If the first Dune (2021) felt like the first half of a movie, Dune: Part Two feels like a cohesive whole unit. A staggering and scale-expanding bookend to that first movie, but also a formal expansion on every moving part and idea in it. It’s not just the story, which finds so much more for characters to do and a more central format for the stakes, but also the craft of the filmmaking, now widely expanded and reaching into the franchise heavens, to formalize this as an epic series of two parts: one great movie in search of a second part, and now, a second part that cashes all the checks Denis Villeneuve wrote.
You can’t write a check like that if you’re not going to turn around and fulfill the promise of it. This second movie, then, spends the entirety of its runtime running back those promises, not just checking them off, but thoroughly exploring them in the context of this story. It acts, like the first movie does, as yet another call for further expansion. It absolutely begs for Dune to be a trilogy. The good news is that the franchise you’re going to think about most this time is The Lord of the Rings and the Peter Jackson movies therein. This is moviemaking wish fulfillment, a blockbuster standard rarely found at the movies anymore, one of those franchise runs that you only get one of at a time. It can never be the movies with the sweeping universe, it requires such a careful visionary to keep the story going like Villeneuve has.
What’s also self-evident is the love not just for Dune (the first movie clearly makes the case for making another movie already), but also the grand opportunity that the blockbuster movie can entail. There are breathtaking sequences. Booming IMAX-friendly sound-design that rattles and shakes and pounds into the desert, until it summons behemoth sandworms, and you think, so this is everything that big budget filmmaking can be.
This is, yet again, a faction-based Messiah story. Through measured and assured thematic resonance, it pieces together a compelling diagram of what big-scale filmmaking can be. The setpieces are illustrious, emanating direct confidence in the craft team that would get the job done. The visual effects are perfect. The direction is always thoughtful. The performances are eminently dialed in. The storycraft expands upon the rest of the book of Dune and gets so much more mileage out of its three-act structure. It is, at least, so evident now why a second movie was needed. Because there was everything left to do.
What Dune: Part Two doesn’t do is waste any time. This is the breeziest two and a half hours. Feels like nothing. There are moments of flattened exposition, almost by necessity, to move the story forward with dialogue and not only with visual design, but mostly there are just these gorgeous moments of epically expansive design that stretches across vast desert landscapes, making all of the events feel localized, captures geography in its action choreography, and winds the arcs of the storytelling so tightly around the coherence of the visual themes that every actionable piece and big moment of visual exposition, seems to inform the next one, and creates a visual language more of its own than in common with the first movie.
There is a maturation to every part of the movie. It seems that this centers around, most of all, the maturation of Timothée Chalamet, who seemed to be playing the part in the first movie, but now has internalized a deeper multi-dimensionality in his performance. He is, yet again, complimented by a top-tier ensemble cast, and everyone involved brings something considerable to their performances, whether it be gravitas, character movement in the plotting, or in the great connective tissue where you feel that this is a dream cast, a true ensemble cooperating and understanding that they are all a part of this larger objective.
This is what happens when everything goes right. When the scale explodes on the screen. Where a story, as exuded by an increased lens of craft and maturation, goes beyond any ordinary expectations of what franchise filmmaking has been since The Lord of the Rings seemed to end the era of filmmaking that this belongs to. Dune now, with some certainty, seems to have eclipsed Avatar as the frachise-of-the-moment. This is a special, big movie, with so much care and professional attention afforded to the big story of Dune. You feel cheated for nothing. It’s a damn good time at the movies.