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Director: Denis Villeneuve
Screenwriters: Jon Spaihts, Denis Villeneuve

By Roderick Heath

Two and a half years since the first part of Denis Villeneuve’s bifurcated adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic was released, the second comes charging out of the deep desert of current cinema-going, that vast and dread wasteland left to us by Hollywood. The first part came out amidst the throes of the COVID pandemic, managing to make a decent box office showing despite all that whilst gaining most of its viewers on streaming. Hardly the natural habitat for a pricey, spectacular science fiction epic, but it still made an impression on a mainstream audience plainly starved for big, ambitious genre filmmaking that doesn’t treat us all like eight-year-olds: if any property caught the first ripples of changing zeitgeist of that moment, more apparent now as the superhero movie craze rapidly wanes, it seems to have been Dune. An ironic fate for a movie adapted from a 1965 tome long described as unfilmable, with the previous example of David Lynch’s 1984 version usually offered as horrid warning for the unwary. Props to Villeneuve: for all my lack of passion for his vision in general and the way he applied it to Herbert’s story, he certainly seems to have pulled off a truly impressive feat in selling such an odd, byzantine story to a multiplex audience. This was particularly clear when I settled down to watch the second instalment, this time in the proper temple of a movie theatre, surrounded by a crowd of all ages. Doubly impressive given that the choice of splitting the book in half left the viewer at an important but unsatisfying dramatic juncture, but with the hook planted deep.

The upside of that choice was that much of what distinguishes Dune as a piece of fiction comes to fruition in its later portions. Those were portions that, for all its very real qualities, Lynch’s film couldn’t help but garble when trying squeeze it all into a workable whole – at least, once the Di Laurentiis editing was applied. The novel’s basic narrative structure of a young protagonist’s fall and rise, with the kind of messianic meaning behind his rise that’s long since become a mainstay of modern quasi-mythic storytelling, gave a solid narrative backbone to a tale that snakes and coils with weird and alien purpose in both key concepts and marginalia. So the second part of Dune was always going to be an intriguing proposition: having promised the audience the prospect of seeing Paul Atreides make common cause with the Fremen to avenge themselves upon the evil Harkonnens and win back control of the planet Arrakis, now they can be asked to wrap their heads around the novel’s most bizarre conceits running the gamut from high science fiction to far-out mysticism, from sentient unborn children to space-navigating mutants. Except that…well, I’ll get to that.

Dune: Part Two opens with confidence, at least: Paul (Timothée Chalamet) and mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) are being escorted to a Fremen underground city or ‘sietch,’ dodging and slaughtering Harkonnen soldiers sent out to hunt them down. At first they find themselves objects of suspicion and hatred as outsiders, especially as Paul has killed the Fremen Jamis (Babs Olusanmokun) in the duel that capped the previous movie. But both Atreides soon find their place amongst the Arrakeens in their different capacities. Jessica is asked to replace the sietch’s dying Reverend Mother, one of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood Jessica was trained by and who inculcates the populace with religious doctrines and prophecies whilst actually purveying social control and selective breeding. Paul for his part determines to school himself thoroughly in Fremen ways and prove a valuable fighter. Sietch elder Stilgar (Javier Bardem) is already thoroughly convinced he is the prophesised leader who will lead the Fremen to Holy War, whilst young warrior Chani (Zendaya), daughter of the murdered Imperial biologist Liet Kynes and a Fremen, maintains a sceptical attitude and wants more practical approaches to ridding their planet of the Harkonnen yolk despite her strong attraction to the young stranger.

Their disparate viewpoints of the same goal at least temporarily intersect in the form of Paul, as he proves not just a good fighter but a wily tactician and an object of increasingly fierce veneration by his fellow ‘Fedaykin’ or elite Fremen warriors, offering the promise of unifying all the Fremen tribes and unleashing them in a grand spree upon the universe: the Fremen look to him as the “Mahdi” and the “lisan al-glaib,” deliverer figures distinct from the concept of the “Kwisatz Haderach” that the Bene Gesserit have been breeding, although the distinction is never elucidated. As a Reverend Mother, Jessica helps further the cause by proselytising to deepen the apparent fulfilment of the prophecy, but the act of drinking “the Water of Life,” a by-product of the infant sandworms that infest Arrakis that works like intensely purified spice, to become a Reverend Mother has the unintended result not just of opening Jessica’s mind to being filled with the memories of other Bene Gesserits, but also her embryonic daughter. Meanwhile, the Emperor of the human universe (Christopher Walken) nurses his unease after having arranged for the Harkonnens to wipe out the Atreides; his daughter Irulan (Florence Pugh), also a pupil of the Bene Gesserit leader Mohiam (Charlotte Rampling), starts to tease out the truth of this discomforting plot. Mohiam in turn encourages Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård), increasingly irate over his kinsman Rabban’s (Dave Bautista) failure to bring the Fremen to heel, to instead place his vigorous but insane nephew Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler) in charge of the suppression.

For about its first third, Dune: Part Two rolls on with a force and purpose that suggests it really knows what to do in picking up midway through a narrative, and, moreover, seems to have liberated something in Villeneuve stymied by his earlier Hollywood ventures. There’s a strong early action sequence as Harkonnen soldiers, hunting Paul, Jessica, and Stilgar’s warband, have the tables turned on them despite their attempts to take refuge on a high mesa: Paul takes out a soldier but leaves his back vulnerable to another, only for Jessica to fall on the enemy and beat them to death. The mixture of emotionally volatile frenzy and suspicion of the Fremen towards the two is deftly depicted, setting the scene for the difficult journey that lies ahead. Similarly potent in staging, if a tad illogical, is an action sequence where Rabban, losing his cool, leads his soldiers into an ambush in a sandstorm and finishes up fleeing before Paul back to his ornithopters, barely avoiding being slain by a Fremen assassin during the wild escape. Why Rabban and his people don’t have infrared scopes, or future version of such, for such actions is left vague, but the staging of the scene is certainly effective, with the punchline being Rabban’s expressions of shock and profound disquiet as he comprehends just how fanatical the force he’s opposing is.

The strong early portion of the movie culminates in the vital mythopoeic moment when Paul first dares to ride one of the colossal sandworms, a feat he needs to complete as part of his initiation as a Fremen, but which proves another building block in his growing mystique, when he uses a worm-attracting ‘thumper’ and draws in a truly colossal worm that he manages to steer. This sets the scene for a marvel of special effects entwined with dynamic camerawork and staging to intensify the desired immersive effect, describing vividly the fantastical notion of snaring hold of and being dragged along on the back of an enormous, primeval beast as it cleaves through the desert sand. This in turn sets up the most impressive of the movie’s visuals, the moment when any fan of the material will be anticipating, when the Fremen warriors ride into battle on the backs of the worms, crashing through hordes of Harkonnen and Imperial soldiers in an awesome vision of primal power and animal will overwhelming even the most fantastically advanced human protection.

Rather than carefully slice up and feed portions to the audience promising the evil still lying in wait for the Atreides and the Fremen, however, the narrative shifts focus to the Harkonnens for a long chunk of the movie, stalling the pace in a manner the entry never really recovers from. Villeneuve wants to make a real impression of the menace of Feyd-Rautha, as opposed to the glimpses of Sting looking bug-eyed in leather shorts in Lynch’s take, even if this version ultimately, similarly emphasises the character as villain beefcake. So we get an introduction of Feyd-Rautha with his latex-clad concubines, casually slicing throats of luckless underlings, in scenes that look like they were designed for a particularly fetishistic mid-1990s fashion mag spread. Despite the (relatively) cooler tone of Villeneuve’s filming and the acting by Skarsgård and Butler, they’re actually even more cartoonish than the takes on the Harkonnens than in Lynch’s film, sapped of all their intellectual as well as physical pith and ruthlessness, leering, growling, raping, and butchering at whim. Villeneuve and Spaihts make Feyd-Rautha a sort of melding of wicked Roman Emperor traits – crazy and capricious like Caligula, fond of gladiatorial combat like Commodus, a matricide like Nero. But the aspect that Lynch emphasised, in a motif he would go onto reiterate much more intricately in Mulholland Drive (2000), that Feyd-Rautha is Paul’s dark double, the projection of his id made flesh, and the alternative casting in the matinee idol of political theatre stakes, is utterly beyond Villeneuve’s literalist sensibility.

Similarly, the Baron’s peccadilloes have been given a slight updating and upgrading in grotesquery – where in the books he had a penchant for sadistically raping and killing young men, here he’s glimpsed with a stack of mangled pubescent girls in his chambers. Villeneuve returns to the images of Skarsgård swathed in fake fat and swimming in glistening oil-like fluid after enjoying rapine and murder, to make sure we know these are not nice people. The “black sun” of the Harkonnen’s home planet Giedi Prime is exploited as an excuse to desaturate the exterior sequences to a virtual black-and-white palette, increasing the fashion spread-gone-evil aesthetic, and Feyd-Rautha goes into gladiatorial combat with some luckless Atreides captives with his guard of genetically engineered mutant men as backup. To be fair, some of this is striking and effectively nasty, reminding the viewer that a universe ruled by the Harkonnens would be a nightmarish hellscape, and indeed one where they’re tolerated is already too close to that status as it is, in this future that’s regressed politically into feudalism. Not that Villeneuve has anything to say about that: it’s just a vaguely techno-Ruritanian backdrop for the plot, a convention Herbert took from classic space opera, converted into an actual idea and conceptual frame, gave birth in turn to a generic convention via the material’s children like Star Wars (1977), and now isn’t going to be converted back into an idea.

Perhaps the most prominent victim of the adaptation’s choices and priorities is Herbert’s most bizarre and memorable creation of the early books, Paul’s sister Alia, who in the book is born as a fully sentient and cognisant Bene Gesserit. Regarded as an “abomination” by Mohiam for that reason and created contrary to all Bene Gesserit precepts, Alia plays a vital role in how the climax of family revenge plays out, presented as a mere vulnerable child to the Emperor and Harkonnen but able to kill Harkonnen with poison. The grown-up Alia is even more fundamental to the two follow-up novels, where she becomes the lover of the resurrected Duncan Idaho but is later possessed by the transmitted consciousness of her grandfather the Baron. Villeneuve keeps Alia to mere glimpses of her in a foetal state within her mother, having psychic conversations with her, and a brief appearance, in one of Paul’s prescient vision, of Anya Taylor-Joy playing the adult Alia – which is, admittedly, very apt casting. It’s not that surprising that Villeneuve would avoid the awkwardness of trying to realise the young Alia as a fully sentient and deadly toddler (although the very young Alicia Witt managed to play her in Lynch’s version to some effect), as well as trying to pare back the extra clutter of characters. But the fact that she’s absent but the narrative shoehorns in Lady Margot Fenring (Lea Seydoux), a scheming Bene Gesserit acolyte who seduces Feyd-Rautha to get pregnant by him, makes that excuse feel a bit flimsy. I felt like Alia’s absence was more intended to remove some of the eccentricity and the complexity from the work: she’s too definite a presentation of Herbertian strangeness and provocation to sit easily with Villeneuve’s efforts to demystify Paul and render the story into a more standard parable for the dangers of fanaticism and power politics, as well as something likely to make the current mass audience uncomfortable.

Villeneuve’s cachet as a filmmaker to date – at least since he left behind French-Canadian art cinema for the heady climes of Hollywood – has been applying a formidable but facetious layer of stylisation to movies that proceed with highly programmatic and even banal dramatic beats. As made plain enough in previous films like Prisoners (2013) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017), Villeneuve has a love for diffused lightning, heavy filter work, and other atmospheric visual textures that recall the grand old days of Hollywood high style cinema from the 1980s but with a more contemporary spin. And, yes, compared to the sleek, almost painfully coherent and featureless style of CGI delivered to us by superhero movies in the past few years, Dune: Part Two does suggest new paths for contemporary visual effects to take. Villeneuve wields such texturing here, enabled again by cinematographer Greig Fraser, with intent to enrich the narrative with some sense of connection in the imagery – the way, for instance, he pays attention to the flicker of erupting fireworks penetrating the cavernous interiors of the Harkonnen citadel where Feyd-Rautha walks rhymes with a later moment when Paul and Chani spy the strobing light from artillery unleashed upon a Fremen sietch, marking the coming of Feyd-Rautha’s wrath to Arrakis.

Villeneuve meanwhile swathes Ferguson so often in cosmic chadors, hoods, and jewellery, and painted over with cabalistic lettering, that I started to wonder if he was indulging some sort of atavistic fetish, but decided that’s too interesting for him. This, even as Jessica’s role is minimised, with some of her dramatic function handed over to Chani. Villeneuve and his special effects team are sparing throughout Dune: Part Two, an episode where the source material was always going to offer up manna to the visually-oriented filmmaker. The desert filming is more effective in this movie than its precursor, with Fraser allowing more colour and texture to certain shots, the sands of Arrakis sometimes bleached and cheerless, other times permeated with lush ochres and governed by skies as blue as the eyes of the spice-gorged Fremen. And yet there’s something fascinatingly inert about the bulk of Villeneuve’s imagery, for all its polish and conceptual grandeur. There’s nothing expressive about it. Except for flashes here and there I gained no real feeling of entrance into a grand fantastical universe, but like that universe was being conveyed in the language of the kind of crisp digital gritty-pretty gloss of video games and AI-generated artworks. Only the repeated image of the titanic worm charging through the sand, one Villeneuve knows is dynamite and repeats at the very end, wields a truly arresting sense of might and transcendent power. A feeling of detachment permeates the film as a whole, and it stems from a more fundamental problem of attitude than simply to Villeneuve’s hyper-fussy aesthetics.

As an adaptation of a book, Dune: Part Two proves a crushing disappointment. Instead of Harkonnen’s comeuppance coming from an unexpected, mildly shocking and memorable place, it’s accomplished in the film in the most desultory terms. For any fans of the novel and its follow-ups hoping for more of the essential detail to make the cut this time, there is still no mention of the Butlerian Jihad or the Spacing Guild, or so much of the book’s imaginitive infrastructure. Just exactly why the spice is so important to this fictional world is left so fuzzy and poorly described that I’m not really sure anyone watching either part of Villeneuve’s diptych and who hasn’t read the books will have any real idea of it, beyond being a quasi-magical MacGuffin. The process of extracting the Water of Life from a young sandworm is shown in well-filmed detail, but the actual connection between the worms and the spice isn’t elucidated, and so the way it’s deeply wound in with Paul’s apotheosis is utterly garbled. The revelation that Jessica is actually Harkonnen’s daughter is dropped with all the grace of a soap opera. It’s always a delight to see Walken in a film and yet he’s oddly ineffectual as the Emperor: Villeneuve seems to have wanted him to embody the haunting, exhausting nature of vast power, rather than mere malice, but the necessary sense of a Machiavellian nature operating almost in spite of itself never comes across, partly because, well, Walken is getting a bit old. The crucial exchange between Paul and the Emperor in the climactic confrontation, when the Emperor coolly informs Paul that his father Duke Leto’s humane streak was exactly his weakness, fails to land as sharply as it should because Villeneuve doesn’t seem to have any clear emotion he wants Walken to express beyond the quality of being Walken.

More conspicuously, Dune: Part Two might well be the apotheosis of an increasingly depressing trend in modern genre storytelling where it’s assumed that underlying subtext or real-world blueprint of the generic metaphors are in some fashion the “true” meaning of what’s going on, and therefore anything that breaks down the distance in terms of interpretation is only dispensing with a nicety. In this paradigm genre storytelling only exists to sell ideas and messages to the great unwashed. Whereas the great power of genre metaphor is precisely the way it generalises, transforming aspects of reality into functional abstractions that can change and develop other meanings over time. In specific terms of Dune: Part Two, this means that Villeneuve has done his absolute best to ensure that we all know that Herbert’s story is a metaphor for oil dependency and the Fremen are not a future race eight millennia and millions of light years removed from us with retained aspects of the cultures that fed into their identity, but slightly coded representatives of Middle Eastern and other hard-done-by populaces. Leaving aside the faintly racist absurdity behind the assumption that a horde of Arabic people were just itching to up sticks and shift holus bolus to a whole planet of desert to hang out on, Villeneuve and Spaihts ram home the similarity to contemporary problems by inventing a new aspect to Herbert’s Fremen society by referring to certain sectors of the Fremen as “fundamentalists,” a word not used in the book and with no equivalent either. The Fremen in the book had their own, peculiar culture and interpretations of the religious ideas common to the Empire as disseminated by the Bene Gesserit, but they weren’t bumpkins. Villeneuve on the other hand subdivides them, between those who are bumpkins and those who, as represented by Chani, are more cosmopolitan (the film elides the fact that Chani herself is the product of personal and cultural mating, too). The film portrays Stilgar as a zealot and gullible stooge for the messianic project, rather than the serious and stalwart warrior in the book, now the kind of true believer who sees even Paul’s casual denials of being the Mahdi as proof he is – moments that, at least, give the film some of its few moments of ironic levity.

Chalamet, to his credit, grows nicely into the role of Paul in his second outing: if he didn’t wield a newly voluble and mature intensity as Paul takes command when confronting the Fremen elders after drinking the Water of Life, the film would fail entirely, but he delivers, even if he’s still not exactly the second coming of Kirk Douglas when whipping up the Fremen for battle. The completeness of the character’s transformation from the gangly manor-born whelp of the first film to the coldly victorious warlord by the end of the second is most coherently conveyed by his presence. The script however lets him down in too many ways. Whilst Paul isn’t displaced in narrative function, exactly, the film disengages from his experience when it really needs to be weaving its way deeply into his viewpoint to put across his blend of increasing desperation and hardening purpose as he sees every choice being cut off through his burgeoning powers of foresight. Villeneuve leans on the one, repeated image of people writhing in agony from the starvation incurred by what he might unleash. There’s no meditation on Paul’s accruing of hardened battle experience and emergent tactical genius, the edges he’s been gifted by being schooled by master warriors combined with the vulcanising heat of his experiences to create a truly formidable leader. Part of this stems from the highly truncated timeframe: in the book this took years, during which time Alia was born and grew, and Paul and Chani had a child who was killed by the Harkonnens. Paul’s prescient visions are boringly filmed and conveyed, and the crucial moment when he dares to grasp his destiny and drink the Water of Life is arrived at, and passes, without any real sense of climactic punch or truly dramatic meaning. Villeneuve’s lack of engagement with the quasi-mystical aspect is of course deeply connected with his general disinterest in the story’s more psychological, mystical, and symbolic aspects, and indeed his desire to have his messianic antihero cake and eat his interrogative parable about religious manipulation too.

Indeed, this reveals Villeneuve’s lack of real imagination underneath the superficial prettiness and conceptual indolence of his pictures. All he gives us is Chalamet staring at his hands and mumbling something about all the alternatives he can see now. Paul’s romance with Chani is also a victim of the fudging: if Chalamet and Zendaya have any chemistry, I didn’t see it, and as a result a love affair that’s supposed to root Paul to the present and upturn Chani’s sense of identity and loyalty remains a stillborn affair, a segue into fodder for the actors’ TikTok fans. Villeneuve and Spaihts moreover go a little further in imposing their own ideas of modernising upon Herbert’s text in a way that feels spasmodic and tacked-on, particularly in the attempt to refashion Chani into a sceptic towards Paul even as she falls in love with him and helps coach him during his initiation period. Zendaya is certainly evolving into a strong actress, and whilst I scarcely bought where this take on Chani insists on steering the character, I admired Zendaya’s attempts to make it palpable with her increasingly troubled and finally furious and agonised visage lending a note of emotional immediacy to the very end that the film otherwise lacks. Josh Brolin returns with welcome, grizzled gravitas when Gurney Halleck is revealed to still be alive and working with a squad of outlaw spice harvesters and smugglers, but his return to the fold isn’t conveyed with any drama in staging: Villeneuve simply reveals him amongst the ranks of smugglers. But Brolin is a canny actor, and he sells the moment of Gurney and Paul’s reunion, with a flash of authentic, potent emotion. Bautista is required to rant a bit. And Pugh, well, there’s not much she can do with a thankless role.

There’s something extraordinarily inefficient about the way the film unfolds, too. To be fair, Villeneuve seems to be trying to maintain something of the novel’s stately, careful progression towards ends that are literally preordained, and relative lack of described physical action. But the very guiding principle and pleasure of the book is the way each chapter is presented as a kind of intellectual chess match between various characters, where the conversations are forms of warfare by other means “I can kill with a word,” Paul declares at the end of a novel where words have been weapons right along – and where the battles in turn are laced with their own kind of dialogue, as in Paul’s final duel with Feyd-Rautha when he tries to understand the importance of his choice of costume. By contrast, here the dialogue exchanges here are bland and expository. The flaccidness of the script is underlined when it forces Zendaya to repeat her immortally clumsy opening line from the first film, slightly modified now in conversation with Paul — “Arrakis is so beautiful when the sun is low,” like she’s writing copy for a tourism advertisement rather than trying to convey one great source of passion in her life to another. Despite splitting the book and the second part being over two and a half hours long, the narrative never shifts into a higher gear. Excessive emphasis is given to aspects like Gurney showing Paul, Stilgar, and other Fremen leaders where he hid the Atreides stock of atomic weapons – which seems present mostly so Villeneuve can nudge the viewer with extra promise of an anti-nuclear parable as well as an anti-colonial and anti-Jihadist parable. And, worst of all, the rather curtailed final battle arrives as more than a bit of an anticlimax, as the grand vision of the worm-riding Fremen comes and is then disposed of.

But where Dune: Part Two subtly but cumulatively really derails the story is in how Villeneuve wants to have his messianic antihero and his sceptical, anti-zealot message too. Herbert’s book certainly comments on the way mythologies are constructed and used by both power and oppressed populaces, but ultimately the narrative hinges on the way it transmutes the desire for religious iconography, and figures who fit into the classical understanding of the word “hero” rather than its devolved modern usage, for a science fiction setting. Lynch’s Dune settled for purveying the ascension of Paul to virtual godhood as a cheeralong journey, robbed of its darker elements, but at least Lynch really got behind that, delivering his action climax with the enthusiasm of a classical war movie, and leaving off with a vision of the miraculous that wields nagging power, cutting to black from the awesome, Cecil B. DeMille-meets-Frank Frazetta vision of rain falling upon Arrakis and the Fremen hordes. Villeneuve won’t commit to dark revelry nor high tragedy nor roaring craziness. Paul is in some ways a false messiah for the Fremen, but also a very real one, and his coming to a certain extent only rides the wave of their worldview and capacity, which is, again, the product not of our world but of a futuristic realm where the religious and the scientific have long since fused back into a curious new singularity of outlook. The Fremen are inseparable from their faiths and warlike talents, and Paul soon learns to his chagrin that his revenge is inseparable from the unleashing of a tide of human potential, both glorious and horrific: no matter what he does in this regard, the tide will be unleashed, because it has been pent up too long, a phenomenon so often glimpsed in history when stable tyrannies end. The later books in Herbert’s cycle make it apparent that Paul resisted the ultimate choice which his son Leto II fatefully makes, to become a practically immortal human-sandworm chimera and strangle all human ingenuity and progress for millennia until the right moment comes to let it loose in a fresh torrent.

In Villeneuve’s filming, this all falls by the wayside so he can have his simplified take on the story in a way that sets out to court current-day collegian clichés about colonialism and capitalist exploitation and white saviours. The script refocuses Chani’s role in the story, in itself not a bad idea as she’s essentially only the hero’s love interest in the book, to make her at once Paul’s lover and vital helpmate – she helps train him in the ways of desert life – but also a bulwark against complete acceptance of his emergence as leader, turning her scepticism on the idea of the Lisan al-Glaib and Paul’s embodiment of it as an outsider. Again, this does flesh out something in the book, but which was more Jessica’s role, as both Paul’s guide but also an increasingly dubious figure – embracing her Bene Gesserit status means detaching herself to a degree from Paul’s project. By the movie’s end Chani turns her back on Paul as he ascends to the throne by marrying Irulan, ranting that she still wants free her people and that “This prophecy is how they enslave us!”, when, point in fact, it allows the Fremen to brutalise the rest of the human universe. It’s understandable that Villeneuve and Spaihts want to open up at least some distance between themselves and the book’s implication that everyone in the end is a servant to some kind of system, be it political, biological, social, religious, or fate itself, Paul as Kwisatz Haderach most of all, even whilst aiming for the lesser of myriad evils.

But it feels, like so many things today, more like a sop to contemporary progressive youth self-congratulation: I reject bad, therefore I am good. Moreover, Chani’s choice of flight is finally less an act of principled conscientious objection, but a peevish refusal of romantic compromise, as opposed to the book’s ironic last lines where Jessica and Chani, whilst locked in their nominal roles as mere concubines, will be remembered historically as wives, thus achieving their own subversion of the hierarchy much as Paul turns the imperial power structure against itself for his own ends. Herbert’s ahead-of-the-curve feminism was fascinatingly articulated through a reactionary future patriarchy, another potentially rich disparity that never gets explored. For all his trumpeted efforts to retain the darker qualities of Herbert’s concepts, Villeneuve ultimately swaps the cop-out of Lynch’s version for a different kind of cop-out, an indulgence of moral sentiment with political dimensions appended to a work expressly about how circumstances can sometimes refuse such indulgences. And this failure of nerve helps douse the secret fire of the story it’s trying to tell, keeping it arm’s length from its heroes’ experiences of moral terror as well as the flush of well-earned victory and the exaltations of quasi-transcendental experience, mastery of time and space at the price of peering into its dankest abyss. Villeneuve manages here what he also inflicted upon Blade Runner, sapping a property that runs rich and deep with poetic vision and rare imagination and imposing the most literal meanings upon it, even whilst affecting to maintain the façade of fidelity.