Dune Part Two is a much more action-packed film than the first one, and I loved it. Where Part One spent a lot of its time setting up the houses, the planet and the betrayal, this one takes everything that was built and starts using it, worms and raids and battles and a knife fight to finish, and it barely stops for breath once it gets going. Where the first film ended with Paul and Jessica just getting in with the Fremen, this one starts with them already out in the desert fighting. There are a couple of changes to the story I didn’t like at all, which I’ll get to. But overall I really enjoyed this film, and a big part of why it hit as hard as it did has less to do with the film and more to do with some homework I made the family do beforehand.
Because last time didn’t quite work for them. I took the whole family to Part One, and they came along knowing Dune was one of my favourite books and that I was very excited, and they sat through it without really getting it. Too many names, too many houses, a lot of very serious people making decisions nobody had explained. So this time I wasn’t leaving it to chance, and before we went anywhere near a cinema I sat them all down and made them watch Part One again. I explained everything as we went, who everyone was and why it mattered, and it made a real difference to how this one landed.
Homework first
The rewatch helped a lot. The second time through Part One, with me pausing to explain every so often, the pieces started to fit for them in a way they hadn’t in the cinema. Who the Atreides are and why the Emperor wants them gone, why the Harkonnens are back on Arrakis, what the Bene Gesserit are actually up to with Jessica and Paul, why the Fremen matter so much, what the spice is and why everyone would kill for it. I gave them the context from the book as well, the bits the films only hint at, like the prophecy the Bene Gesserit planted on Arrakis long before Paul got there, and what he keeps seeing when he closes his eyes. It turned a film they hadn’t really got into a story they could actually follow.
So when we went and saw Part Two together, it hit home a lot more for them. They knew who Stilgar was, the Fremen leader who takes Paul in, they knew why Jessica drinking the Water of Life was such a big deal, and they knew what it meant when the Fremen started calling Paul by a name out of their prophecy. They could see where it was heading before it got there, the same way Paul can. In this film he keeps seeing a holy war spreading out from Arrakis in his visions, and he spends most of it trying to find a way around it. Knowing Chani from the end of Part One helped too, because this is her film nearly as much as it’s his.
Much more action
This one moves. Paul and Jessica are with the Fremen now, and the first big chunk of the film is them raiding the Harkonnen spice harvesters, coming up out of the sand, blowing things up and vanishing again, which is a completely different energy from all the setup of the first film. Paul learns to fight the Fremen way, and the Fremen fighting is quick and nasty, all knives and ambushes and people appearing out of the ground behind you. Then Paul rides a worm for the first time, the moment the whole of Part One was building towards, and it’s every bit as big as it should be. The worms are everywhere after that, carrying armies across the desert and turning up in the middle of battles.
The Harkonnens get more to do as well. Feyd-Rautha turns up, pale and bald and grinning, and his first proper scene is a fight in a black and white arena on the Harkonnen homeworld that looks like nothing else in either film. The Emperor finally shows up in person too, along with Princess Irulan, and the whole thing ends up in one room on Arrakis. The big battle at the end has the Fremen coming out of a storm on the backs of worms and running straight over the Emperor’s forces. And it finishes on a knife fight between Paul and Feyd, the two of them circling each other in front of everybody, and it’s so much more action-packed than Part One that it never really lets up once the raids start.
Chani, and the Alia who never shows up
So, the two things I didn’t like. The first is Chani. In the book, Chani is with Paul all the way, she believes in him, and she ends up standing beside him while it all goes the way it goes. Here they’ve turned her into the skeptic, the one Fremen who thinks the prophecy is a Bene Gesserit trick, and she spends the back half of the film pulling away from Paul. She’s with him for most of the film, fighting beside him on the raids and teaching him how to live in the desert, and she still doesn’t buy a word of the prophecy. It changes the ending too, because in the book the last word goes to Jessica telling Chani that history will call them wives, and here Chani’s the one walking away on her own. I didn’t like the changes to Chani, because that’s not the Chani I know from the book.
The second is Alia. In the book, Jessica is pregnant when she takes the Water of Life, and Alia is born a strange little girl who already knows everything, and she’s the one who kills the Baron. She stabs him with the gom jabbar in front of the Emperor, and that scene is a big part of why she’s such an unsettling presence in the book. Here Alia never actually gets born. She’s a voice Jessica talks to in her belly, there’s one quick glimpse of her grown up in Paul’s visions, and it’s Paul who kills the Baron instead. I didn’t like losing her, and even with both of those changes still bugging me, I loved this film.
Rating: 5/5.
