“Dune: Part Two”: This film requires your entry

Simone Meier

There are things you fall into. In the water. And falling in love – that’s why ‘falling in love’ in English also means ‘falling in love’. You fall and fall and in the falling there is a surprise and a gentle defenselessness. And so you fall into “Dune: Part Two” – the two and a half years that have passed since the first part are forgotten in the first words and images, there we are again, in a world made entirely of sand, between the dunes of Arrakis, the hot, golden planet where a surprising number of young people destined for greatness fight and fall in love.

There is Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), possibly the savior of Arrakis, possibly the enlightened one, who must lead the desert people of the Fremen (of ‘Free People’, freed slaves) to a ‘paradise’ that is as green as it gets . There’s Chani (Zendaya), a Fremen leader, a prototypical Amazon, and also a member of a death squad.

Paul and Chani fall in love, which is one of their many decisions. It is moving when they sit on a dune in the evening in their ‘distillation suits’ that recycle all moisture and bodily fluids, rave about how beautiful a world made of sand is, and passively sniff ‘herbs’ together. Spice is the only raw material of Arrakis, a kind of hallucinogenic herbal mixture extracted from the upper sand layers. The lower ones are home to sandworms, enormous creatures with a crop made entirely of spines, but anyone as smart as the Fremen can surf the desert on them.

And there’s the other side: Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh), daughter of the emperor who delegated the depower and murder of Paul’s father to the monstrous Harkonnen. And Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen (Austin Butler), a pale, bald psychopath with great similarities to Stephen King’s clown from “It”, who will be in charge of Arrakis in the future. And just like Irulan and Paul’s mother, Jessica, the beautiful Lady Margot Fenring (Léa Seydoux) also belongs to the all-powerful and clairvoyant sisterhood of the Bene Gesserit, who have one thing in mind above all: manipulation and sperm theft. Lady Margot knows exactly how to get someone like Feyd-Rautha, with “desire and humiliation”.

Power is opposed to cunning, totalitarianism to anarchism, fundamentalism to rationality, there is no peace anywhere, not between individual parties, but also not within families, no child trusts father or mother, but at least there is a secret understanding between Paul and his unborn child Child Sister, from the beginning he talks to the fetus in the womb, to a being so strange, so floating and as bright as a lonely shining star in space.

And this little fetus creates the typical Denis Villeneuve effect, this unique image that makes you feel strangely at ease even in the most inhospitable Arrakis. In short, in “Dune” the visionary Villeneuve is mainly concerned with the one element that is missing on Arrakis and is only present in underground reservoirs: water.

The fetus is the only living thing that is allowed to live entirely in water and with which we can feel a kinship on the safe night of the cinema. For others, water means enormous hardship; obtaining it often means murder (it’s amazing what can be extracted from such a corpse), and crying means wasting water. And it affects the imagination of even the most level-headed engineers: the Harkonnen herb harvester looks like an octopus, their helicopters, sorry, ornithopters, buzzing dragonflies. Vielleuve has always merged the high-tech with the organic, giving the machines an innocence that is actually their own. Only those who command them are always evil.

Unlike the first part of “Dune,” which often resembled a sand meditation session, there is a lot more action in the second part. People against sand, people against machines, Willy Wonka against Elvis. Sorry, Chalamet versus Butler or Paul versus Feyd-Rautha, the two were not expected to have such martial gravitas and elegant fitness. And the “bloodlines”, always interfering dynastically in some way, reveal something terrible.

The world of the Harkonnen is now even more clearly fascist than in the first part, the ring scene shot in black and white seems to be copied from Leni Riefenstahl, which is a clear setting, but not entirely strange in the sci-fi genre. And the holy war of the South, which Paul, increasingly drunk on his own power, joins, also has its real political component.

Power is the wrong path to peace, no matter who holds power, says Villeneuve, says Frank Herbert, whose first “Dune” novel has finally been told with Villeneuve’s second “Dune” film. Shortly before the start of the second part, Villeneuve more or less promised a third. Zendaya and Chalamet would be there, the two happily talking about how much they can trust Villeneuve and how he has asked himself every question they ask him a hundred times and is incredibly confident in his answer. They had never felt so at home during a film shoot. Protected when the fetus is in the amniotic fluid.

You can feel it, you can see it, there is no uncertainty in Villeneuve’s ensemble, no matter how many spices or related things Frank Herbert himself may have consumed while writing. Chalamet and the others play the evil, the chosen, the resistant and all the pathos in the epic with a level-headedness and commitment that is almost a little worrying.

So if there’s a third part maybe in two or three years, there should be something other than the Fremen war against the Harkonnen, something after that, you can already guess what that might be, there’s a little teaser, and yeah, of course you definitely want to see it again, you want to surrender and surrender to this film, which uses gigantic resources to announce that gigantomy is a crime (but that’s nothing new in SciFi either), until you feel the sand between feel your fingers and breathe in the rhythm of Hans Zimmer’s soundscape.

“Dune: Part Two” runs 166 minutes and hits theaters on February 29.