Theocratic authoritarianism, colonial violence, the pitiless economics of resource extraction: These subjects are present in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movies, not as vague allegories gestured at between action sequences to add some thematic heft, but as the very substance of the story. With the release of Dune: Part Two, all the meticulous (some might say exhausting) attention Villeneuve paid to building out the first movie’s vast and complex world—an interplanetary empire governed by multiple competing families, each with centurieslong dynastic histories—pays off. More than any science-fiction epic I can think of in recent years, the Dune movies, each really constituting one-half of a full story arc, belong to the tradition of speculative science fiction that Frank Herbert’s original 1965 novel partook of and helped to establish: They are movies as much about mass belief systems and political power struggles as they are about characters and relationships, without sacrificing the specificity of the human stories at their center. I was not even a huge fan of Dune: Part One, which struck me as more visually and sonically hypnotic than it was narratively coherent. I was also among the critics who found its truncated ending almost comically abrupt. But to his great credit, Villeneuve has followed through on the task he set for himself in Dune’s moody, enigmatic, and expansive first chapter: He now returns to the world he so painstakingly established, ready to orchestrate the grand-scale conflicts that are about to tear it apart.
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