03/03/24

Cineworld, Edinburgh

It only needs a glance around the IMAX auditorium at Edinburgh’s Cineworld on this Sunday afternoon to confirm that Denis Villeneuve’s big gamble has paid off. There’s barely an empty seat in the building. 

Dune: Part One came along at a propitious time. It was October 2021 and we were barely out of lockdown, sitting uncertainly in our seats, wearing paper masks and slapping gel on our hands at five-minute intervals. What we needed now was something epic to take our minds off the pandemic and we certainly got that – but what we were also handed was an unfinished story and a three-year wait for its conclusion. 

Would it be worth it?

The answer to that is a resounding yes! If the first film occasionally felt a little too languid for comfort, Part Two ramps the action up to eleven, and Villeneuve has the good sense to keep everything rattling along at full speed ahead. The result is a film that, despite  a running time of just under three hours, never feels overlong. 

And in this case the word ‘epic’ barely does the material justice: this is an immense, eye-popping spectacle, an insanely inspired slice of cinematic world-building that at times leaves me almost breathless at what I’m witnessing up on the giant screen. This, my friends, is why they invented IMAX. If you haven’t seen Part One since its release (or at all for that matter), I’d advise you to catch up with it via streaming before sitting down to the second installment. I did and it helps no end to reacquaint myself with the characters.

We pick up exactly where we left off. Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and his mother, Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), have survived the murder of most of their family and have sought refuge with the Fremen people in the remotest part of the desert planet, Arrakis. Paul has finally met his (quite literal) dream girl, Chani (Zendaya), and, under the protection of Stilgar (Javier Bardem), he’s learning the ways of the Fremen. 

At the same time, he’s all too aware that some of the more devout members of the tribe are giving him meaningful looks and referring back to an ancient prophecy that a messiah will one day arrive and lead the Fremen to triumph over their oppressors.

Could this be a potential way for Paul to take revenge for the killing of his father by the evil Baron Harkonen (Stellan Skarsgard), who is still skulking in a bathtub doing unspeakably horrible things to everyone who comes near him? And if you think he’s bad, wait till you meet his nephew, the psychopathic Feyd-Rautha (Austin ‘Elvis’ Butler), who redefines the word ‘villain’ in one of the most remarkable screen transformations ever.

Villeneuve has excelled himself here and Dune: Part Two is an extraordinary achievement, one that cements his reputation as one of the great visionaries of the cinema, up there with the likes of David Lean and Stanley Kubrick. His interpretation of Frank Herbert’s source novel spins allegories about the links between religion and drugs, the evils of colonialism, the ruthlessness of royalty, the inevitability of war between the poor and the privileged. That’s all there lurking behind the dazzling action set pieces and massive explosions.

My only niggle (as with the first film) is that the 12A rating sometimes works against the film, when all that violent mayhem must remain essentially bloodless in order to tick the boxes – but it’s not a big enough quibble to dampen my enthusiasm for this giant-sized helping of space fantasy, that quite frankly makes the Star Wars franchise look positively amateurish by comparison. 

And if the story’s conclusion doesn’t feel quite as er… conclusive as I might have expected, the possibility of Dune Messiah looming on a distant horizon may account for it. A trilogy, perhaps? 

Well, it would be rude not to, right?

5 stars

Philip Caveney