Dune 2: Imperfect due to Chalamet and Zendaya’s mistake
Dune 2: Imperfect due to Chalamet and Zendaya’s mistake. As the ‘Dune’ universe unfolds, it’s evident that the second part is both lengthy and brief.
By Megan Sauer
Through ‘Dune’ and ‘Dune: Part Two’, Denis Villeneuve undertakes a daunting task, successfully tackling the seemingly impossible challenge of adaptation. But nothing is perfect.
Villeneuve triumphs by entering Arrakis with unprecedented visual engineering, in an explosion whose shrapnel is the warm colors, impossible contrasts, and thermal distortion of the desert. The battles are more epic than ever, the faith stronger and the sandworms bigger in an overly ambitious delivery that bets all its options on a single card, and gets an Ace.
However, and although the rest of the hand accompanies quite well, the filmmaker is one card away from completing the straight flush.
As already happened in the first one,” recalls Ricardo Rosado in our review of ‘Dune: part two’, “the almost three hours of footage take all the time necessary to give us powerful images, but they are incapable of telling what is happening. without ceasing to look like underlined lines from a book chosen solely for the drawings.”
Because what Denis Villeneuve likes are images, not dialogues. “Frankly, I hate dialogue,” the filmmaker recently told The Times of London. Dialogue is for theater and television. I don’t remember movies for a good phrase, I remember movies for a strong image.
I’m not interested in dialogue at all. Pure image and sound, that’s the power of cinema, but it’s something that is not so obvious when you look at the movies made today. Cinema has been corrupted by television.”
As the ‘Dune’ cinematic universe expands, it becomes increasingly clear that this second part is, at the same time, too long… and too short. And sometimes there is an unnecessary rush in telling the story of Muad’Dib, while at other times it seems that time does not advance and we linger excessively in an exasperating narrative loop, especially in a production of this length.
The material, as adapted, perhaps lent itself better to a multi-part series, but that’s a bit difficult given the director’s previous statements.
But, in addition to what was mentioned, the main ‘but’ of ‘Dune: Part Two’ is that, once again, it seems like a prequel to what is to come more than a second part, repeating that feeling of existential emptiness after almost 5 hours of viewing, if we add the minutes of the two released installments.
Until we see if Warner gives the green light to ‘Dune 3’, and wait for Villeneuve and the rest of the cast to balance their agendas to return to Arrakis, the truth is that we have only seen the end of the beginning of Paul Atreides’ story.
