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Dune Part 2 was great (warning: spoilers) and thoughts on Dune universe
HBD nerds can be overly obsessed with SNPs and IQ distributions, blank slatists are blind to primordial truths of material reality, but the Dune universe properly understands Civilization as the volatile interaction between the gene pool and meme pool. I am happy to report that Dune Part II does justice to the book and is the best movie I've seen in theaters for as long as I can remember.
There is not much to complain about in terms of Wokeism. There was some bad casting in the first movie for characters that don't appear in this installment. Right Wing Twitter is complaining about the the love interest, Chani, being unattractive and the transition of her character to being a warrior who is skeptical of the cult percolating around Paul. This is probably the biggest change from the book, arguably necessary because Paul's internal conflict would be difficult to depict so it was written as an external conflict with his love interest.
The other complaint from the Christian nationalist side is that the movie and Dune universe are a critique of religiosity, which is only partially true. But in this case, the antagonists are godless heathens, and it's the victorious protagonist who is associated with religiosity, which is inverted from the traditional Hollywood critique of Christianity.
What Paul, the Fremen, the Empire, the Harkonens, etc. represent in terms of pattern-matching to reality or history is open to interpretation. I saw one right-winger on Twitter complain about the Dune universe as a celebration of the Islamic conquest of Western civilization. It's true the Fremen are aesthetically coded as Arabic, and Herbert actually does use the word "Jihad" in the book to denote the cults and its conquests across the universe, for example Paul "thought then of the Jihad, of the gene mingling across parsecs..."
But Paul is an avatar of all Abrahamic religion: he's the synthesis of Moses who leads his people through the desert to salvation, the dying-and-rising Jesus, and Mohammed the conqueror. And of course Paul Atreides, played by Timothée Chalamet who is half-Jewish, is named after the Jew Paul of Tarsus, "a Pharisee, born of Pharisees", who became the Christian apostle to the Gentiles. Which must bring us to the Bene Gesserit, the order in the Dune universe which manipulates imperial politics by consciously crossing bloodlines and planting the seeds of religious myth.
Of course Christians accept the revelation of Paul of Tarsus on the Road to Damascus. But if we assume that this did not happen, the alternate story of Paul's conversion and ministry is going to be closer to the Bene Gesserit of Dune than the Road to Damascus. The surface-level reading of the Bene Gesserit is that they are just a caricature of the adage that religion is a mechanism for controlling people. But the deeper reading is that the Bene Gesserit are a depiction of the mechanism by which religion creates people and directs the gene people through the use of memes (in the story, their "voice" alone can literally command someone to unconsciously obey their will).
This also leads into my broader interpretation of Religion, which has unfairly become synonymous with Abrahamic religion. In my mind, Religions are memes that direct the gene pool. So something like "Diversity is Our Strength" is a Religion not because "I'm an edgy atheist and I don't like 'Diversity is Our Strength' so I'm going to call it a religion to insult people who agree with it." It's a religion because there are people consciously directing the population to internalize this value, and this value subsequently leads to planned, massive overhauls in the gene pool of civilization.
I am fundamentally sympathetic to the Bene Gersserit. Which memes would direct civilization on a better trajectory? How would we counter memes that are hostile to our mission? You might be able to wander out of the cave, but its neither possible nor desirable to force that onto everyone else. Consciously directing the memes is the solution, not trying to make people impervious to their influence (an impossible task- postmodernism only created its own Religious grand-narrative).
Paul is squarely a representation of Abrahamic religion, but the meaning of House Atreides and House Harkonnen is less clear. I interpret the conflict between those houses as the European or Aryan duality embodied in the Apollonian and Dionysian motif in Greek tragedy with, of course, House Atreides embodying the Apollonian: "...rational thinking and order, and appeals to logic, prudence and purity and stands for reason" and House Harkonnen the Dionysian: "... wine, dance and pleasure, of irrationality and chaos, representing passion, emotions and instincts".
The relation of this conflict to Greek myth is directly alluded to in the Lore, according to which House Atreides is descended from King Agamemnon of House Atreus. Furthermore, the patriarch is named Duke Leto Atreides, and Apollo is the son of Leto, who is consort to Zeus. It is revealed in the story that Paul is related to the Harkonnens, which harkens to this duality in Aryan myth, a duality which was "often entwined by nature" according to the ancient Greeks.
The Roman Empire is likewise the best historical representation of this duality between the Apollonian and Dionysian, with the Imperial throne becoming increasingly symbolic of the Dionysian aspect as the Roman Empire declined until.... the conversion to Christianity.
On the one hand, the Dionysian excess is pruned by an ascetic desert cult. But does that actually make way for the resurgence of the Apollonian? Paul tries to keep a foot in both camps, proclaiming himself both Duke of House Atreides as well as the Fremen Messiah. I won't spoil how that turns out.
The movie was really great, it hit on all the big points which I interpreted from the books. The visual and sound design was stellar, it's a must-see in theaters.
Hard disagree.
The first movie was tolerable, and visually well-crafted. The second movie kept up with the visuals, but tipped over the edge for me in several ways.
St. Alia of the Knife got, essentially, cut. This is the most utterly unforgivable bullshit, especially given the promise of a third movie. There are fewer more iconic moments than the abominable child ending her treacherous grandfather with the Gom Jabbar. In fact, it's the only unequivocally great thing she ever gets to do, making her ultimate end all the more tragic.
The casting for Irulan seemed like a deliberate slight against the the idea of multigenerational eugenics. Her portrayal of Tatlock in Oppenheimer was grating, but Tatlock was presumably herself quite grating. Irulan is a regal character, if not indeed a somewhat ethereal one. They couldn't even pluck her eyebrows for this?
The casting for Shaddam IV was similarly perplexing. Christopher Walken played the emperor as a doddering has-been in the early stages of dementia.
In general the perversion and brutality of the Harkonnens was understated--to the point of being a fumble. This seems to have been simple cowardice on the director's part. Understandable cowardice, perhaps, but cowardice all the same.
Failure to address the Butlerian Jihad seems like a particularly egregious miss given the present level of public interest in artificial intelligence.
Chani was an interesting character in the books, albeit a minor one. She becomes a more important figure in the movie, at the cost of changing her into a boring (and fickle) Mary Sue.
Stilgar is rendered as an oaf and a dupe, the better to mock the "fundamentalists."
In its 6 book entirety, despite failing to reach the final showdown with the machines (Kevin Anderson sucks), is still a magnificent meditation on the difference between humans and human animals, on the fact that evolution continues to operate on us, and on the ways in which that poses a threat to our continued survival as a species. Paul is ultimately a failure as a messiah because he refuses to embrace his bloody destiny, instead leaving the task to his children (SUBTLE METAPHOR WARNING), who then step up and do the bloody business of putting an end to the hedonistic but stultifying preening of the human race. Here instead we get Chani asserting her agency--she won't abide a political marriage for her man--in a story that was fundamentally supposed to be about the lack of agency that is the problem Paul is supposed to solve for humanity.
Other than the wokism of casting the Fremen--but not the Harkonnens--as multiracial, I didn't see anything to complain about along that axis. The unrelenting girl-bossing of certain characters was weird, but only weirder for how badly the writing and acting neutered Lady Jessica. Dune is absolutely stacked with "strong female characters" so I guess the director had to dial that back, to better highlight his distorted vision of Chani as something less interesting than the Mother of God.
Ugh. Anyway. Just once I'd like to see a filmmaker actually deliver on the promise of Dune. It would be challenging, and consequently it would probably be unpopular. A clear portrayal of the truth of the Axlotl Tanks might well be sufficient to send the zeitgeist into total meltdown.
Some of these criticisms are pretty odd. The Harkonnens absolutely were shown as perverse and brutal, a lot of that was just dumped on Feyd-Rautha here, and I liked what Villeneuve did with Feyd-Rautha very much. "Feyd-Rautha as a psychosexual Darth Maul" turned out lot better than the usual "Feyd-Rautha as a somewhat more competent Joffrey Baratheon" thing and Austin Butler was great with microexpressions. The worst thing about the casting of the Emperor Shaddam IV (not a particularly major character anyway) is that it's impossible to see Christopher Walken as something other than Christopher Walken, but other than that, casting him as intergalactic Joe Biden showcases that we're seeing a late-stage empire waiting to be pushed down. I don't understand the point about Irulan.
I understand the Alia criticism - I had been quite averse to early rumors on how Alia would be handled but ended up being OK with it, I guess that the murder toddler would have been something that might have become ridiculous too easily - and share the Chani criticism, though that might have also worked better if Zendaya was a better actor outside of the love scenes, which she handled well.
Personally I thought that the part with Paul taking the worm juice could have been handled (a lot) better and Dave Bautista was kind of wasted in this movie.
This is kind of where I'm at.
I watched the first movie and reread the first 3 books in preparation for the new movie and if nothing else I feel like Denis Villeneuve deserves credit for accurately capturing "the Vibe" of Herbert's books. Dune is big, it's weird, and it doesn't hold your hand. There are some changes I disagree with but like Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings they at least feel in line with the original work. I'm still annoyed that they dropped the line "Are you suggesting that the duke's son is an animal?" from the Reverend Mother's test in part one but so it goes.
The handling of Alia was annoying from the outlook of a purist but understandable from a cinematic perspective and in light of the compressed timeline, and as such I was broadly ok with it. In Hindsight I would have swapped the casting around with either Anya Taylor Joy or Lea Seydoux as Irulan and Florence Pugh as Lady Fenring but that's neither here nor there.
I've seen people complaining about how Stilgar is portrayed but over all I feel that it was pretty faithful. He is the true believer, and he does volunteer to let Paul kill him so that Paul can be the de jure leader of the Fedaykin and Sietch Tabr not just the de facto, to which Paul gives the famous reply "I'm not going to break my knife before a fight".
Christopher walken was wasted in the sense that they cast him in a position of authority and then didn't give him an unhinged monologue to deliver a la Poolhall Junkies, Pulp Fiction, King of New York, the Rundown, Etc... and I agree with @naraburns criticism of his characterization.
On the flip side I disagree with Nara's complaints about Fayed Rutha, wanting a fair fight (or a minimally unfair fight) feels very in character as a major motivation of his in the books is wanting to prove that he his better than everyone else, and overall I agree that "Austin Butler as psychosexual Darth Maul" was the correct call given that truly book-accurate Harkonens are not compatible with a PG-13 rating. They're less about the random killing of underlings and more cannibalism, heartplugs, futanari, and general body-horror. Pity we couldn't go full Drukhari Gladiator/Event Horizon in this bitch.
In the book in his duel with Paul, he's got a drugged blade and a hidden poison needle. He also accuses Paul of "treachery" when he realizes that Paul's crysknife is naturally acidic--to which Paul responds dryly, "Only a little acid to counter the soporific on the Emperor's blade." Feyd-Rautha's response is rage:
Feyd-Rautha doesn't seem to want fair fights, even minimally. He just wants to prove that he's better than everyone else, by winning by whatever means necessary. He even gloats about it (quietly) to Paul during the fight:
And yet from only a page before we have...
His whole thing through the rest of the book is that he's a striver, wanting to prove that he is better and more capable than his uncle and older brother, and thus take the throne. See also the bit about wanting to give the Atreides slave in gladiator pit a proper burial.
There's also the element of the Bene Gesserit wishing to preserve that genetic line, given the short time provided one can't put too fine a point on that, one must show him as somewhat admirable.
To explain the Bene Gesserit wanting to preserve the genetic line, you need only show some good quality; his competence at restoring spice production would be enough.
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