Dune 2 is out on Friday – here are the five biggest moments to watch out for. *Warning, light spoilers ahead*
Whether you’re a Dune die-hard who’s already dreaming about bingeing all three films in one go, reliving the halcyon days of Lord of the Rings in its glory day, or a newcomer to the fantasy trilogy who just thinks Timothee Chalamet is hot and wants to watch him pout a lot into a wind machine while sitting on a sand dune, we’ve got good news for you: Dune 2 is out this Friday.
It is another almost three hours of looking into the cinematic future, at a new era of film-making that finds new horizons in terms of scope and mise en scène; not so much about the story but the beautiful story setting.
Here are the five biggest moments in Dune 2.
Timothee Chalamet does some relatively flimsy fake fighting
Let’s get this out of the way first: Dune Part 2 is good, and Chalamet a capable leading man, despite the directorial choice to have him pouting into a wind machine for approximately half of the film. But given his lead character Paul Atreides is a violent man (understatement of the century) we don’t get a whole lot of Chalamet in slay mode.
In the first half of the film he does lots of sword fighting but the camera mostly pans to his victim before we can see the Call Me By Your Name actor doing much fight choreography. Like with the old Bond films, Chalamet somehow always wins, but often his murderous slight-of-hand approach is curiously left off screen. He gets a decent full-on scrap with Austin Butler’s Feyd-Rautha, but was the double somersault actually Chalamet?
There’s a jarring gay kiss
Austin Butler’s Feyd-Rautha and Stellan Skarsgård’s 600 pound baron Vladimir Harkonnen share a weirdly intimate kiss given Rautha is Harkonnen’s nephew. To be fair, Harkonnen is described in Frank Herbert’s book as “a predatory homosexual given to pederasty and incest, an unrepentant rapist and murderer.” But that foreknowledge doesn’t make the moment, which lingers for a while, any less shocking.
There’s some biting dark comedy
There’s not much joy to be extracted from the perennially at-war sand dune-dwelling folk in Dune 2, except for the odd bit of black comedy that is executed with precision. After Chalamet’s Atreides says “silence!” to one of the Bene Gesserit religious sisterhood, there’s a slow focus on one of the women, who slowly utters “abomination.” It’s one of two or three unexpected but well-handed comic reprieves.
The mise en scène in general is otherworldly
Sword fights against highly saturated blood orange horizons, brawling crowds in monochrome mirroring the style of Nazi rallies but in stadiums five, six times the size, bigger than you can imagine. The curvaceous sand dunes themselves loom large like characters, symbols of the bleakness of the lives of the Fremen tribe who are stuck amid endless repetitive sand. Vicious dust storms stretch on for miles and you feel every piece of grit. Director Denis Villeneuve and cinematographer Greig Fraser’s universe is scorched and endless but unable to turn away from. Like Earth itself, it feels bigger, more expansive, than your mind will allow you to fathom.
Finally, Dune 2 is more disturbing than terrifying
In the desert, one way to survive is extracting the liquid from slain bodies, storing it in weird containers that look like accordions and then pouring it into a big underground lake of dead human liquid. It is an unnerving thing to witness once, let alone three or four times. But somehow Dune Part 2 is a 12A certification: the actual stabbings that lead to deaths aren’t gruesomely shown, but there’s something sustaining and creepy about the extraction of bodily fluids. It’s something to do with something unutterable being treated like something ordinary.
Dune 2 is in cinemas from Friday 1 March
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