Dune: Part Two

I won’t dwell too much on the positives, since they’re obvious enough: the photography, the music, the style, the atmosphere. Perfection. That said, the negatives just about cancel out the positives. For every Feyd-Rautha there’s a Stilgar; for every Irulan, an Emperor. In other words, for every inspired piece of casting and character choice, there’s one that misses the mark entirely. I feel equally split about Villeneuve’s reinterpretation of the story. He made more changes to Part Two than to Part One, and many of them are far more radical. Some of these I love. I love that the film trims down the dialogue. I love the reimagined Harkonnens—especially Vladimir and Feyd-Rautha. I love Chani. But then there’s the plot, and here I think they made a mess of it. Villeneuve had to make tough choices, and some I think were right: cutting down the time skip, sidelining the Guild, avoiding the absurdity of a toddler killing the Baron. All those were good instincts. But the way he handled them altered the spirit of the story in fundamental ways. Book-Paul would never have used atomics against the Sardaukar or the spice fields, if that’s even what the film means to show. Villeneuve keeps things hazy enough to leave room for interpretation, but not much. In Herbert’s version, Paul is careful never to break the Great Convention. He uses only a fraction of his family atomics to blow open a wall, never to kill people. In the film, if Paul truly used atomics against human forces and then threatened the Great Houses instead of the Guild, they would have erased him and his followers from existence. That’s the point: in the book, Paul wins through precision and leverage, not by breaking the galaxy’s one inviolable law. And that’s only one example. The film introduces a number of changes that will inevitably have cascading effects. At that point it stops being an adaptation and starts becoming a kind of fanfiction. As someone who loves fanfiction, I don’t entirely mind that one of the most spectacular films of my lifetime fits that description—but it does cut against the spirit of the thing.