'Dune: Part Two' Is The Best Sci-Fi Film of the Decade

You don’t need to be a studio head or a theater owner to realize that everyone in Hollywood has their fingers crossed for Dune: Part Two. Sure, the Oscars are right around the corner, and there are certainly plenty of great films from last year that are worth celebrating, but so far 2024 has been an absolute shit show at the box office. Business had been bad and the product has been even worse. Granted, we’re only three weeks into February, so the sample size is small, but you know things are rough in Tinseltown when trash like Argylle opens at No. 1 and the latest Marvel-affiliated widget off the production line currently sits on Rotten Tomatoes beside a fat green splat and a woeful 13% favorable rating.

What does any of this have to do with Dune: Part Two, you may ask. Well, director Denis Villeneuve’s hotly anticipated follow-up to his blissfully weird 2021 adaptation of Frank Herbert’s talismanic 1968 novel was originally slated to open last November. But because of the actors strike, Warner Bros. opted to push the film to March 2024, no doubt so that Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, and newcomers Florence Pugh and Austin Butler could peacock on the red carpet and promote it to the heavens on the late-night talk show circuit. Of course, sci-fi fans bitched and bellyached, as they do. But in retrospect the delay turned out to be a pretty wise move. After all, back in November, all anyone was talking about was Barbenheimer and Bradley Cooper’s fake schnozz. There wasn’t a lot of oxygen left in the room. But now? Now the stage couldn’t be better set for the further adventures of Paul Atreides. If the movies ever needed a savior, it’s right this second.

Glancing back at my review of the first Dune on this site back in 2021, I noticed that I called it “the best sci-fi movie of the decade.” Hyperbole? Not really. Remember, the decade wasn’t all that old yet. And to be honest, heading in to the new sequel, I stood by it. But walking out was a different story. Because Dune: Part Two is even better than the first film. The stakes somehow feel exponentially higher, the power struggles are even more mythic and Shakespearean, the onscreen world-building is richer and more exotically filigreed, and the visuals are even more epic and dazzling—something I didn’t think was possible. Dune: Part Two isn’t just an embarrassment of narrative and retinal riches; it’s the sort of big-canvas franchise storytelling we haven’t see since The Lord of the Rings came to a close back at the shire.

If you haven’t revisited the first Dune since it left the multiplex, you don’t need to worry. The opening moments of the film get you right back up to speed without sending you to Wikipedia. Picking up almost exactly where things left off in the opening chapter, we’re reminded that the House of Atreides has fallen with the death of Oscar Isaac’s Duke. The dreaded, pasty-faced Harkonnens have taken over the lucrative spice-mining trade on the desert planet of Arrakis. And our hero, the Duke’s son Paul Atreides (Chalamet), and his mystic mother Lady Jessica of the Bene Gessirit (Rebecca Ferguson), are now embedded with the local Fremen freedom fighters on Arrakis (Javier Bardem, Zendaya, et al) as they wage guerilla warfare on the colonialist Harkonnens—and now, by extension, the Emperor (Christopher Walken) and his daughter and one-day successor Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh), who’s been groomed for power by Charlotte Rampling’s black-veiled Reverend Mother. I’m sure that last sentence probably sounds like a lot of nerdy gibberish to the uninitiated (not to mention armchair grammarians), but then again no one would ever confuse Frank Herbert with Hemingway. Simplicity wasn’t his thing. But thanks to Villeneuve and co-writer Jon Spaihts’s elegant, economical script, it all scans more easily than you’d expect.

For those who have been tracking the fits and starts of the Dune franchise online, I don’t think I’m giving away anything by saying that Dune: Part Two is a middle chapter in the franchise. Yes, like the first film, it ends on a cliffhanger. But this time around, it feels like a steeper and more rewarding cliff. And, unlike most middle chapters of a trilogy, this doesn’t feel like a jerry-rigged bridge connecting two more interesting stories. In fact, a who’s who of welcome new faces arrive on the scene to add layers the first installment only hinted at. As the Emperor, Walken dials down his worst mannered tendencies to simultaneously convey a heavy-is-the-head-that-wears-the-crown world-weariness and a craven sense of realpolitik expediency. The Emperor is old enough to have seen how these power struggles play out and he knows that his time on the throne is finite, but at the end of the day loyalty is only as valuable as it is useful.

As his royal daughter, Pugh seems to bristle at the idea of being a pawn in a bigger game and how she’s only being told part of the story. And as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, the psychotically cruel nephew of Stellan Skarsgard’s Jabba the Hutt-like Baron Harkonnen, Austin Butler is all but unrecognizable behind his character’s alabaster skin, shaved eyebrows, and heavy metal bondage gear. He looks like a younger version of Robert Blake’s specter in David Lynch’s Lost Highway crossed with the most badass member of the Borg collective. His ambition is limitless. His morals are nonexistent. And his bloodlust is unquenchable. Butler, so good in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, goes big and gives us a villain to really hiss at. Despite all of Villeneuve’s pricey, future-shock CGI, Butler may be the director’s best special effect.

While other new additions include Léa Seydoux and Anya Taylor-Joy (no spoilers here), Dune: Part Two is, at its heart, a hero’s journey. And as original as Dune may be, its arc is straight out of Joseph Campbell. Which bring us to Chalamet’s Paul Atreides. As excellent and against-type as the actor was in the first Dune, his character’s evolution couldn’t really skirt the fact that he had to start off a little bit whiny and petulant, not unlike Luke Skywalker in A New Hope. But now that he’s made the leap to battle-tested hero, Chalamet really lets it fly, summoning a more interesting performance. Torn between avenging his slain father and fulfilling the messianic destiny that many of the Fremen (including Bardem’s Stilgar) want from him, Paul takes on an interesting new complexity that brings to mind Willem Dafoe’s fallible, self-doubting Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ, right down to his push-pull romantic connection with Zendaya’s Chani. Ferguson, meanwhile, is allowed to let her witchy side loose even more this time around. Her Lady Jessica is now pregnant, and she not only speaks with the baby daughter growing inside of her, she uses the unborn as a pawn to manipulate Paul’s next move. It’s a deliciously freaky puppet-master performance that manages to draw you in and creep you out.

Still, if Villeneuve’s film was just a gallery of characters fighting for power, warring over spice, and spouting metaphorical mumbo jumbo, it wouldn’t be half the movie it is (although it would still be pretty great). No, the director knows that we’ve paid to go on a ride. A deep, philosophical ride to be sure, but still a ride. And Dune: Part Two never forgets that it’s first and foremost a shock-and-awe eye-candy blockbuster. In an era when we go to the movies only to be bombarded over and over again with the same tired visual tropes and clichés, Villeneuve delivers enthralling, shoot-the-works set pieces that feel like high-wire acts of visual poetry and boundless originality. Witnessing Paul learn how to ride a giant sandworm like a rodeo cowboy waterskiing on a high-speed bullet train is as breathlessly thrilling as watching Charlton Heston racing a chariot in Ben-Hur.

Like its predecessor dialed up to eleven, Dune: Part Two is a spectacle that you feel with your head and your heart, but it also never lets your eyes take a break for a minute. It’s a film of grandeur that asks a lot of its audience and rewards us for going on its journey. My advice is don’t just see it, see it on as big a screen as you possibly can and just soak it up. Because Villeneuve shows us the magic of movies—a brand of magic that’s all too often invoked, but all too rarely felt these days. He’s given us nothing less than beautiful and bizarre sci-fi masterpiece bursting with big ideas and even bigger visual wonders.

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