On the rare occasion that we procure a sitter for a night out to the cinema, it’s a real gift to have something of this caliber opening. When Part 1 came out we still weren’t parents yet, so I’m glad we got to venture out to complete the story together. 

Villeneuve has reminded us the stateliness that is possible in cinema. It’s the kind of production that makes sense of the palace you go to view it in. For nearly three hours we got to inhabit a faraway land and go on an adventure.

There is a sequence where Paul has his first go at riding the wild worm and it is a feat of immersive filmmaking. I felt a level of swept away that I haven’t since I was a kid. The fights were such that I was kept from thinking about their choreography and instead had an imagination aflame. The architecture, the costumes, the tech all felt dimensional and used. 

The story is of great interest. If there’s anything I’m a sucker for it’s a tale of messianism. And like every narrative it means something. But miraculously it managed to feel timeless and not beholden to the cultural moment.

(This in spite of the fact that the film’s dangerous dumb dumbs are literally “fundamentalists from the south” which is not a turn of phrase you’ll find in the book—of course on the other end of things you could easily read into Villeneuve’s decision to have the Alia character as an unborn fetus rather than a toddler). 

It would be foolish to bristle at the idea that religion and faith could be wielded to control people, but it’s intriguing to contemplate how media and entertainment have served as propagation machines as well. There’s something a little less wilful about the slow and nuanced configuration our movie consumption can have on our person. 

So what’s compelling at the bottom of the thematic on-one-hand-then-the-others is a simple tale of heroism and leadership in a world that is “beyond cruelty.” That’s the summation we find Paul waking up from at the start of the story and in the wake of that realization he opts not to roll over but to fight like hell to make things a little more right than they are. 

He gives himself to the gruelling process of becoming one with the desert that otherwise imprisons him and marrying himself to the Fremen people and their cause, but seemingly to an end even greater. He wants to participate in that old Chosen One song and dance of restoring balance to the universe. In this case that means, in part, revenge. 

It appears that the finale implies that millions will die in the impending holy war. There is a great tragic resonance here that feels very true and it’s scaled all the way up to interplanetary politics. Me, I’m just some dope who hit the Tropical Coke option on the Freestyle® machine in the lobby. Nobody cares if my knife chips and shatters.

(Watched in AMC Hiram)