You May Have Missed: Dune: Part Two (Dir Denis Villeneuve, 2h 48m, 2024)

I finally got round to reading Frank Herbert's seminal science-fiction novel, Dune, last year. Celebrating its sixtieth anniversary this year, it feels like a prophecy of science fiction's great arc over the last half a century. Its themes of mystical religions, chosen ones, galactic empires and desert planets influenced Star Wars, its ecological themes influence Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy and its machivellian power struggles influence myriad science fiction (and indeed fantasy) works; this is without mentioning the impact of Alejandro Jorodorowsky's unrealised adaption, from which (at least according to Jodorowsky) births Alien, The Terminator, The Fifth Element, and the equally labrynthine world of his graphic novel series The Incal, and its own shadow of influence over science-fiction. Both this, and the 1984 David Lynch version left Dune with a reputation as a seemingly unfilmable novel, joining Don DeLilo's White Noise (now a 2022 Netflix series) and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (nothing...yet) in that rarefied air of the unfilmable novel.

This was until 2021 when Dune Part One hit cinemas; essentially heralding the return of cinema alongside No Time to Die, its impressive scale, faithful adaption of the Herbert novel, and stunning visuals via cinematographer, Greig Fraser, not to mention Hans Zimmer's titanic score, not only made the film a financial success-on which Part Two relied, but also a critical one. Dune Part Two is, at basest, more of the same: picking up where Part One left off, we are, through Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh)'s thoughts about the fall of the House Atreidies , nimbly taken through the events of Part One, as her concerns about the possible involvement of her father, Shaddam IV (Christopher Walken), and the Harkonnens, led by the scheming and sinister figure of Baron Vladimir (Stellan Skarsgård), in the deaths of the House, a secret that could undermine his reign.

The Chosen One: Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) is at the centre of Dune Part Two's narrative

Meanwhile, on the planet Arakkis, otherwise known as Dune, Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), and his mother, Jessica, (Rebecca Ferguson), a Bene Gesserit, capable of supernatural powers and mind control, are now under the protection of Stilgar (Javier Bardem). Together with the Fremen under Stilgar, they travel towards the stronghold of the Fremen- Paul is the subject of millenia-old prophecies among the Fremen, who await a messiah, the Lisan al Gaib. Arriving at the citadel, so the surviving Atredies slowly become part of the Fremen. Whilst Paul is immediately accepted by the tribe, incluiding Chani (Zendaya), one of their warriors, who becomes close to Paul, Jessica's adoption by the nomadic people is both more complicated, and far more political, quickly using her role as Reverand Mother, the Fremens' spiritual leaders, to begin to manipulate the prophecy to hers, and Paul's advantage.

Against this, and Paul's training in the ways of the Fremen, culiminating in the visual spectacle, and further step in the prophecy, of Paul riding one of Arrakis's many colossal Sand Worms, the film nimbly balances the rule of the Harkonnens over the planet, under the brutish and ineffectual Rabban (Dave Bautista), whose rule, and attempts to harvest the psychoactive substance, Spice, begin to come under attack from the Fremen as Paul's renown and following grows, the rise of the other Harkonnen scion, the sadistic and gleefully unpleasant, Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler). All of this leads to the inevitable clash, and Holy War, between the Fremen and the rest of the universe, including the Emperor's fearsome Sardaukar warriors, as, inch by inch, moment by moment, Paul's destiny and the prophecy draw towards their inevitable climax

Desert Power: Dune Part Two is a visual treat but matches this with a tight narrative

At the centre of this is Paul himself; whilst Dune Part One saw the character develop from the scion of a noble house into a young man struggling for survival on a hostile world, into a capable fighter, Part Two is altogether more complex. Here, Villeneuve's script (cowritten with Jon Spaihts) does take some influence from the second Dune novel, Dune Messiah; whilst much of Paul's journey for the first half of the film, in which he steadily becomes part of the Fremen culture, and begins to lead their attacks on the Harkonnens is openly heroic, despite the increasingly Machivellian overtures of his mother, the second half, as the young man turns to desperate measures to avoid his visions of the future from being realised, is an altogether more unsettling beast. The entire first half of Dune Part Two builds to this moment, not of triumph but of horror, Paul's arrival at the Fremen camp immediately afterwards accompanied with Zimmer's score at its most unnerving, a rattling cello, a drone of dread, clawing its way across military drums, the imagery dark and Miltonic.

We have entered a work in which no side is now heroic; the Harkonnens are rapacious, cruel and sadistic: the unnerving prescence of Butler's Feyd-Rautha introduced murdering his "pets", his followers, and who lives only for the fight and for sadomasochistic violence and power, a dark shadow of Paul whose sparse scenes are to set him up as such. The Emperor is a weak demagogue, Walken imbuing him with a fragility, a tiredness, otherwise missing from the actor's body of work; he is but a pawn in younger men's power struggles, and his daughter, a smart turn from Pugh, is much of the same-a Part Three may well give her more power and cunning as the novels did. Against this is ranked Paul and the Fremen, an ever-more zealous set of followers whose religious fervour consumes all in its path, fanned by Jessica's corruption of the prophecy and, later Paul's adoption of it, to drive his followers on.

Absolute Power: Dune's sci-fi power struggle is a masterfully told, beautifully shot film about power and its relationship with faith.

Paul's arc is nuanced and complex: there is a chilling sequence in which Paul's control as he addresses the Fremen, as he preys upon their devotion to their beliefs, coalese, in what may be the best performance of Chalamet's career so far, soon leading tens of thousands to war; yet, it is the personal betrayal, the breaking of a relationship caused by Paul's quest for answers, and what they wrought upon the Fremen and the universe as a whole, that is felt most keenly at the film's denoument. That it is the Fremen, rather than the novel's original "Weirding Way", brought to the planet by the Atreides, that win Paul his way to his revenge against the Harkonnens only makes this more poignant, a white saviour using the tools of his supporters to condemn them, and the universe at large, to endless war. This sense of the Fremen being decieved, their desire for a homeland and a saviour, is the undercurrent that drives the second half, and where the original novel's cooption of TE Lawrence's time in Arabia, and his attempts to form an Arab State meet the unmistakble cinematic language of David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962), attacks on convoys, colossal battle scenes et al.

Yet, Dune Part Two is, despite its cerebrality, the ability to read it and its prequel as everything from cynical dismissal of theism as a trick to keep power and win it, to eco-thriller where a planet's native embattled population use their knowledge of their homeland to beat a technogically advanced foe, to a fantasy revenge film in which the young prince finds his all-encompassing revenge bitter and empty, above all of this, Dune Part Two is a tour-de-force of visual cinema. There's too many shots to talk about, from the reintroduction of Paul and the Fremen in blown-out oranges and deep blacks as they track a unit of soldiers, to the jawdropping arrival of the sandworms to sweep across the Emperor's lines, in a shot so gloriously, ridiculously, scaled that it almost steps out of human scale altogether-the fact that this is preceded by an atomic bomb detonating cannot be lost on the audience-to the stark solarised effect on Giedi Prime, in which the film's colourpalate is reduced down to black and white.

Dune Part Two is, simply put, one of the best looking, best sounding, best shot films of 2024: Villeneuve has raised the bar set (by himself) on Blade Runner 2049 (2017) to bring one of the most visually stunning pictures I have ever had the pleasure to watch. Moreover, Dune Part Two's narrative scale, its ambition, and its central performances make this a truly epic piece of cinema, and a fitting companion to its precessor, whilst improving on it in almost every single way, all to match a genre-defining tale of revenge, power, and zealotry on a galactic scale

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

Dune Part Two is available in the UK vis NowTV and US via Netflix, and on DVD from Warner Bros.

Next week, we swap the deserts of Arakkis for the toilets of Tokyo as we arrive at our final cinematic look back at 2024 with Wim Wenders' Perfect Days.