Critics hail return to the desert of Arrakis in ‘Dune: Part Two’

“Dune: Part Two,” the highly anticipated sequel to the 2021 sci-fi box office hit, finally arrived in U.S. theaters on Friday, and the reviews are overwhelmingly positive.

The film, which stars Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Javier Bardem and Stellan Skarsgard, is based on the second half of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel and dives deeper into the story of Paul Atreides (Chalamet) as he navigates the powerful forces that control the universe and his own destiny.

“Dune: Part Two” has a 94% “Certified Fresh” score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 95% Audience Score.

“The year’s first surefire blockbuster is a sequel that outdoes Denis Villeneuve’s first epic 2021 sand opera,” writes ABC News critic Peter Travers, who also felt it was a “tad” long at 2 hours and 46 minutes.

“Villeneuve’s film is a grand success, working on an even broader canvas than the first Dune — but it’s tinged with deep mournfulness, a quality that sets it apart from its blockbuster contemporaries,” writes David Sims of The Atlantic.

“’Dune: Part Two’ builds a world that’s undeniably spectacular, compressing a sprawling, borderline incomprehensible story into an efficient narrative-delivery system,” Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post writes.

“I was not even a huge fan of ‘Dune: Part One,’ which struck me as more visually and sonically hypnotic than it was narratively coherent. I was also among the critics who found its truncated ending almost comically abrupt,” writes Slate’s Dana Stevens. “But to his great credit, Villeneuve has followed through on the task he set for himself in Dune’s moody, enigmatic, and expansive first chapter: He now returns to the world he so painstakingly established, ready to orchestrate the grand-scale conflicts that are about to tear it apart.”

Negative reviews are few and far between.

Kevin Maher of The Times U.K. is among the film’s detractors.

“Villeneuve has taken the worst and most preachy bits from ‘Avatar,’ about how imperialism is fuelled by the exploitation of natural resources, and seemingly repackaged them with an orange Instagram filter,” Maher writes.

Odie Henderson of the Boston Globe writes, “’Dune: Part Two’ tries to explore ideas about whether an outsider should lead and/or save a race of people, but the half-hearted efforts are almost as bad as if these notions hadn’t been interrogated at all.”

“Dune: Part Two” is rated PG-13.

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