"The film’s most spectacular sequence comes around the middle point as Feyd-Rautha steps into a coliseum in a rigged coming-of-age performance. On Giedi Prime, everything glistens. The photography is high-contrast and almost silver, as bodies shimmer in the faint light clouded by industrial smog. The Harkonnen clan’s rippling and unnaturally white bodies are almost plastic in their consistency. The neoclassical architecture, out of place amidst oily, black industry, works as a hopeless display of fascistic power and racial supremacy. With images drawn from the works of Leni Riefenstahl, we feel at least the echoes of violent aesthetics. The brutal violence of these sequences, led mainly by Feyd-Rautha, played with delirious, lisping bloodlust by Austin Butler, underscores rather than contrasts with the overwhelming simulated power of the environment. "

Read my full review at Cult MTL: cultmtl.com/2024/02/dune-part-two-is-an-astonishing-epic-about-ambition-power-and-political-violence/