Dune: Part Two

🧂 Dune: Part Two (2024)

The messiah business has never looked this good, or felt this queasy about itself.

Directed by Denis Villeneuve. Distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures. 2024.

🧂 Salt: 4 / 10. A couple of real complaints about pacing and one badly shortchanged character, but nothing that dents the achievement. and ⭐ Stars: 7 / 10. A genuine blockbuster miracle that stops just short of the classics it's chasing.

Paul Atreides came to Arrakis to survive. He stayed to become the thing everyone should have been afraid of.

Denis Villeneuve spent the first Dune building a world; he spends this one making you regret how much you liked its hero. Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) has gone native among the Fremen, falling for the skeptical fighter Chani (Zendaya) while the zealot Stilgar (Javier Bardem) keeps reading Bene Gesserit-planted prophecy onto every one of his sneezes. Meanwhile his mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) drinks the Water of Life and becomes a Reverend Mother with a second consciousness narrating from inside her own pregnancy, the Harkonnens swap out the useless Rabban for the considerably scarier Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler), and the whole galaxy inches toward a holy war that the movie is smart enough to treat as a horror story rather than a coronation.

Zendaya's Chani is the film's actual spine. She's the one character who never buys the Lisan al-Gaib nonsense, watching the man she loves get mythologized in real time and steadily losing him to it, and Villeneuve trusts her skepticism to do the audience's thinking for it. It's a quieter performance than the marketing suggested, and a much better one for it; her face in the film's final minutes is doing more storytelling than the plot itself.

The Feyd-Rautha arena introduction is the best sequence Villeneuve has ever shot. Giedi Prime is lit under a black sun, rendered in an infrared-adjacent monochrome that turns Austin Butler's gladiatorial birthday massacre into something genuinely alien, all hairless scalps and stark contrast. It's the rare prestige blockbuster flex that isn't just showing off; it recalibrates how menacing the Harkonnens are right before Paul has to go stand in front of one of them.

The sandworm-riding sequence earns every second of its hype. Chalamet summoning and mounting a worm the size of a skyscraper is the kind of image franchise filmmaking usually fumbles by cutting too fast or leaning on a needle-drop, and Villeneuve instead just holds the shot and lets the scale do the work. It's the closest the film gets to pure, uncomplicated awe, which makes it a deliberate lull before everything gets worse.

Christopher Walken's Emperor Shaddam IV is the film's flattest note. He arrives with real weight, the man whose fear set the entire plot in motion, and then mostly stands around looking mildly inconvenienced until Paul forces his hand. Florence Pugh's Princess Irulan fares a little better as a shrewd observer narrating events nobody asked her opinion on, but between them the imperial court never generates the dread the Harkonnen scenes manage effortlessly.

The turn to jihad happens in about the time it takes Paul to drink one glass of poison. The film has spent two and a half hours carefully building Paul's reluctance, and then resolves it almost instantly once he drinks the Water of Life, waking up fully converted to the prophecy he's spent the whole movie distrusting. It's a defensible reading of the character, arguably the point, but it lands as a jump cut where the story owed itself a slower unraveling.

The verdict: a spectacle that actually earns the word, one that understands its hero's rise is a tragedy wearing a war epic's clothes, undercut only by a rushed final turn and an imperial subplot that never catches up to the Harkonnen half of the story. Chalamet and Zendaya carry the emotional weight; Butler steals the menace outright.

So why four shakers? Because the jihad-in-a-jump-cut ending deserves real pushback, and Shaddam IV is a wasted opportunity in a film that otherwise gives every other faction teeth. Those are legitimate flaws in an otherwise towering piece of blockbuster craft, not excuses to pile on a movie that's clearly trying harder than almost anything else released that year.

So, did Paul Atreides save Arrakis? He conquered it, which the movie is very deliberately telling you is not the same thing.

Pass the salt. 🧂