Everyone is blown away by “Dune: Part Two”: the second entry in Denis Villeneuve’s science fiction saga, based on Frank Herbert’s novel of the same name, immediately reached the top of the IMDb Top 250, on the social cinephile network On Letterboxd, the film currently has a sensational average rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars (with 891,000 votes cast). If you scroll through the comments there, it’s superlative after superlative: talk of life-changing screen experiences, larger-than-life cinematic art, and the best science fiction film of all time. And “Dune: Second Part” also comes across as more than just good for us: FILMSTARTS editor Joana Müller gave it the rare maximum rating of 5 out of 5 stars in her review.
I will probably offend some fans with this text and I’m mentally preparing for a series of angry comments “I didn’t understand the movie”, but I really wish you all the joy in Villeneuve’s “Dune” universe – I’m just sharing them I don’t, and I can’t really understand them either. Small disclaimer: the type of science fiction film that “Dune” represents is not necessarily my favorite genre. But even though I’m less interested in anything than the most recent Star Wars series, it’s completely clear to me why George Lucas’ original trilogy is considered groundbreaking. I can also learn a lot from David Lynch’s much-maligned 1984 version of “Dune.” But When it comes to current blockbusters, I’m usually at a loss – and “Dune 2” is no exception.
Wonder or Dune? I don’t feel like it anymore either
I’ll start with the positive: I really liked the so-called Sandwalk by Paul Atreidis (Timothée Chalamet) and Chani (Zendaya), which functions as a kind of romantic expressive dance and brings a touch of visual poetry to the film. The much-discussed black-and-white sequence on the Harkonnen planet Giedi Prime (more about that here) is also one of the (meager) highlights for me, and not only because of the always great Léa Seydoux. Because the color disappears completely from the film, it gains life, movement – and strangeness.
Beyond that, though, it’s almost incomprehensible to me why “Dune: Part Two” is considered monumental cinema. – and I can really only explain it by saying that the time of big, groundbreaking screen events has been over for a while and there is simply a lack of alternatives. In short, there are only two types of blockbusters at the moment, with the hyper-ironic, old-fashioned cash grabs (now more like cash grabs) of Marvel & Co. and the sterile, leaden seriousness of directors like Christopher Nolan or Denis Villeneuve are just two sides of the same thing for me. Because I don’t really want to see any more of it.
Does this have to be monumental cinema?
Villeneuve’s ‘Dune’ films want to be read as a political allegory, they are about colonial exploitation and religious fundamentalism, there is also an ambivalent character study and even a love story hidden somewhere. What they explicitly do not want to be: the fantastic genre films that are also based on the material – for that you should probably stick to the David Lynch version.
Villeneuve translates the seriousness of the content into staging of clumsiness, and all the bizarre masquerades and fantasy terms seem all the more ridiculous the more the Canadian tries to disguise the fact that ‘Dune’ also includes a camp and a fair. Except for Javier Bardem in a thankless comic relief role, all the characters act constantly unpleasantand even outside the gladiator fight in black and white, Villeneuve attached great importance to leaving as little color as possible in the film – e.g. by also placing an ugly beige filter over lifeless sand and stone landscapes. Should this be the ultimate in today’s overwhelming cinema?
In general: Where William Wyler had 50,000 (!) extras lined up for the crowd scenes in “Ben Hur” 65 years ago, we now look at Chalamet from a bird’s eye view as he walks through an armada of CGI men who have already hundreds have been imitated. sometimes some edges of the picture no longer even move (“the main thing is that it looks a lot”) – when did it happen that something so serious could be considered “monumental”?
‘Long’ Doesn’t Automatically Mean ‘Epic’
Another misconception: that ‘long’ automatically means ‘epic’. From what I understand, “Dune: Part Two” has little in the way of epicness in the sense of a broad, turbulent story. To be honest, I wonder how the story hasn’t made any progress in five and a half hours – both parts taken together. I remember the first “Dune” movie as a 150-minute exposition, a seemingly never-ending world building. In the second, relatively much happens, but the individual series are awkwardly placed next to each other rather than forming a flowing whole. In both cases, the result for me was the same: boredom, disinterest, the feeling of being left out.
Especially because this time too an emotional anchor is missing, an element that turns the characters from symbolic placeholders into figures. It could have been Paul and Chani’s relationship, but… Apparently Villeneuve is only afraid of someone who accuses him of kitsch – so he preemptively bans anything that even remotely resembles human feeling from the film.
Instead, the characters explain the plot to themselves and to us in tiresome dialogue scenes (it is not without some irony that Villeneuve in particular stated during the promotion of THIS film that he considered the dialogue uncinematic), and to suggest grandeur, it is simply the case that Hans Zimmer’s obligatory drone score is pushed to the limit again and again, until, in combination with the visual language that does not have much variation in terms of motifs, only redundancy remains. .
There is little I want more from cinema right now than a blockbuster vision that can truly amaze, overwhelm, captivate and move me. However, I don’t expect it any more from Villeneuve than from Marvel.