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Dune films

Theatrical poster for Dune Part Two (2024)

Dune: Part Two — I Made the Family Do Their Homework First

by Hutch Morzaria February 15, 2025

written by Hutch Morzaria

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.

Paul and Chani on a dune in Dune Part Two

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.

February 15, 2025 0 comments

Theatrical poster for Dune Part One (2021)

Dune: Part One — Shivers in the Cinema, Blank Looks From the Family

by Hutch Morzaria January 22, 2022

written by Hutch Morzaria

Dune Part One gave me the shivers, sitting there in the cinema, and not just the once. I loved it. Dune is one of my favourite books, and I’d been very excited about this one for a long time, the kind of excited where everybody around you knows about it whether they wanted to or not. I’d spent years with the 1984 version, which I really enjoyed, camp and all, but this is the first time I’ve watched Dune and felt like I was looking at the actual place. The scale of Arrakis, the sand and the heat haze and the size of everything against the people standing in it, the huge slab-sided buildings, the ships hanging in the air, and more than once I had the hair standing up on my arms like a kid.

It’s also only half the story, which is worth knowing going in. The film covers the first half of book one, the move to Arrakis, the Harkonnen attack, the Duke’s death and Paul and Jessica running for the deep desert, and it stops right as the Fremen take them in, with Paul’s fight against Jamis as the last big moment. Part Two has already been confirmed, so the rest of the book is on its way. Chani barely gets a look in this time, a few glimpses in Paul’s dreams and a couple of scenes at the very end, so a lot of what I’m waiting for from the book is still ahead. None of that took anything away from what’s here, and I walked out wanting the next one straight away.

Taking the whole family

I didn’t go on my own. I took the whole family along, and they came, fair play to them, because they knew this was one of my favourite books and they could tell how excited I was. That’s two and a half hours of sand, spice, noble houses, planets, prophecies and people whispering at each other in the dark, all dropped on them cold with no warning about who anybody is. So they didn’t really get it. They just didn’t have the book sitting in the back of their heads filling in the gaps the way I did, and without that a lot of Dune is people making very serious decisions about things nobody’s explained yet.

And there’s a lot to not get if you haven’t read it. Bene Gesserit, Kwisatz Haderach, mentats, the spice, the Guild, why the Emperor would hand the Atreides the most valuable planet in the universe and then help the Harkonnens take it back, the film throws all of it at you and trusts you to keep up. Even the voiceover at the very start, Chani talking about her planet and the outsiders who keep taking it, assumes you already care who the Fremen are. The film never stops to hand you a glossary either, so if a word means nothing to you, the scene just moves on without you. I’d had those words in my head for years, so every one of them landed for me, and for my family they were mostly names going past. They knew it mattered to me, though, and they sat through every minute of it with me anyway.

Lady Jessica in the desert at night in Dune Part One

A universe that feels real

The thing I loved most is how they built the whole universe. The look and feel of it felt real to me in a way no Dune has before, not a set and not a special effect but somewhere people actually live and work and die. The ornithopters fly with wings that beat like a dragonfly’s, and they’re chunky and loud and look like they’d be a pain to keep running. The stillsuits have the tubes and the catch pockets and the whole idea of drinking your own recycled water right there on screen, and you believe people would wear them because they’d be dead in a day without them. Nothing looks shiny or new out on Arrakis, it’s all rusted, worn down and lived in, which is exactly how I always pictured it reading the book.

The Harkonnens get the same treatment. The Baron’s homeworld is dark and heavy and nasty, the Baron himself floats up out of a black bath, and the Sardaukar turn up looking like they came from a planet built to break people, which, if you know the book, they did. Even the shields get a look of their own, a blue shimmer that turns red when a blade goes slow enough to get through, which is exactly the rule from the book. Then there’s the first time you see a worm come up out of the sand, enormous and quiet until suddenly it isn’t. Every piece of this universe has been thought through, the tech, the buildings, the clothes, the way the sand moves, and it all adds up to a place I’d believe was out there somewhere if you told me it was.

Paul, Jessica, Leto, and the Duncan I didn’t love

The casting is mostly spot on. Timothée Chalamet is Paul, and he’s got that thing Paul has in the book where he’s young and a bit fragile at the start but you can see how clever and how dangerous he’s going to become, through the gom jabbar test, the visions, the night in the stilltent where it all lands on him and the fight with Jamis at the end. Rebecca Ferguson as Jessica is spot on too, because Jessica is doing about five things at once in every scene she’s in, protecting Paul, obeying the Bene Gesserit, loving the Duke and being terrified, and you can see all of it. Oscar Isaac as Duke Leto is just right as well, calm and decent and clearly walking into a trap with his eyes open, for the sake of his son and his house. And most of the rest of the cast land exactly where I wanted them.

The one I didn’t love was Duncan. Duncan Idaho is the Atreides swordmaster, the one who goes ahead to Arrakis to win over the Fremen, and he gets a big last stand in this film covering Paul and Jessica’s escape. I just didn’t love the choice for him, and with the rest of the casting landing so close to how I’d pictured everyone, that one stuck out more than it would have in a weaker film. He wasn’t the Duncan I had in my head from the book. It’s a small gripe in a film I loved, but it’s the one thing I’d change about it.

Rating: 5/5.

January 22, 2022 1 comment

Dune Movies

Dune (1984): A Pug, a Floating Baron and All of Book One

by Hutch Morzaria April 20, 2002

written by Hutch Morzaria

If I’m going to start a blog about the things I love, it may as well start with Dune, because it’s one of my favourite books and nothing else was really in the running for the first post. So the first thing up on Zone Six is a Dune 1984 review, David Lynch’s version with Kyle MacLachlan in the stillsuit, and I’ll get the obvious bit out of the way before anything else. It’s a bit camp. Sometimes it’s a lot more than a bit, and I really enjoyed it anyway, which is exactly why it’s the one I wanted to open with. A film can have Patrick Stewart charge into a battle with a pug tucked under his arm and still take a massive swing at a story this big, and this one manages both inside the same ten minutes.

What got me watching it is how much of book one is actually in there. The move from Caladan to Arrakis, the Harkonnen betrayal, the Duke’s death, Paul and Jessica running for the deep desert, Stilgar and the Fremen, the spice, the worms, Paul going from exiled heir to the man leading all of them, it’s all on the screen. It just comes at you in a slightly different manner than I was expecting, and that’s the fairest way I can put it. Scenes get shuffled around, a lot of what people are thinking gets whispered over their faces so you always know where everyone stands, and a couple of the big pieces get swapped out for something else entirely. If you’ve read it you’ll spend a good chunk of the film going “oh, so that’s how they did that bit”, and for me that was a big part of the fun.

Paul and Jessica in stillsuits in the deep desert in Dune (1984)

All of book one, just in a different fashion

The biggest swap is the weirding way. In the book it’s the Bene Gesserit way of fighting, the reason Jessica and Paul are so dangerous once the Fremen take them in, and it’s mostly about how they move and how fast they are. Here it turns into the weirding modules, a little handheld gadget you speak into with the sound doing the damage, so the scenes of Paul training the Fremen become Paul teaching a cave full of fighters how to use them. That’s not a scene I’d ever pictured while reading it, and it’s probably the clearest example of what I mean by the film doing book one in its own fashion, because the story beat is exactly where it should be and the thing on screen looks nothing like the thing that was in my head.

The ending’s the other one anybody who’s read it will spot straight away. Paul beats Feyd, takes the throne out from under the Emperor, and then it starts to rain on Arrakis, which is a very big thing to have happen at the end of a film called Dune and not how the book finishes at all. The Guild Navigator gets moved right up front too, this huge floating thing in a tank of spice gas that you meet in the opening minutes instead of a mystery you wait the whole story to see. And then there’s the gom jabbar test, with the box and the needle and the Reverend Mother, done almost exactly the way it’s written, which is part of why the changes stand out as much as they do. None of that stopped me enjoying it. Working out how each piece had been carried across from the page, and what it had turned into on the way, kept me hooked right to the end.

Gurney, Paul and the Baron

The cast is where it really does it for me, and three of them in particular. Patrick Stewart is exceptional as Gurney Halleck, the Atreides weapons master who trains Paul, and it’s a real kick seeing the man most of us know as Picard (before he actually was Picard) play somebody this rough around the edges. He’s got the baliset, he’s got the scowl, and yes he’s got the pug, carried into the Harkonnen attack like it’s standard issue, which is about the campiest image in a film full of them. He’s still exceptional, pug and all, and he’s Gurney as I know him from the book.

Kyle MacLachlan is Paul Atreides and he’s exceptional too. He has to carry the whole thing, from the nervous duke’s son with his hand in the box for the gom jabbar to the man riding a worm at the head of an army. He looks young enough at the start that the Reverend Mother testing him feels like something being done to a kid, and by the end he’s the one the whole desert is shouting for, so the jump the book asks for is all there in one performance. It’s a lot for one actor, and he makes it look easy.

And then there’s the Baron. Kenneth McMillan plays Baron Harkonnen floating around his halls on suspensors with his face covered in sores, and he’s exceptional in exactly the way that part needs. He’s the campiest thing in the whole film by a distance, and I mean that as praise, because he’s also properly nasty, the kind of villain who pulls the heart plug out of a servant just to make a point. Sting turns up as his nephew Feyd, in not much more than a winged pair of underpants, and between the two of them the Harkonnen scenes are where the film’s camp really lives.

A 1984 film that looks like the 60s

It suits the filmmaking of its time, and I say that as a good thing. The worms are big physical models thrashing through real sand, the ships are models, the Harkonnen homeworld is all smoke and pipes and furnaces, and the Emperor’s palace is gold and heavy dark wood everywhere you look. Even the stillsuits look like they came out of a workshop, all ribbed and heavy and a bit rubbery. There’s nothing about it that feels like a computer made it, and when a worm comes up out of the ground it’s a proper object with weight to it rather than something drawn in afterwards. For a film trying to put a whole alien planet on screen in the early 80s, that’s a lot of stuff somebody had to physically build.

The funny part is that for a film made in 1984, it looks like something from the 60s. The costumes, the big stiff uniforms with the high collars, the hair, the way people stand around in enormous rooms delivering lines to each other, it all feels a lot less like the far future than an older idea of what the future was supposed to look like. That’s the one part of it that dates it for me, more than any of the effects, and it’s also where a lot of the camp comes from. Some of it’s a bit much, the Baron’s scenes especially, and there are moments where the costumes got more of my attention than whatever was being said. The Emperor’s court alone could keep you busy for a whole viewing.

April 20, 2002 1 comment