When last we left: In the space feudalism of the galactic Imperium, the reformist House Atreides has been in a cold war with the evil House Harkonnen for years. Harkonnen has power in the nobles’ council (Landsraad) largely because they control the planet Arrakis (commonly known as ‘Dune’) which is the only source of the drug “spice.” The spice is critical to galactic civilization because it is a psychoactive drug that allows navigators to make the calculations necessary to fold space-time and reach other planets. As the story starts, the Emperor has turned the Harkonnen fief in Dune over to the Atreides, a move that is so lacking in obvious motive that Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac) rightly suspects a trap. As it turns out the Emperor has fully shifted support to Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgaard) and supplied him with some of his Sardukar commandos. The Atreides, no longer on their home turf, are dealing with an enemy that knows the territory, and Harkonnen troops with Sardukar support anhiliate most of the Atreides forces. Leto is betrayed by his household doctor, Wellington Yueh, paralyzed and brought to the Baron because the Baron is holding Yueh’s wife hostage. Either knowing or suspecting that the Baron will not let him and his wife out alive, Dr. Yueh implants a poison gas capsule in Leto’s jaw, so after the Baron predictably kills Yueh, he floats over to Leto to gloat, Leto bites down on the capsule and the poison gas kills everybody in the room – except the Baron, who barely managed to survive because of the anti-grav harness he needs to compensate for his abnormal obesity. (Or as Oscar Isaac might put it, ‘somehow, Baron Harkonnen returned.’)
What is not confirmed at the time is that Leto’s concubine, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), and heir Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) managed to escape capture and were able to survive in the desert with help from some surviving retainers. They eventually made their way to the territory of Stilgar (Javier Bardem) a Fremen (native) leader who had been negotiating with Duke Leto.
Given that this intellectual property has been around for years longer than Star Wars, there are no real spoilers given how many fans there are of Frank Herbert’s original books, so there is not much point in going over the original narrative, which has already been brought to film at least twice. But filmmaker Denis Villeneuve has changed some things that may alarm Dune purists. Notably, the second half of the first book, which is the scope of this film, takes place over the course of years, whereas this movie takes place only over a few months, given that Jessica’s second child, Alia, is still in the womb, whereas in previous versions Alia ends up taking a major role in the final act.
At first, the external conflict that led to this movie is made secondary to Paul’s internal conflict. He, and his new girlfriend Chani (Zendaya) realize that the Fremen belief in a savior from beyond the planet isn’t a supernatural revelation but the result of centuries of manipulation from Jessica’s Bene Gesserit order. Chani and her best friend serve as examples of how Paul still manages to win over the Fremen as a whole, by his sincere desire to learn their ways and serve their people. But Jessica is quickly told to take on the role of the “Reverend Mother” for the community, which involves an alchemical ritual that warps her unborn child. This is all very involved, and I haven’t actually read the books myself, but with the Bene Gesserit, a Reverend Mother gains access to all her ancestral memories, but only from her female line. No male has ever gone through the process and lived, which is the main reason why there are no male Bene Gesserit. In fact, their multi-generational goal is to eventually produce a male child who will succeed at the ritual and become a “Kwisatz Haderach” who has total awareness of the past and future.
Jessica heads south to join a gathering of the tribes, and Paul’s budding psychic power lets him realize that the path she is leading him on will lead to war and the deaths of literally billions. He refuses to take on this destiny so he can stay with Chani, but when the Harkonnens trace and destroy Stilgar’s lair, he is left with no choice. Chani herself tells Paul, “Our choices are made for us.”
Dune: Part Two is very much about the idea that there is no free will, especially if one can see the future, and yet it trips up the destiny that everyone seems to have planned. The Emperor’s daughter, Irulan (Florence Pugh) confronts her Reverend Mother (Charlotte Rampling) who tells her flat-out that the Bene Gesserit manipulated the Emperor, and thus the Harkonnens, into destroying House Atreides because they had become too independent and too threatening to the status quo. Even the existence of Paul is a choice: Because Bene Gesserit can control their bodies, and arrange a timetable of marriages for the sake of the breeding program, Jessica could have had a daughter as her first child instead of a son, and was in fact told to by her superiors. Paul was born because Jessica had fallen in love with Leto and wanted to give him an heir, meaning the Kwisatz Haderach was born a generation early.
Compared to prior adaptations, Villeneuve’s Dune gives a realistic presentation of the Fremen as grubby desert survivors with their own language and culture, but that complexity goes out the window with House Harkonnen, gratuitously evil villains whose devotion to a bald monochrome aesthetic leads to a fight scene in their arena that is completely bleached of color, while House heir Feyd Rautha (Austin Butler) looks more like a buff Nosferatu than Sting.
But otherwise, the fight scenes are great, the acting is great, and while the direction is not quite so dependent on sensory overload as Part One, it gets the point across. I have a couple of friends who are fans of the book and saw the movie early, and they said that while it’s a great action movie, it isn’t really Dune. Certainly it changes things up with regard to the end-stage dynamic between Paul, Chani and Irulan, meaning that any presentation of Dune Messiah (which Villeneuve has not confirmed, but says would be his last production in the long and involved book series) would necessarily be different than the original material, which would be one reason to tell a story when all the fans know how the first one went.