Before going to see Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two (2024) this last weekend I revisited David Lynch’s Dune (1984). No film is going to match the style of Lynch’s kinky sci-fi epic. Lynch’s Dune is so much a product of its time that Villeneuve’s film could never be as operatic, sexual, or unhinged. Lynch was a maverick iconoclast working in a mainstream idiom while Villeneuve is a commercial stylist peddling the second installment in a planned blockbuster trilogy.
As such Dune: Part Two must be taken the same way one ingests the latest Marvel movie. One must look at Dune: Part Two as a commercial endeavor that may possess some artistry buried deep in its mountain of special effects and all-star cast. Dune: Part Two is well crafted to be sure, but is it art?
Few big special effects movies look as good as Villeneuve’s Dune movies. The computer generated facades, spaceships, and sand worms actually look as though one could just reach out and touch them. The production team of Dune: Part Two really accomplished something special with the look and feel of the film. There’s a degree of visual world building in Dune: Part Two that has never been seen in a blockbuster before.
Villeneuve’s film looks incredible but its dramatic contents are another story. Villeneuve is capable of staging scene after scene of exposition but there is never any room for character. The cast wanders incredible tableaus muttering sci-fi nonsense, propelling the film forward without examining the plot for any emotional depth.
Villeneuve’s impressive scenery disguises a hallow cinematic experience. The audience knows why things happen in Dune: Part Two, they just don’t care. There is no poetry to Villeneuve’s direction and no humanity in his writing. Dune: Part Two possesses the human nuance of Madame Web (2024). At least Lynch’s film supplanted characterization with rapid fire pulpy posturing and fetishized violence, proving that Villeneuve still has something to learn from Lynch’s ill-fated Dune.
