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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.
Their switch-over of Liet-Kynes to a random black woman for diversity points alone shows how badly the Director's understanding of the Dune universe works; a very wide but shallow puddle that completely misses the mark.
I didn't see the first one, won't see the second one. Don't even get me started on them showing off the Sardaukar homeworld.
Fun aside; None of the movies ever get the Padishah Emperor right. In the books he's described as a youthful, thirty-something redhead. Yet they always have him as an old man past his prime. Pity.
I'm pretty sure they cast the character as an African woman because the actress playing Chani (Zendaya) is biracial, and if her father is going to played by European Javier Bardem, one African parent is necessary for her ethnicity to make sense.
Although frankly I'd have preferred if they'd recast all the Fremen with Arab actors. It may not be canon, but in my head the Fremen are Bedouin, damnit!
The Fremen canonically originally roughly from the Nile area. While there should have been more Arabic Fremen (i wonder if they're saving Rami Malek for Part 3?), having black Fremen is in no way against the canon, and there's nothing wrong as such with casting Zendaya as Chani.
I know the Fremen have a lot of Islamic imagery, but I'd thought this in particular was a Jewish reference? They came out of Egypt, they were slaves on Salusa Secundus, they were persecuted and chased from planet to planet, all the while preserving their ancient beliefs (or at least, they think they did, but getting actual Reverend Mothers on Arrakis probably helped). And look, they're waiting for a Messiah!
There are explicit Jews in the sequels, so they are separate.
Well, yes, but the themes can be reused repeatedly? This is literature (or about as close as sci-fi gets), there doesn't have to be a one-to-one mapping to the real world. The Fremen are clearly a mashup of a lot of things, most especially Arabs and Islam, but why not toss in certain elements of Jewish history, too? (As distinct from "Judaism", which I don't think the Fremen borrow much from. They've got various private rituals, and hold themselves apart from other people, but that may be as far as it goes?)
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As I understand it, the Fremen were once pilgrims of the Zensunni religion fleeing persecution (there is a vision/flashback in the book mentioning how the Empire denied them the Hajj), so there's definitely a lot of Islamic coding there.
And the Glossary:
What I find interesting about that "They denied us the Hajj" phrase, is that it's clarified to mean that it was denying them the freedom to go wherever they want. It seems to have lost the significance of a pilgrimage to a specific place (although Muad'dib's religion recreates that in the next book), and instead means something more like what a nomad or one of the traveling people might hold important, as one of the fundamentals of life.
Oh, that makes sense, so there is still some plausible deniability in the "literal Space Arabs" department.
That being said, the idea of people still making the journey to Mecca many centuries in the future (edit: and across many lightyears!) did fascinate me.
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