed levity to the grim and grand vision, while still, with Zendaya, guides the central question of the story, and frames Paul and Jessica’s decent into the worst possible versions of themselves: Paul steered by necessity to become a genocidal overlord, while Jessica becomes a sinister minister and embraces outright villainy (which Ferguson excels at). The tragedy, and Herbert’s point about the nature of power, comes into sharper focus and not as tiresome as it might have been otherwise).

Less well handled is the parallel story between Paul’s rival Feyd-Ruatha Harkonnen (Austin Butler), a homicidal torturer who is charged with destroying Paul and the Fremen, and his squicky relationship with Bene Gesserit Priestess Margot Fenring (Lea Seydoux). While the depictions of the Harkonnen homeward, with its nightmarish architecture and monochrome light, does, in the best traditions of science fiction, point obliquely to our antagonists culture and why they’re the such freakydeeks (a technical term), the intended shaping of Feyd-Ruatha’s character and Bene Gesserit’s plot falls far short of what it could be.

Still, its far more intriguing (or at any rate less mockable) than the brief checkins at the Imperial Palace where the Emperor (Christopher Walken,) palpably does the bare minimum (both as character and actor), and his daughter Irulan (Florence Pugh) stoically muses on politics while best in increasingly ridiculous costumes (by the end, she is about to be consumed by ravenous zippers. I’m all for space fashion, but there is a line).

While Desert Power is only obliquely referred to (“Power of the Desert.” Boo.) and Duncan Idaho does not erupt from a plane to thunderous applause, I enjoyed the second Dune much more than its predecessor. It’s three hours, and feels it, but, unlike the first installment, I would be hard pressed to find something that could be immediately trimmed. There is something classically Hollywood (and fitting of the run time) about packing huge numbers of people into a desert cavern and seeing them be converted from skepticism to zealotry, which the film does very well. And the doom laden portents, the thundering drums, or the silhouette of a heat shimmered phantom brought me out in chills.