Dune: Part Two movie review: shifting sands

Dune is a white-savior story. This is a problem. Cuz fuck those guys. (They’re almost always guys.)

Sure, we’re eight thousand years in the future, on planets far far away; Earth seems to have been all but forgotten. But our protagonist, Paul Atreides, is a young man with white skin, scion of a feudalistic, colonialistic lord, played by a white American actor of European extraction; the character is from a world that is distinctly Scottish-flavored. He inspires the Fremen — the oppressed indigenous, brown-skinned, Muslim-esque peoples of the desert *cough* Middle Eastern *cough* planet Arakis, and, as depicted here, more a collective mass than individual people — to rise up against their oppressors, the Harkonnens, who are other (literally) white-skinned feudalistic colonials.

(Arakis is home to the “spice” that is required for interstellar navigation. The spice is this civilization’s oil. And unlike in our 20th/21st-century reality, the people sitting on the incredibly valuable, incredibly essential natural resource are not the ones who benefit from it. Dune is Lawrence of Arabia if good ol’ T.E. headed out there after WWII, when car culture started booming, instead of during WWI.)

Arguments have been made that Dune — the series of novels by Frank Herbert that began in the 1960s, the first of which is the basis for 2021’s Dune and now Dune: Part Two, from Québécois filmmaker Denis Villeneuve — is, in fact, a critique of the white-savior narrative. But that only gets us so far. I posted this comment in response to a reader bringing up “but it’s a critique, though” following my review of 2021’s Dune:

Whether the Prophecy [that helps install Paul in his white-savior role] is “real” or not is beside the point. White Western men, whether Herbert and Villeneuve, think it’s plausible that indigenous people would accept an outsider — who just happens to look more like a white Western man than he does like those indigenous people — as their salvation. Even if you want to take Dune as a critique of the idea of the white savior — and, again, there’s no hint of that in this movie — we can still question that critique being structured as it is.

In further discussion, I wrote:

[T]he movie… centers Paul. This is Paul’s story, which creates empathy for Paul. The Fremen are barely characters.

A far more potent critique of the white-savior narrative might center the Fremen, perhaps put someone like Zendaya’s Fremen warrior Chani in the protagonist role — why can’t she have a hero’s journey, rather than Paul? But that’s not the book that Herbert wrote, and if Villeneuve wants to adhere closely to the novel, Paul-as-savior is the story we are stuck with. (Dune is one of the biggest selling novels of all time — not just in the science-fiction genre, but of any stripe — with a devoted fanbase that would surely be cheesed off by too much divergence from the text. *sigh* Perhaps there will come a day when fanboys don’t rule. But it is not this day.)

So now we have the back half of Villeneuve’s (Blade Runner 2049, Arrival) adaptation of the first Dune novel. Does it offer any critique of the white-savior trope? I don’t see it. Paul is unquestionably a white savior. Most of the Fremen accept him as their savior. And while there is critique of cultural appropriation (more on that in a bit), it’s also arguably a problem that the primary Fremen characters here — Chani and Javier Bardem’s Stilgar — are not played by actors of MENA (Middle Eastern and North African) background. It’s not that Zendaya (Spider-Man: Homecoming) and Bardem (Everybody Knows, mother!) aren’t terrific; of course they are. And they look more the part than could have been the case. (There are white Westerners in these roles in David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation of the book, for instance.) But it’s a problem that a movie that purports to critique colonialism kinda looks like a good example of colonialism, even in the woke 2020s.

That said, Paul is, appropriately, not a good guy in the eyes of anyone except, maybe, the Fremen. (This is in keeping with the books.) There are no genuine good guys here. (Maybe Chani could be considered such. She is at least clear-eyed about what is going on with Paul and the Fremen.) Dune: Part Two is a warning about demagoguery. About the use of religion as a tool to control the masses. This warning, as Villeneuve deploys it, is blatant, ridiculously over-the-top. But given the times we are living in, with populist fascism and fundamentalist religious bullshit springing up everywhere (and no, I’m not talking about anything Muslim), over-the-top feels like it might be necessary to get some thick-headed numbskulls to see it.

And still, many won’t.

*sigh*

Anyway…

Dune 2 is a genuinely terrifying movie, though it sneaks up on you, even if you are an openminded, politically aware soul already attuned to the horrific shit going down in our real 2020s world. Partly it’s terrifying because obviously so many people — including the artists making blockbuster movies — can see what’s happening to us all, and yet we seem to be collectively incapable of stopping it.

There’s little escapism here, is what I’m saying.

Young Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet: Don’t Look Up, Little Women), having survived the massacre of his House by House Harkonnen in the first movie, is now living among the Fremen in remote wastes of Arakis, trying to prove to them that he is more than a spoiled princeling and genuinely wants to promote their independence from galactic occupiers. (Why does he want this? Is it just revenge, justice for his father, Duke Leto? These questions are part of the thorniness that is Paul Atreides.) This means he has to contend with a prophecy that suggests that he may be the liberator long foretold who will release the Fremen from the shackles of those stealing the sweet spice from under their literal feet. Some of the Fremen, such as the older Stilgar, have fallen under Paul’s inadvertent spell. Others, including Chani and her young friends? Not so much.

Villeneuve, who adapted Herbert’s book with screenwriter Jon Spaihts (Passengers, Doctor Strange), gives us a lot of truly lovely stuff as he depicts life among the Fremen. I found it beautiful how sand walking, the arhythmic movement that the Fremen use to avoid drawing the attention of the giant subterranean sandworms, looks like dancing, and how the patterns sand walking leaves in the sand looks like Arabic script. Fremen culture is much more elaborately depicted here than it was in the first film. (Which makes it much more frustrating that no Middle Eastern actors were cast in significant Fremen roles. The talent is there. C’mon.) We appreciate the immense tragedy when the Fremen culture is attacked again, in a renewed Harkonnen offensive to retake what they see as theirs.

The political machinations are many here, and I don’t want to spoil them for those who haven’t read the book, which will be most of the movie’s viewers, because book bestsellership requires far smaller an audience than movie blockbustership. (The fantastic cast also features Christopher Walken [The Jungle Book, Eddie the Eagle] as the feckless emperor, and Léa Seydoux [No Time to Die, The Grand Budapest Hotel] as another Bene Gesserit wielding powers simultaneously awesome and pathetically prosaic; Josh Brolin [Avengers: Endgame, Deadpool 2] returns as Atreides soldier Gurney Halleck.) But this is very much a story about power as control, and about the politics that enable that control as religion. That Fremen prophecy foretelling the arrival of a liberator? Total fabrication of the Bene Gesserit religious order, from which women pull the galactic strings. They’ve been working on this for centuries. But even they, with their mystical powers and well-earned aura of menace, do not have the control they think they do.

Dune 2 is ugly and outrageous and brutal and cynical, and it hits square in the social plexus of the horrifying real-world 2024 milieu in which we all exist… which slightly softens all the white-savior, cultural-appropriation stuff. This movie, while not perfect, has important shit to say, shit that must be heard. Again: Villeneuve’s hand with it all is an elegant sledgehammer, bashing us around the head about things we should already be able to see for ourselves but clearly can’t. Or won’t.

It’s like this: As the cruel, sluglike* Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård: Borg vs McEnroe, Our Kind of Traitor) vies to regain his control of Arakis, he removes his Arakis lieutenantship from one nephew, Beast Rabban (Dave Bautista: Knock at the Cabin, My Spy), and hands it to another, Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler: Aliens in the Attic). When she hears of this, the emperor’s daughter, Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh: Oppenheimer, Black Widow), is appalled: “But he’s psychotic,” she objects. And the first thing that sprang to mind for me was: But aren’t they all?

(*Ugliness equating to evil? There’s a critique of Dune to be mounted here, too.)

Villeneuve’s depiction of the Harkonnen homeworld, Giedi Prime, will make your blood run cold. We meet Feyd-Rautha as his uncle grants him a gladiatorial battle in a brutalist stadium to prove his mettle before the populace — it’s fixed, of course; the other combatants are drugged — and it’s some real Leni Riefenstahl shit. Bad enough, but Giedi Prime basks in the sickening glow of a “black sun,” and cinematographer Greig Fraser shoots this not in a creamy, dreamy black-and-white but in a kind of infrared, which leaches color and is simply stomach-churningly wrong. The kind of wrong that screams: Human beings should not be living in this kind of natural environment, and no wonder the Harkonnens are such awful people. (Oh, and “black sun” is definitely a Nazi thing.)

But it isn’t only the Harkonnens who are psychotic: Paul and his mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson: Reminiscence, Doctor Sleep), by now aren’t much better. A Bene Gesserit priestess, she accepts the role of Reverend Mother among the Fremen, and she leans hard into the job; tattooing her face with Fremen symbols that represent the prophecy is the least of it. It’s more white-savior crap — why would the Fremen want an outsider as their spiritual leader? she doesn’t even understand their culture, has to be taught about it — but Villeneuve also leans hard into showing how deeply wrong what Jessica is doing is. In the first film, she seemed a sympathetic character, defying the Bene Gesserit leadership in the form of the calculating Reverend Mother Mohiam (Charlotte Rampling: The Little Stranger, Red Sparrow) and throwing a spanner into their plan to manipulate the powerful men who rule the galaxy. (It’s complicated, but as part of the Bene Gesserit long game, she was supposed to have a daughter by Leto, not the son that Paul is; the sex of her child was under her control. Bene Gesserit workarounds for that come into play here.) Now, though? It seems that it wasn’t galactic fascism she objected to, merely the particular flavor of it that would have excluded Paul. With a path in sight to grab power for her son, she’s suddenly all for it.

Are we, the audience, suddenly all for it as well? Dune 2 is a long movie, and it revels in that: it’s seductive; it sucks you in, gets you on Paul’s side, as in the sequence when he calls a sandworm to ride for the first time, to demonstrate his worthiness as a member of Fremen society. It is big, bold, grand mythmaking stuff. The film prompts us to cheer his success… and it’s tough not to. But I would like to think — and it’s not that much of a stretch, really — that Villeneuve is very desperately asking his audience to recognize the cognitive dissonance that many of us will come into this film with, and possibly leave with: Can we see that this young man whom we reflexively applaud is actually, you know, a tyrant in the making? And what do we do with that realization if we do come to it?

Because one of the last images of Dune: Part Two is Paul rallying the Fremen for even bigger, bloodier battles to come (whether a presumed third film materializes or not), and while the visual details of it are quite different from the Nazi-esque rally on the Harkonnen homeworld — the colors are deceptively warm, for one — it is, at its root, exactly the same vile horror, about the power of personality and propaganda to move masses.

The big question here is this: Are we able to see this? And if so, what do we do with awareness?

Villeneuve is fucking with us in a way that I’m not sure mainstream audiences are ready to deal with. Because real “leaders” in the real world are pulling the same shit. The stakes are so very high. Are we up to the challenge?

see also:
• Dune movie review: dreams of alien worlds

more films like this:
• Dune (1984) [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Max US | Mubi UK]
• Lawrence of Arabia [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Netflix UK]