Hard to come up with a more trenchant or accurate summation of my thoughts than: "movie owned", because that's where I really ended up with this — this was not my favorite science fiction film of all time, and I think there are some quibbles and flaws, but it absolutely owned.
Some rapid-fire takes:
- I think almost every divergence Denis took from the original book was correct, much to the chagrin of very few ultraloyalist dorks. The "who is the traitor?!" arc was fairly hackeneyed and anti-climactic in the book, and would have chewed up otherwise-precious time in the film; Alia being a mutant toddler would have translated very poorly onto the screen; even my biggest complaint from the original, the immediate reveal that the concept of the Lisan al Gaib was a Bene Gesserit plot, was steered into in a rewarding way by recasting Chani as more of a skeptic.
- I suspect we might look back on this film with an understanding that it reified the superstardom of its four leads in a way that few prior films have done.
- Walken and Pugh's characters are not given much to do in the books, nor are they in this film, nor do their portrayals redeem or salvage what are fairly wooden characters overall. (Walken, in particular, felt like a kind of stunt casting whose choice was understandable but incorrect.)
- A couple sequences in this film — the fireworks on Giedi Prime, the nameless Harkonnen troops silently ascending the crag — will sit with me for a long time as some of the most indelible sequences in science fiction cinema. Truly incredible things.
- I thought Chalamet's transformation over the course of the film was tremendous, and he sold Paul's journey much more than the book's tortured monologuing did.
I think that in many ways, Dune 2 represents the apogee of blockbuster genre storytelling: a visual marvel, a spectacle of brilliance and novelty, a parable that raises more questions than it answers, a meal that can be enjoyed both as a child and an adult. Here's hoping it launches a thousand ships.
★★★★
