Thoughts on Dune Part 2

My wife and I went to see Dune Part 2 on its opening weekend.  We made a bit of an event out of it by watching Dune Part 1 on streaming the night before.

She was very glad we did, because the second movie pretty much picks right up from where the first left, so if you don’t remember who was who you’re going to be working hard on context clues for some of the cast.  Not all of them.  I mean, they can’t stop telling you who Paul is and the prophecy that may or not foretell his destiny.  But the rest of the people who come and go in the film, you might be a bit confused without a refresh.

But let me stop a moment and say that there will be SPOILERS below, so let me stick the movie title card in here as a break, then we can move on.

Dune: Part Two

Well, there will spoilers if you’ve never experienced any of the past media related to the book, which was published the year I was born, making it pretty old.

Also, I will say up front that my opinions are also heavily influence by my relationship with the book, the 1984 film, and possibly the SyFy mini-series, though I can barely remember much of that.  So if you came into this without my level of baggage, your view is likely different.

On the good side, the film is visually stunning and absolutely worth seeing on a big theater screen.  I would even recommend the IMAX experience for the improved video quality, though I temper idea that with the observation that, while the IMAX video experience is excellent, their view on sound seems to be “louder is better” so maybe go in with some cheap ear plugs if you don’t want to be overwhelmed.  Even Hans Zimmer’s excellent sound track doesn’t need to be cranked to 11.

Also, in dividing the story into two films you get 320 minutes, or five and a third hours of run time during which the story can unfold slowly.  We could linger over points that had to be rushed though in earlier attempts at bringing the tale to a visual medium.

My problem is how those many minutes were spent.

On the one hand, I am glad that they didn’t just yadda yadda Paul into the Fremen and turn him into the chosen one, Lisan al-Gaib, in 20 minutes.  He has to work for it and we follow in his steps as he does.

On the other hand, there are a number of interesting threads in the book besides Paul.  So when we spend the bulk of the film on the Paul becoming learned in the ways of the Fremen and being accepted into their ranks in sometimes agonizing detail, there are other tales that are left wanting.  And, frankly, Paul’s isn’t the most interesting tale in my mind, so all of this “ways of the Fremen” experience started to drag for me about an hour into the effort.

I am sure part of that is due to my knowing how things play out… though, I doubt if anybody honestly thought that the movie was going to end up with Paul failing the challenge and ending up just a couple more gallons of reclaimed water in the basement of Sietch Tabr.  Seriously, even without Stilgar constantly going on about prophecy, Paul fulfilling the prophecy was the obvious conclusion, right?

And speaking of Stilgar, he managed to go from the tough desert nomad to a secondary character out of Life of Brian with his prophecy obsession.  I especially liked this line:

The Madhi is too humble to say He is the Madhi. Even more reason to know He is! As written!

This immediately joined in my head with an exchange from Life of Brian:

Brian: I am not the Messiah, do you understand? Honestly!

Girl: Only the true Messiah denies His divinity.

Brian: What?

So that didn’t help me take things seriously.  I realize Paul needs Stilgar’s support, but Stilgar becomes such a true believer so quickly, and often so clownishly, that credulity is strained.   Meanwhile, Chani is about two seconds from saying, “You know nothing Jon Snow” at several points.  Making Paul’s lover his biggest skeptic is a choice, but perhaps not an original one.

The timeline of Paul’s desert adventure… and he takes more time to win over the locals than Peter O’Toole does in Lawrence of Arabia… is also a bit muddled to me, largely due to his mother’s pregnancy.

I recall in the book, and certainly in the David Lynch film, that his sister Alia was something like four years old when the final scenes unfold.  Here, everything takes place within the human gestational cycle, which is still presumably 9 months long out in the distant future.  I cannot image it being made longer, unless the MAGAs are running the place and felt that would help with their “woman can’t be allowed bodily autonomy agenda.”

And, because I am weird, the timeline in my head hinges a lot on how fast sandworms travel.  I have tried not to do the calculations… Arrakis is roughly the size of Earth’s moon (which brings up some gravity questions, but don’t go there) and first Paul’s mother, then Paul, have to ride a sandworm down into the “uninhabitable”(yet heavily populated, at least by Arrakis standards) southern hemisphere of the planet for the big Fremen conclave, Paul’s final test, and the rallying of the Fremen to head back to the northern hemisphere… but it sure seems like all of that might have taken a bit of time than the movie allows.

(You can, if you wish, also picture me in the theater wondering if they sleep on the sandworms, trading shifts driving, or do they call it a night and camp only to call another sandworm in the morning and whether or not the sandworms themselves get tired.)

I feel like they could have safely run a montage of some of Paul’s adventures and whatnot because, while we were out in the desert, there were a lot of other plot threads in play that get short shrift or are ignored completely.  Interesting plot threads.  Things that add depth and meaning to the story.  Things that are kind of important to the story.

During all of this the emperor, the Bene Gesserit, House Harkonnen, and the spacing guild are all up to things that influence the outcome, that shape the plot.

Sure, we get to see some of it.  There are some absolutely stunning scenes of the Harkonnens, including the black and white spectacle of Feyd-Rautha birthday celebration in the arena.  That sends a lot of messages about the Harkonnens in general.  The camera spares no effort broadcasting that they are the bad guys.  But we spend time on the visuals, then we have to have some dialog later in a side room to tell us what is actually going on, which makes the visuals feel a bit gratuitous.

The Bene Gesserit gets even less screen time.  You get a notice once in a while about what they are up to, but most of what we know about them comes out of Paul’s speculation or Jessica’s statements.

And the spacing guild?  Forget about it.  Maybe they got mentioned in passing and I missed it, but they were not at all in on the plot.  Again, you might not have noted their absence, but in my head canon they are an important thread in the story.  I wanted to see this.

Image from Screen Rant

Screen Rant has a whole post about why it is good that the spacing guild was completely omitted, but then goes on about how important the guild will be to the next film, which seems to undercut the whole premise.  They didn’t need an hour of screen time, but you have to bring the audience along somehow and now they either have to ignore it for the next film… which is likely… or somehow boot strap them into the tale.

Oh, and the next film.  Yeah, we’re going there.  It has been approved.  And the ending of the film clearly references it with the Fremen boarding the captured transport ships of the Sardaukar to unleash their Jihad on the rest of the galaxy.  That would have been a REALLY GOOD TIME to mention the spacing guild, since the jihad goes exactly nowhere without them.  But I guess that gets picked up in the third film… or ignored.

We also skipped over the fates of a few other characters, and I can hear you thinking “To make the transition to film some things by necessity have to be cut out.”  And I get it.  I wasn’t one to make a fuss about Tom Bombadil back in the day.

It is the fact that we spend sooooo much time on Paul’s journey that it feels like almost the whole film and everything else is a bit of side flavor.  I might have been okay if there had been 30 minutes less of Paul overall, but that story left me impatient to get on with things.

That is a lot of fret over details.  The TL;DR is that if they were going to make nearly three hour movie out of the second part, they could have spent some more time on things besides Paul because, on his own, Paul isn’t all that interesting.  He only works against the background of the other stories and shorting us on those shorts us on the scope of the tale.

See, I am so invested that can’t even do a good TL;DR.  Let me try again.

Too much Paul, not enough other stuff.

Is that clear enough?

Oh, wait, one more complaint.  Feyd-Rautha didn’t cheat in the final fight.  No poisoned barb on his belt.  I guess they had established House Harkonnen as the bad guys sufficiently that they didn’t feel the need to go into that.

Still, I liked it even with my mild dissatisfaction.

Meanwhile, I have been enjoying watching a rehash of a lot of the arguments about the series that I saw show up back in the UseNet era of the internet.

There is the usual debate about Paul.  Is he really the hero?  Should we be rooting for Paul, or is he just a tool of the whole system or part of the problem as he enables the Femen jihad that will end up costing billions of live.  There are strong opinions out there.

A meme that popped up – no idea who to credit

There is the argument about whether Dune is science fiction or fantasy or even a superhero film.  This one always seemed very silly as the argument against it being science fiction is that they don’t use computers or advanced tech based on computers.  But that isn’t a barrier to science fiction, and they clearly used technology to work around the lack of computers.  And the whole thing, regardless of the trappings, is very much in the model of the classic fantasy/science fiction heroes journey where a young male is the chosen one.

That said, if you think Paul is a superhero, maybe revisit the arguments about whether he is the hero at all.  At best he would fall into the category of a superhero from The Boys in my book, chemically created and tragically flawed.

All of which is a futile attempt to categorize something because we feel like we have to.  The book store puts it under science fiction.  That is enough for me.

Finally, there is a good meme going around about how to go about reading the Dune novels, which I think is pretty apt.  Again, I don’t know who to credit, but it is all over Reddit, so I won’t be the first to steal it.  It starts off with the first two, which is presumably all the movies will end up covering, but we’ll see.

Options 1 and 2

If you are more invested you can go further.

Options three and four

And then there is the all in option.

Option five

I have personally gone into option five and have read five of the Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson books and… they are not very good.  They are not complete trash, and do at times fill in some needed backstory, but they are long, often overwrought, and not very satisfying.  Like a lot of prequels looking to cash in on something, they find themselves answering questions that were best left alone.

Anyway, we’ll see where this goes when we get Dune Part 3.