“Dune: Part One” left Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and his mother, Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) adrift in the desert, the last remaining members of House Atreides. By the time “Dune: Part Two” begins, they’ve acclimated to their new, arid surroundings, but find themselves on opposite sides of a prophecy.
Jessica takes the stance of religious zealot – literally. After she and Paul take up with the Freman (the native people of the desert planet Arrakis, where Paul’s father was once upon a time named Duke before he was murdered), Jessica becomes Reverend Mother to a tribe led by Stilgar (Javier Bardem). She’s made it her personal mission to convince the Freman her son is the subject of an ancient prophecy – a messiah destined to bring peace to Arrakis, ending years of colonial rule.
But House Atreides is part of that long standing rule, and the prophecy itself was seeded throughout the Fremen by the Bene Gesserit, a mysterious, magical sisterhood to which Jessica belongs. She claims the prophecy was meant to bring the Freman hope – but hope that’s managed and controlled by an outside force isn’t really hope at all.
Ideas about the nature of prophecy, authoritarianism, and power can be found all over “Dune: Part Two,” Denis Villeneuve’s follow-up to his 2021 adaptation of Frank Herbert’s seminal science fiction work. If “Part One” was a stylistic achievement, a hypnotic look into the construction of a cinematic world, “Part Two” is a titanic feat of deconstruction. Throughout the “Dune” series, Herbert takes the construct of a hero and completely dismantles it. With his first film, Villeneuve took the time to build out Herbert’s world in detail, a world we will now watch begin to fall in this second installment. Villeneuve uses characters and their relationships as representations of the larger political and social themes, his tale of a hero’s rise and fall ultimately one and the…
Read the full article here