I made the mistake of watching “Dune: Part Two” in 4DX.
Can we talk about 4DX? Where the seats do a roller coaster thing; swerving and jostling throughout movie, causing motion sickness for those who have it. (I don’t, but my subconscious was in a constant state of wanting to turn around and catch the teenager(s) kicking my seat.) Then there’s the puffs of wind in your ears when you least expect it, and 4DX also sprays water on you. I’m not a fan of this. You don’t know where that water’s been! Especially in New York City. Anyway, with or without 4DX, I didn’t really care for “Dune: Part Two.”
“Part One” was a made-for-IMAX science-fiction epic featuring a massive sense of scale. The desert planet Arrakis featured gargantuan hovering machines and football-field-long sandworms looking like monolithic elephant trunks with vacuum-cleaner-dust-brush-attachment mouths. They utterly dwarfed the tiny humans. It was fun the first time out.
While the sense of scale and spectacle still outstrips most special-effects blockbuster cinema offerings, including “Avatar,” this time around there’s a ponderous sense of “been there done that.”
Unfortunately, if you’ve seen one monster-worm rodeo, you’ve seen ‘em all. (“Worm rodeo” is my term using a sand-thumper gizmo to attract a big sand worm with vibrations, await it’s inevitable underground tsunami-like arrival, swing some grappling hooks, and then go worm-back-riding, or worm-surfing in the desert.)
What Happens
Set shortly after the events of “Part One,” we catch up with aristocrat Paul (Timothée Chalamet), a duke’s son. He escapes death and now ingratiates himself with the indigenous folk of Arrakis, known as the Fremen, one of whom is Chani (current it-girl Zendaya). Will she be his love interest? What do you think? But Paul wants revenge on the Empire that caused the siege on Arrakis, which caused his father’s death, rendering Paul’s birthright null and void.
Overthrowing the Empire can only be accomplished by Paul becoming the foretold warrior-prophet of the Fremen. Paul must become a sort of sand-Neo (Keanu Reeve’s messianic character from the “Matrix” series). This requires some propaganda. Paul’s mom Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) reluctantly supports the concept, along with Stilgar (Javier Bardem), a Fremen zealot who’s convinced Paul will return Arrakis to the oasis of abundantly watered green vegetation of eons long past.
Paul is not ethically 100 percent onboard with this wholesale con job, and neither, obviously is Chani, until Paul’s convinced there really is no other way. Once fully committed, and especially after imbibing a viscous blue liquid that’s extracted via syringe from drowned juvenile sand worms, he commits atrocities and betrays those closest to him with a merciless belief in the end justifying the means.
Overall
There’s much grand spectacle: the numerous Fremen sieges on Arrakis, and the ubiquitous-to-Dune, evil fat man Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard) floating around in the air, and taking baths in some kind of ghastly, greasy black liquid.
Quite a bit of “Dune: Part Two” is shot in black and white, and some of the depictions of the colosseum carnage and the giant, bombastic, fascistic rallies of said evil fat man are more than a little reminiscent of Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will.”
Zendaya and Chalamet don’t have a chemistry that burns up the screen. The film needed some relationship juiciness, what with all that dry, dry sand.
Director Villeneuve’s definitely got style and a genuine specificity of vision—I’ll give him that. But this dark world and universe, with it’s alabaster-white evil humans is, for my taste, too eerily (and suspiciously) similar to Ridley Scott’s “Prometheus” world, with its evil alabaster-white humanoids, and its direct links to those face-hugging, acid-veined, chest-exploding aliens that have taken up permanent residence in our collective imagination since 1979. I’ve grown a little tired of the endless darkness and tales of moral compromise.
