“Dune” series: “Dune 2”: pathos, violence and redemption

Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune 2”, the sequel to the Oscar-winning first part of the galactic space opera longed for by countless fans, is celebrated in the feature pages as if the French-Canadian director had reinvented science fiction. Like many blockbusters in this genre, this visually aesthetically opulent work with a fantastic star cast suffers from the fact that it is just another new edition of a material that is already showing its age. Contemporary science fiction rarely makes it to the cinema.

For the film industry, with multimillion-dollar budgets, the economic margin is crucial. Tried-and-tested material attracts viewers to the cinemas, which is why “Blade Runner” and “Total Recall” have already been re-released and so many “Star Wars” or “Star Trek” remakes are on the horizon. Since “Dune 1” was successful at the box office, the sequel was inevitable. Frank Herbert’s multi-volume work “Dune” was considered just as unfilmable as the equally genre-defining space opera trilogy “Foundation” by Isaac Asimov, which was published 20 years earlier and is currently being implemented as an elaborate streaming series by Apple TV+.

On the one hand, of course, this has to do with a much better trick technique, which comes into its own when Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) races through the desert of Arakis standing on a gigantic sandworm in “Dune 2”. On the other hand, Villeneuve takes more than five hours for the first of the six volumes of the “Dune” series, which is roughly the length of a standard mini-series. With Apple TV+ you even dream of ten seasons, i.e. around 100 hours, of implementing Asimov’s trilogy. This leaves room to develop more complex narrative structures from the original novel and possibly also to set your own accents. While “Dune 1” seemed almost like the more detailed and technically superior, but ultimately stoic retelling of David Lynch’s 1984 “Dune” version, which completely flopped financially, Villeneuve’s “Dune 2” dramaturgically implements the conflicts inherent in the novel’s plot, even those in Lynch’s does not occur. This is above all the inner conflict of Paul Atreides, who for a long time refused to accept his prophesied role as savior and instead denounced it as part of a religious ideology of domination.

Frank Herbert’s first “Dune” novel was published in 1965 at a time when cultural countermovements were forming and many were eager for a social narrative that went beyond rational explanatory models. That’s why many hippies had “Dune” right next to “Lord of the Rings” on their bookshelves. Herbert’s novel is set in a post-digital world without AI and robots, which is influenced by religion and stages power politics as a metaphysical event. The looming war of feudal structures between Harkonnen, Atreiden, the Emperor and other ruling houses in a declining empire is reminiscent of “Game of Thrones” in places.

Above all, “Dune 2” is a story about religious fanaticism, which is critically reflected on the surface and which the female and angry heroine Chani (Zendaya) does not fall for, but which is evident in the weapon-like clatter of drawn swords and the staccato of those fired Laser weapons go down. The action factor in this neo-monumental film, which not unjustly reminds many of “Lawrence of Arabia” and is also part of a series of new mega-blockbusters such as “Oppenheimer”, is enormous. In terms of visual aesthetics, this is convincing as genre cinema, also because of the impressive cast, from Florence Pugh as the cunning emperor’s daughter to Christopher Walken, who plays the lousy galactic emperor, and Javier Bardem, who leads the anti-hierarchical tribalistic Fremen through the desert with a potbelly.

Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” series is to be continued, which should happen if part 2 is financially successful. In an interview with the Times of London, the star director recently complained about a cinema that is currently too dialogue-heavy and corrupted by television. According to Villeneuve, image and sound are the means of cinema. In his pathetic “Dune” films, dialogue could almost be dispensed with.

Another important science fiction director of our time, Alex Garland, instead makes chamber play-like and dialogue-rich films like “Ex Machina” or “Annihilation”. Garland’s latest action-packed film “Civil War”, which will be released in US cinemas in April, will be a critical contribution to the US election and a continuation of the dystopian political SF like “Bushwick” and will have significantly less dialogue than usual. Maybe that’s the case an artistic trend of our time that could also scare you because, as in the case of “Dune 2”, it reproduces socio-political developments as entertainment cinema rather than really critically reflecting on them: namely, not rationally based on emancipation, but emotionally based on action, pathos, violence and the longing for redemption.

»Dune 2«, USA 2024. Director: Denis Villeneuve; Book: Denis Villeneuve, Jon Spaihts. With: Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Austin Butler, Florence Pugh, Christopher Walken, Léa Seydoux, Stellan Skarsgård, Charlotte Rampling, Javier Bardem. 167 min. Now in the cinema.