The art of cinematic spectacle is alive and rocking in Dune: Part Two
Having gone big in Dune, his 2021 adaptation of Frank Herbert’s futuristic opus, Denis Villeneuve has gone bigger and more far out in the follow-up.
Set in the aftermath of the first movie, the sequel resumes the story boldly, delivering visions both phantasmagoric and familiar. Like Timothee Chalamet’s dashingly coifed hero – who steers monstrous sandworms over the desert like a charioteer – Villeneuve puts on a great show. The art of cinematic spectacle is alive and rocking in Dune: Part Two, and it’s a blast.
It’s a surprisingly nimble moonshot, even with all its gloom and doom and brutality. Big-screen enterprises, particularly those adapted from books with a huge, fiercely loyal readership, often have a ponderousness built into every image.
In some, you can feel the enormous effort it takes as filmmakers try to turn reams of pages into moving images that have commensurate life, artistry and pop on the screen. Adaptations can be especially deadly when moviemakers are too precious with the source material: they’re torpedoed by fealty.
Dune made it clear that Villeneuve isn’t that kind of textualist. As he did in the original, he has again taken plentiful liberties with Herbert’s behemoth to make Part Two, which he wrote with the returning Jon Spaihts. Characters, subplots and volumes of dialogue (interior and otherwise) have again been reduced or excised altogether.
