One comes away from a showing of “Dune 2” not unhappy. It tells a rigorously classic story. It has scope and imagery. Some of the action sequences are enjoyable. Director Denis Villeneuve has also done a much better job of telling a story than he did in “Dune,” his 2021 movie, the third based on Frank Herbert’s 1964 “Analog” magazine serials.
So, good. Fans of the books and of the first film will probably be pleased by “Dune 2.” Those of us who never got around to the books but saw the first movie will be pleased that this one is better, if more conventional. People who haven’t read the books or seen the first movie are going to need a mess of help making any sense out of the sequel.
That said, by the time we drive home we are picking away at things that bothered us about the moving picture. It has no sense of humor. None. It does nothing with its actors. Villeneuve has Christopher Walken in his cast, playing the emperor, and he gets nothing out of him. Nothing.
He has Charlotte Rampling, an effective actress since the early 1960s, and he puts her in a box hat under a veil so substantial that we never see her face.
The young couple that are the hero and heroine of the tale, Timothee Chalamet as Paul and Zendaya as his desert-dwelling love interest, seem unlikely to provoke much immediate sympathy from the audience. And their parts don’t seem to develop much. His coloring changes and he becomes slightly more intense late in the film, after he has drunk the worm juice. That’s about it.
Dave Bautista just looks pained throughout. Stellen Skarsgaard is working in a vast fat suit that always takes all visual attention away from his face. Only Javier Bardem manages to act much here, and he’s limited to two emotions. Boy, does “Dune 2” need Oscar Isaac, whose character was killed off in the first film. Now pictures — ”Dune 2” is loaded with big images. Sometimes, perhaps because of the costumes, Chalamet ends up looking like Peter O’Toole dancing atop a de-railed train in “Lawrence of Arabia,” another movie set in sand deserts and about the attack of tribal types on a decaying but once grand empire. No wonder those who have commented on Herbert’s story have so frequently suggested that David Lean’s 1962 movie influenced the original novels. They have also suggested that the story is a commentary on the western world’s reliance on oil from the middle-east — remember that the serials were written before the “Arab Oil Embargo” which drove our search for domestic production. Oil, to some readers, is like the book’s “spice.”
“Spice” is the name of the sparkles in the food eaten by the Bedouin-like people in “Dune 2.” It alters its consumers’ consciousness, acting as speed, as a hallucinogenic, and as a capability expander that allows them to, for example, pilot space craft.
The rate of spice processing has caused the war between the insurgents — Paul, his pregnant mother, and the sand-wandering natives led by Bardem.
Then there are the worms. Maybe the reason “Dune 2” avoids humor is that if the audience once got to laughing, it would explode in merriment at every mention of the giant worms. These crawl along quick just under the top level of sand and appear when one taps a spot of some kind in the desert. Then one hooks onto them with grappling hooks and essentially sand skis while standing on them.
All liquid is precious to the wanderers, but none is so precious at the blue fluid they extract from the throats of the worms. This is a hallucinogenic liquid.
Pregnant Ma and Paul each try it. The liquid is a nice, memorable blue.
When one thinks of the details of “Dune 2,” one sees its images. Is this enough?
