Film Dune 2: The electric dunin'g harder.
Well, this will be a rather short review.
Basically, I left the cinemas in the first movie believing that Villeuneve's minimalistic directing didn't fit the grand scope of the Dune novel, at the same time making things more bloated in monochromed nothingness devoid of any alluring visuals. I was told again and again that the sequel fixed parts of what was wrong with the original, honestly? I wasn't interested in watching it, but my friends asked me to go with them and at least I'd have people to banter with (the theater was empty so we were as loud as we wanted).
Honestly? This movie not only repeats the same mistakes of the original, but actually makes things far worse.
Same monochromatic boring scenes in scenarios that don't change, droning soundtrack that, while original, feel boring. Lots of scenes bloated with new content that add nothing and not only forget the original material, but violently deviate from it. Violently to the point of making the cat-rat from Lynch's version look like a minor annoyance. Characters downright disappear without reason, everyone won a degree of brutality in lieu of the subtlety and intelligence demonstrated in the book and, of course, the huge hamfisted approach to the messianic aspect. If Lynch's sin was turning it into a good vs evil, Villeuneve didn't win anything by going 'everyone is eeeveelllll'.
Interestingly, if one of my pet peeves with the first movie was how they changed Gurney Halleck from an affable but deadly troubadour full of wisdom into a brute, here, they repeat the dose making him even worse, trying to goad Paul into greater violence. The biggest change here is, of course, Chani. For those who don't know, in the novel while she accepted and went along with Paul's role as a messiah, she was a constant reminder of Paul's humanity (this is more evident in Dune Messiah), constantly telling him that it would be ok if they just went to the desert to live with each other, worried about how being a messiah was destroying him and, in turn, we hear from Paul's inner monologues how he feels his role in an unchangeable fate is distancing him from the woman he loves. By changing her into someone who is against the messianic aspect the getgo (going so far that me and my friends made a drinking game 'take a shot each time Chani would have died for running her mouth') they deprive Paul from his humanity, his ponderings about what he is becoming and where he will go, add nothing to the mix, and just create plotholes.
So, between two adaptations that cut a lot of material, I still prefer Lynch's, at least that was visually gorgeous and fun.
Film Careful Handling of Difficult Material.
A solid, even excellent film, though I put it slightly behind the first one. Part One had the advantage of stopping where the book gets extra-unfilmable, where Herbert started throwing weird crap in non-stop before just plopping the ending.
Part Two is, shockingly, a lot like Part One. Villeneuve('s team) continues to convey loads of exposition in a crisply efficient manner. I watched this film in a slightly detached, oh, I see what you did there sort of way. The technician's mastery was impressive, but I was left slightly cold. Every individual choice made here was better than in the 1984 film, but taken as a whole, that movie had more heart. I believe this is mostly due to the book, and I'm disinclined to criticize an adaptation for staying true to the source. Likewise, near the end, it feels like the director is speed-running a checklist. This is from the book; Herbert is on record saying he intended that effect.
My only real criticism of the film is that it feels "focus group-y" in a way that Part One didn't: insert romance subplot, insert more female agency, insert comic relief Stilgar, insert sequel teaser character. Kind of like the MCU, except here they had the sense to keep it in low gear. The dynamic of rational young skeptics against stupid old fundies ("He denied being Mahdi. So humble, he must be the Mahdi!") felt more like an injection of 2024 viewpoints than what Herbert was theme-ifying about in the book, as did another scene where Paul oddly starts to tell Chani that she's sandwalking wrong because he read something in a book.
Now the positive: this film is straight-up beautiful. So many expensive films nowadays look like crap. This looks great. The acting is excellent. I wasn't sure how Chalamet, whom I've only seen play nice guys, would do as a raging guerilla leader, but he nails it. Butler completely disappears into his role. No longer Elvis, he is now an Evil Bald Man, more Evil and more Bald than any Evil Bald Man to ever shave. My favorite was Ferguson. This film asks her to do a whole bunch of strange things, and whether or not she's having a bad acid trip, raving about "the beauty and the horror," being a tatted-up cult leader, or conspiring with a fetus to dominate weaker minds, she sells everything. Florence Pugh, Zendaya, Stellan Skarsgard—everyone in this prestige film turns in a solid performance.
There is one exception. Christopher Walken is so Christopher Walken in this that I half-expected him to threaten to stab someone in the face with a soldering iron. He's not bad, but unlike Butler, I can't unsee the actor. Walken is more meme now than man, beautiful and horrible. This comes around to the "focus-groupiness" mentioned above: Walken has internet fame for being in a Dune-referencing music video. I suspect he got the role because some joyless hack at the studio thought, "insert meme, raise revenue one-fifth of one percent."
TLDR: Part One fans can rest assured that Villeneuve doesn't "Game of Thrones" it. There may not have been enough faith in the source material, but it's still a great film and probably the best we're likely to get given the difficulty of the source material and the fact that investors expect to make money.