Science fiction without science: This is Denis Villeneuve's mature and successful challenge with “Dune – Part Two”, in which he picks up the story that was left out three years ago and brings the events told in the second and third parts (triumphantly) to an end Parts (“Muad'Dib” and “The Prophet”) of the first volume of Frank Herbert's saga. With a certain narrative freedom (we say that for the purists), but with an epic ambition that highlights the messianic side through a path of atonement and spiritual quest that fashionable superheroes had virtually erased.
Three years older and more expressive (and therefore more compelling for his character), Timothée Chalamet plays Paul Atreides, now fully accepted by the Fremen people led by Stilgar (Javier Bardem) and increasingly conquered by Chani (Zendaya). On the planet Arrakis, rich in the “spice” that grants precognitive abilities, all he thinks about is fighting the forces of Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård, hidden behind the obese form of a repulsive slug), but his mother Jessica ( Rebecca Ferguson) tells him, making it clear that his destiny is much greater and more demanding because he could be the “prophet” that the desert dwellers are waiting for to lead him to their salvation.
Of course, there is no pause in the suppression of the rebels, but the warlike prowess of the Fremen (and Paul) undermines the strategies of Beast Rabban (Dave Bautista) so much that the Emperor (Christopher Walken) arrives on Arrakis and with it he pushes the Baron , eliminating Rabban and replacing him with the more treacherous and cruel Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler, virtually unrecognizable). While Paul finds the armorer Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin) as an ally, who now makes do as a “spice smuggler”.
In short, we are always the good guys against the bad guys, but told with a new spirit in which the special effects (which exist) take a back seat to the charm of an atmosphere that you have difficulty defining: medieval? Ecologist? Messianic? Villeneuve's successful decision was probably precisely not to want to simplify the complexity created by Herbert, but to highlight its many contradictions or, in any case, the ambiguities of a transcendentalism that today finds its strength in the confrontation with an overly invasive science (and technology).
Artificial intelligence has been banished from the world of Dune, where a Coriolis storm seems deadlier than the latest war inventions: there are no lightsabers or flying cars, just imposing self-driving factories that refuse to hide their looming monstrosity and destructive capabilities in a desert-fighting mission . Without worrying about the duration (166 minutes), the direction plays with chromatic contrasts – a dusty orange for the exteriors, a disturbing chiaroscuro for the interiors, mastered by cinematographer Greig Fraser – to explore the metaphysical ambiguity of a story mediating increasingly resembles a path of sacrifice and renunciation.
Paul is no longer his own man, he must answer a “call” that requires him to make painful personal sacrifices in the name of a greater common good (and Herbert’s readers know this well). Villeneuve invites the viewer to surrender to the flow of images, to be captured by this vaguely metaphysical and ambiguously disturbing atmosphere, which forms a bridge between what is seen on the screen and what is in the memory and imagination of the The viewer moves, seems to want to strike.
Because Paul can be seen as a new messiah and a jihadist terrorist, as an architect of a new realpolitik or as a champion of illusions, as a victor and a vanquished at the same time. This is why I spoke of science fiction without science (and of course also without fantasy), because the risk of the film is precisely to link its thousand proposals by telling us about a world in which humanity is in is in a constant state of conflict and tragedy does not do this he does not even have the hope of catharsis.