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It is clear within ten minutes of this film starting that it it an excellent piece of filmmaking. It’s all there right from the very beginning; the performances, the design, the emotion, the human connection, the tension, the music and the immense atmosphere. I was sucked in immediately.

What is all the more impressive about this is the total turn around it presented in me as I was not drawn in to director Denis Villeneuve’s first Dune movie. I liked it but it kept me at a bit of a distance. This was mostly due to what I felt was some fairly cold characterisation; there was no one on screen I really cared about, but I also found it to be a little over designed, almost as if it was more concerned with the imagery than it was other aspects of the movie. I didn’t like the incomplete nature of the narrative either.

This latter element was no accident of course, the 2021 film only set out to tell the first part of Frank Herbert’s 1965 book even though at the time of release they didn’t yet know if they’d get to make a sequel. Their faith was rewarded though because here we are. What is interesting about this second film is that even now the rest of the original novel has been captured and put up on screen, we are clearly still not done. I’m not sure where we currently are with the greenlighting of Villeneuve’s proposed third movie in this series, an adaptation of Herbert’s follow up tome Dune Messiah, but we can be pretty confident it is going to happen. Where Dune Part One, as it will henceforth be known, came down was in stopping as it was just getting started (which is quite something to say of a two and a half hour film) but this second film feels more contained. It doesn’t reach the end but it certainly reaches an end. To be fair whether it was going to be done or not almost hangs on a single line of dialogue, but they got their answer and the denouement was powerfully stolen away.

In terms of the look of the film, it’s not that it’s more varied but the story is told in such a way as to manage the visual onslaught this time. The first sixty minutes mostly concentrates on one group of people in a single type of setting (sandy) and it isn’t until the second hour that the focus shifts to a very different location (oily).

The biggest success of Dune Part Two though is its total contrast to, what by my mind was the biggest failing of its predecessor. At the heart of this are some really engaging characters; all of them tough but still emotionally captivating.

The key to this is Zendaya’s Chani, only briefly glimpsed in the first film but here possibly the single most important player in the whole thing. Chani is protagonist Paul’s way into the Fremen tribe he is hiding out with after his family was destroyed by the evil Harkonnens and she is the audience’s way into the story. As she comes to accept him so do we, yet she is so much more than just a supporting player. The way this is written she has her own journey and a massive amount of individual agency. She also softens Paul’s harder edges, he is more appealing next to her and when he pulls away this is as dramatic as any battle or explosion.

Alongside her is Javier Bardem as Fremen leader Stilgar who so desperately wants to believe that Paul is the prophesied chosen one, come to deliver the people to paradise. They manage to find humour in this, in a way that will remind some viewers of Monty Python’s The Life of Brian yet does not jar with the rest of the narrative. Within this there is also a fascinating examination of the power of religion and the plot manages to weigh up the power of science against belief without having to categorically state which is at play here.

Dune Part Two is a superb follow up to its predecessor but even if you not seen that film there is so much here to get swept up in. All the world building was done in the first film, which frees this of that task but I’m not sure you absolutely need to have seen it to appreciate this one. There’s one small box you won’t recognise but otherwise I think you’ll make sense of this.

I’ve barely touched on all the different aspects of what this movie that make it so good but that leaves you more to discover. Needless to say there are numerous great performances beyond those I’ve mentioned, the action scenes are brilliantly orchestrated, the dialogue smartly efficient and the framing superb. Make no mistake that we are in the middle of one of the great cinematic trilogies and if you’ve not done so already, now is the time to get onboard.

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The Ripley Factor:

As well as Zendaya this move has Rebecca Ferguson, Florence Pugh, Léa Seydoux and Souheila Yacoub, and they all drive the plot to one extent or another. There is one other key female voice, which if you know the story will not be a surprise, but to everyone else is an interesting addition. Denis Villeneuve has actually sought to increase the female involvement in his version of the narrative and has made some changes that stop certain characters becoming tropes.

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